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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Duke University Libraries 


https://archive.org/details/pulpitpowereloqu01 bart 


Pulpit Power and Eloquence 


OR 


One Hundred Best Sermons 


of the Nineteenth Century. 


INTRODUCTION BY 


ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D. D. 


® 


Compiled by FREDERICK BARTON from the recommendations 
of the following: 


JF. H. BARROWS, President Oberlin College. 
F. W. BASHFORD, President Ohio Wesleyan University. 
A. H CURRIER, Professor of Exegesis. 
FRANCIS E. CLARK, President United Society C. E. 
RUSSELL H. CONWELL, President Temple College. 
ADDISON P. FOSTER, American S. S. Union. 
F. W. GUNSAULUS, President Armour Institute. 
FAMES M. GRAY, Author Synthetic Bible Studies 
GEO. C. LORIMER, Recently, Tremont Temple, Boston. 
F.B. MEYER, London, Eng. 
H. C. G. MOULE, Bishop of Durham. 
Ff. S. MILLS, Bishop U. B. Church. 
F. G. K. McCLURE, President Lake Forest University. 
W. G. MOOREHEAD, Xenia Theological Seminary. 
Div.Sch. Si ata Seigirckee Leer . . 
KERR BOYCE TUPPER, First Baptist Church, Phila. 


AND OTHERS. 
.B3 ‘ 


® 


Published by F. M. BARTON, Cleveland, O. 


- Copyrighted toot 
; by 
F. M. BARTON. 


a 


Index According to Author’s Name. 


Page 
Abbott, Lyman—God’s Workshop............... 805 
Arnot, William—The Lost Sheep........ aaa ake aaa 
Banks, L. A.—Radiant Personality............. 9 
Beecher, H. W.—What is Christ to Me?........ 13 
Behrends, A. J. F.—I Know Whom I have Be- 
MENG GNOy ie ade Rds cc onje's dena aeciaees ncdulon ei tele 
. Black, Hugh—Duty of Forgetfulness............ 30 
Bradford, Amory H.—Christ the Center........ 810 
Broadus, John A.—Character Building.......... 34 
Brooks, Phillips—The Candle of the Lord...... 37 
Buchanan, Claudius—The Star in the East..... 46 
Burrell, David J.—Non-Christian Religions.... 60 
Bushnell, Horace—Unconscious Influence...... 69 
Cadman, S. Parkes—St. Paul’s Apology........ 78 
Caird, John—Religion in Common Life......... 85 
Campbell, Alexander—Justification and Coro- 
RUNMEERT Ele ws On & 0a rides dy Rind dh Gow s0se.tuiciccce'et ea 97 
Carey, William—An Enquiry.................... 109 


Chalmers, Thos.—Expulsive Power of a New 
Affection 114 


Channing, W. E.—Christianity a Rational Re- 

ligion 
Chapman, J. Wilbur—Grieving the Spirit...... 139 
Christlieb, Theo.—The Lord that Healeth Thee.143 


Conwell. Russell—The Jolly Earthquake....... 152 
Cook, Joseph—The Atonement.................. 159 
Cuyler, Theodore—Christ the Restorer......... 815 
D’Aubigne, H. M.—Cross of Jesus Christ...... 170 
Dixon, A. C.—The Dying Grain of Wheat...... 179 
Dods, Marcus—The Sowe’P..........sscecessevess 184 | 
Drummond—The Changed Life.................. 191 
Duff—Chief End of the Christian Church...... 204 
Dwight, Timothy—Sovereignty of God.......... 215 
Evans, Christmas—Fall and Recovery of Man.225 
Farrar, F. W.—What God Requires............ 231 
Finney, Charles—God’s Love for a Sinning 
SEE EL id n't, o dy.n' eR aeiniseede eh cosa ea voraiols aisle 3% 


Fowler, C. H.—Divine and Human Co-partner- 
SUEEMERM RE iteo'y Foti. oa vd) d'c-6.0 cue aiawiaiet piaicleie tie sia 


Gordon, A. J.—Christ the Light and the Glory.253 
Gordon, S. D.—Jesus’ Habits of Prayer... 
Guinness, H. G.—‘‘Watch’’...............-. os 
Gunsaulus, F. W.—The Uplifted Christ........ 
Hall, Charles Cuthbert—Spiritual Unity 
Hall, Robert—Modern Infidelity Considered.. 
Haven, Gilbert—Two Greek Books on the Life 
Beyond 
Hillis, Newell Dwight—The Uses of EE > 


Hitchcock, Roswell D.—Final Triumph of 
SAMA AEMNUO SA Riedie Wass c's ei cla'vs'siea deutete veatembeiaea 


Hopkins, Mark—Choice and Service............ 351 


Hurst, John F.—The Gospel a Combative 
FATS REMC Sa aita'estpiara anon /ciace we ce ameter a 5 


Hyacinthe, 
FNC MG Py Sivicacite daa stbiok.saooam ow ate cght neon 


Irving, Edward—The Oracles of God 
Jordan, David Starr—The Strength of Being 


- 803 


SICALE oO ain dee Sea Vee: VCs ve bUvc ebenwuebaus 82 
Krummacher—The Crucifixion ..............0005 393 
Lanceley, John E.—The New Song.............- 399 
Leland, John—The Jarrings of Heaven Recon- 

ciled by the Blood of the Cross............. 405 


Liddon, Canon—Influences of the Holy Ghost.411 
Lorimer, Geo. C.—The Old Faith and the New.420 


MacArthur, R. S.—The Masticated Word....... $22 
McClintock, John—Import of the Lord’s Sup- 
RELI alpine cwit'vstiéd ss ruc Mable «itv c-sp 9 Usiemaeles 433 


Page. 
Mcllvaine, C. P.—The Believer’s Portion in 
CREO sac eats cess cum eecleenies.s és Swi be aearmies 446 
McKenzie, Alexander—The Little Faith........ 440 
McLaren, Alexander—An Old Preacher on 
PP RSS AINE Bd cinina ae eicio winea'Vid ad a Aniap aiaiors ee 61 
McNeil, John—What David Said in His Heart.454 
Sa Ih W. F.—Separation of the Soul from 


AOR Oa er rent ClO er Cee bee ee eae ya | 
Martineau, James—Parting Words.............. 477 
Mason, John H.—The Gospel to the Poor...... 482 
Melvill, H.—The Natural Man...............008+ 494 
Meyer, F. B.—Spiritual Life and Growth...... 501 
Moody, D. L.—No Difference..............0.e0e0+ 517 
Moorehead, W. G.—Ecclesiastes, or Under the 

SSTUM | denie.a. ists ecainfelacic visa. « dulwann meas outs soumkinadeee 526 
Morgan, G. Campbell—I am With You all ie. 

DIGG: ccicuicianivingavaecsaciacts «slwatnisoateieuye ews vis 
Moseley, Canon—Reversal of Human fie: 

ENE |» a.c'e' nip danawatsaitnn nh alee eulp tie di calee ik Meeesiks 543 
Moule, H. C. G.—Walking in Christ............538 
Murray, Andrew—The Life is the Light........554 


Newman, John Henry—Communion with God..557 ~ 


Newman, John P.—The Only Hope of the 
World 564 


Nicholson, Wm. R.—Priesthood of the Churck 
of God 576 


Nicoll, W. Robertson—Rose Garden of God....579 
Park, Edwards A.—Prominence of Atonement.589 


Parker, Joseph—To him that is weary, A word 
AN, SCHSON: TOcsy cn cicoeeedannoam nice ks eda ay 601 


Pearse, Mark Guy—The God that Answereth 
DY. WEG" x, ose civics Sa dot deta aerosols ig Ae POTION 616 
Pickard, W. B.—God’s Child—the Criminal. .. .625 


Pierson, A. T.—Believer’s Union with the 
THONG wells sieiona gohan tanian naniesscaeee ici ee eae 633 
Potter, Henry C.—The Individual and the 
SEALE) seine se W ancl a» ncmslguiaca hak yuen aya ewented 641 
Punshon, Wm. Morley--Healing Waters.......646 
Robertson, F. W.—Loneliness of Christ........ 655 
Schauffler, A. F.—Money........s:ccescvccenscnns 652 


Sheldon, Chas. M.—Christian Discipleship, or 
Follow Me 666 


Simpson, Matthew—The Resurrection of the 
EQUUL vicacetcevbarscstanen Nia ie b Mealats av ofl. see ahd O fiat 672 
Smith, Geo. Adam—Ritual, False Peace of..... 681 
Spreng, S. P.—Not Ashamed of the Gospel..... 690 
Spurgeon, Chas. H.—Paul the Ready........... 695 
Stalker, James—Heaven, a Funeral Sermon... .699 
Stanley, Dean—Jesus of Nazareth.......... wee T04 
Stockton, Thos. H.—The Song of the Angels or 
Glory GO) AOS caycuc a Rie oud edeter use batec monks 707 


Storrs, Richard S.—The Permanent Motive in_ 
Missionary Work 


Talmage, T. DeWitt—Christ Over All.......... 723 


Taylor, Hudson—Blessed Prosperity and Ad- 
WREHILY Spancumrepumnecme acted deaee acurimes 728 
Tholuck, F. A, G.—Jesus in Gethsemane....... 739 
Tomkins, Floyd W.—Christian Warfare........ 746 
Tupper, Kerr Boyce—The Central Theme...... 751 
Var DYKO» Elon y-—Saltises sviviaucvecccavsb ce seine 762 
Vaughan, C. J.—God Calling to Man............ 768 
Warren, W. F.—The Gospel Invitation......... 774 
Watson, John (lan Maclaren)—Peter, the 
BACKANer see cuavainct tastes bcicesh Wont kwell 782 


Wayland, Francis—A Day in the Life of Jesus.786 
Webb-Peploe, H. W.—Under Authority.........794 
Whyte, Alex.—Paul as a Pastor..........+++ .». 800 


Index According to Subject. 


Page. Page. 
Adversity and Prosperity—Taylor............... 728} Jesus of Nazareth—Stanley ...........+..00+++++104 
Affection, Expulsive Power of a New—Chal- Justification and Coronation—Campbell......... 97 

MILOKH Eve ser iin estan pate clots aiash wicible’ «ia \alain lela @ alalnpimsiacaiaia 114| Life Beyond, Two Greek Books on the—Haven.225 
Atonement, Prominence of the—Park........... 589 | Life of Jesus, A Day in the—Wayland......... - 786 
Atonement, the, in the light of self-evident Life, The Changed—Drummond 

Pe ARE Naialoc aaa: cabin clncren apis Selnae'sieieiag a 159 ight, The Life is the—Murray 5 

Believed, I Know Whom—Behrends............. 24] Lord’s Supper, Import of the—McClintock.. . 433 
Believer’s Portion in Christ, The—Mcllvaine..446/ Lorg, the, that healeth thee—Christlieb........143 
- Candle of the Lord—Brooks..........ceeeeeeeeee ‘Loneliness of Christ, The—Robertson........ 655 
Central Theme, The—Tupper.............. : Love, God’s, for a Sinning World—Finney.....236 
Character Building—Broadus ........ oeens Loveth, Every one that—Parkhurst..... sa eesees 606 
Choice and Service—Hopkins.............. a Missionary Work, Permanent Motive in— 
Christ Over All—Talmage ..........ccsseeccseees s Storrs: ..c.seses senee een eee SAP OADE a! § 
Christ, The Light and the Glory—Gordon...... Modern Infidelity Considered—Hall...... veeenten 303 

/-Christ, the only hope of the world—J. P. New- oney—Schauffler ..)..\..acsenieeeeeenee ee 

TET Nas eh ocr cae inieamialeins clelstalaaiaio th aisie.els 564} Natural Man, The—Melvill............. Aeoape ine 494 
Christ, Walking in—Moule..............s.ees08 Obligations, An Enquiry as to—Carey........... 104 
Christ, What is Christ to Me—Beecher Oracles of God, Preparation for Compas the 
Christianity, A Rational Religion—Channing. .124 —Irving ....2250s0sseenanen eee 
Christianity, The Final Triumph of—Hitch- Parting Words—Martineau ..... 

RCRA IRAN HEE a faa arate take ines afin 's nln 'niale! eto leu tale nnynie, 341| Paul as a Pastor—Whyte, Alex............. 

Church, Chief End of the Christian—Duff..... 204| Paul the Ready—Spurgeon...............++ + aeesis89B. 
Clean, The Strength of Being—Jordan.......... 382 | Personality, Secret of a Radiant—Banks. Per 
Coronation and Justification—Campbell......... 97| Peter, the Backslider—Watson ....... ite Sco; vata 782 
Criminal, The, God’s Child—Pickard........... 625 | Preaching, An Old Preacher on—McLaren...... 461 
Cross, the, of Jesus Christ—D’Aubigne ....... 170} Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. .576 
Crucifixion, The—Krummacher .............++-- Prosperity. and Adversity—Taylor..............728 
Difference, There is no—Moody........ Reformation of the Family, The—Pere Hya- 
Discipleship, Christian—Sheldon ... cinthe ....56... 5.00 soeeteneeemenaens cousin sw OOD 
Divine and Human Co-partnership—Fowler ..245| Religion in Common Life—Caird..... tb afo.cja's ero jeteeenl 
Earthquake, The Jolly—Conwell..............-- 152 | Religions, Non-Christian—Burrell .............. 60 
Ecclesiastes or Under the Sun—Moorehead..... 526| Restorer, Christ the—Cuyler..... ose foe enne'eei Je SLD 
Faith, The Little—McKenzie..............+00+6+ 440 | Resurrection of our Lord, The—Simpson.......672 
Faith, The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. .420! Ritual, The False Peace of—Smith..............681 
Fall and Recovery of Man—Evans............-- 225! St. Paul’s Apology—Cadman.. 
Fire, The God that Answereth by—Pearse..... 616 | Salt—Van Dyke ............++. 
Forgetfulness—Duty of—Black.............0-+++ 20| Separation of the Soul from God—Mallalieu...471 
Gentleman, Definition of a—Newman..........- 562| Sheep, The Lost—Arnot............. aire clales lia aneel 
Gethsemane, Jesus in—Tholuck.............-.-- 739 | Song, The New—Lanceley....... see seeeoneeeees B09 
Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God—Nicoll..570| Sovereignty of God, The—Dwight.......... con cvele 
Glory to God, or the Song of the Angels— Sower, The—Dods...........++++ oo ccleaner ee 

MEO CREO osetia misitc ae riaaletelalcialelpja leleraalefelefeca 707 Titual Life and Growth—Meyer..............001 

* God Calling to Man—Vaughan...............++-- 76S ' Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. (om 
God, Communion with—Newman..............+- 55) EPA 5 ci ciate: eletera seed cte neat AC scion Sawaielatee 
Gospel a Combative Force, The—Hurst........ 358} Star in the East—Buchaman..............+++---. 46 
Gospel Invitation, The—Warren ............+++: 774) Strong, Be—Parr...........cssese:: welanlone tewereis 612 
Gospel, Not Ashamed of the—Spreng........... 690| Suffering, The Uses of_—HiHis ae Narre one en dO4 
Gospel to the Poor, The—Mason............-- ...482| The Uplifted Christ—Gunsaulus..............+.- 278 

é-Grieving the Spirit—Chapman.................6. 139 | Under Authority—Webb-Peploe ..........-++++- 794 
Heaven Reconciled, The Jarrings of—Leland..405| Union with the Lord, The Believer’s—Pierson. od 
REA ON —SEALCOT |. raiela asic aia eicwsiniale aie cial mgatetoiclera aiaalara 699 | Warfare, Christian—TomKims ...........-..+++-- 
Tioly Spirit, Influences of the—Liddon.......... 411 Watch—Guinness + volclel alo ce tetateat oie Aulworeteattels “ae 
Human Judgment, The Reversal of—Moseley..543 | Waters, The Healing—-Punshon.. nia cea eaters AIS 646 

#-T am with you all the days—Morgan............ 532] Weary, A Word in Season to Him that wax -601 
Individual and the State—Potter................ 641} What David Said in His Heart—McNeil... 454 
Influence, Unconscious—Bushnell .............- 69} What God Requires—Parrar.......++.++ss+s00+ «281 


Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S. D. Gordon.........2614-Wheat, the dying grain of—Dixon. Soon heeee een 


te 
‘ 


Page. Page. 

Gen. 2:9, God Calling to Man—Vaughan....... 768| Ps. 27:4, Communion with God—Newman..... 557 
Exod. 15: 22, 26, The Lord that Healeth Thee— Prov. 1:10, The Strength of Being Clean— 

& ORAISH TOD ica s cictuidln ae Kcininieteloeieln beh acaidactete Gs cals 143 JOTOAN 02. sae ve ewe es ciee eine diam ete oeieeeieneaane +. 082 


Se 


pe “Exod. 34:35, A Radiant Personality, Secret of. 9| Prov. 20: 27, Candle of the Lord—Brooks....... 37 
™ Josh. 24:15, Choice and Service—Hopkins..... 350| Eccl. 1-12, Ecclesiastes, or Under the Sun— 


1 Sam. 3:10, Individual and the State, The— Moorehead) 22.0. c aswe ded eee eee sbaies «ee DED 
EOLECM te caitin dion sae sari sien aermiaeen a ten cenie renran 641| Isa. 50:4, Weary, A Word in Sena to Him 

1 Sam. 27:1, What David Said in His Heart— that is—Parkers..:.s0ccckoueueeee ciecbrertaheete .. 601 
UMC TRU RICAE siesta stored te capo a ite eneioi ed miatalaleesy oval orebaaer als 454; Isa. 54:4, Forgetfulness, Duty of........... Ape) 

1 Kings 18:24, The God that Answereth by Isa. 59: 1-2, Separation of the Soul from God— __ 
BOGE PGATSE sv cusicnic a eisidactisistein meine aeeladts ss eie 616 Mallalieu.....0.scseus+cut es occ keeee eee 471 

ao Prosperity and Adversity, PRCHEE eee Jer. Ma 26, The Old Faith and the New 
OT wrale's sono cviccesdwcdbiciuccle sind daenaunssesecacse (Z 

Ps. 23:3, Christ, the Restorer—Cuyler ......... 815} Jer. "0: 23, The Sovereignty of God—Dwight.. 1214 


5 ief End of the Christian Church Jer. 15:16, Word, The Masticated—MacArthur.822 
ote a ae aay Se ssbae 204|} Ezek. 47:9, Healing Waters, The—Punshon.... gy 
Ps. 103: 13, 14, God’s Ghild, the Criminal— Micah 6: 6-8, What God Requires—Farrar..... 

S PiCKAra ane nies Ms) osfis c= ca waidaalsitew tes /s e25%,Amos 4: 6. Ritual. The False Peace of—Smith.681 


Index According to Text.—(New Testament.) 


Page. 
Matt. 2: 2, The Star in the East—Buchanan.... 46 
Matt. 56: 13, Salt—Van Dyke ...........-..2eceers 762 


Matt. 6: 9, God’s Child, the Criminal—Pickard.625 
Matt. 8: 8-10, Authority, A Man Under—Webb- 


PEN cin divecens ke SAE He So luuase deed =m es 2 7 

Matt. 10: 34, The Gospel a Combative Force— 
UNIO rd SaIU en ioit Cale punialebeivee cope cbwas ape 359 
Matt. 13: 1-9, 18-23, The Sower—Dods........... 184 
Matt. 14: 31, The Little Faith—McKenzie....... 441 
yatt 17: 2, Secret of a Radiant Personality 9 

Matt. 19:30, Reversal of Human Judgment, 

TO oO, Co a cciarace ec dsas desea beledec’s 

Matt. 26: 36-46, Gethsemane, Jesus in—Tho- 
MEN s s pees « rape aan tnersaucrwas dvcnve se 739 


Matt. 27: 33-35, The Crucifixion—Krummacher.393 
.Matt. 28:20, I am With You all the Days— 
CTE Wate gian Tauern <eiete cee’ vacua operates 
Mark 8: 34, Christian Discipleship .. sade 
Mark 13: 37, Watch—Guinness................... 
Luke 2:14, Glory to God or The Song of the 


Angels—Stockton Se ae wipe hat RERENE cet ine fhe 707 
Luke 2: 32, Christ, The Light and the Glory— 
STREET on Oe See Ee eh cee ce cee cadets op ciee’ 253 
Luke 7: 22, Gospel to the Poor, The—Mason...482 
Luke 8: 4-15, The Sower—Dods.................- 184 
Luke 9: 10-17, Jesus of Nazareth, A Day in the 
Life of—Way BUNPARE « oicid on'ln secmbpidcing waded = Sans 786 
Luke 15: 1-7, The Lost Sheep—Arnot............ 1 
Luke 24: 34, Peter, a Backslider—Watson....... 782 
John 1: 4, The Life is the Light—Murray....... 554 
John 3:8, Holy Spirit, Influences of the— 
PLUS Sahin aa oun eigen on & enidenuetnnley ans 4 sks 411 


John 3:14, The Uplifted Christ—Gunsaulus. ...278 
John 3: 16—God’s Love for a Sinning World— 
RIRNIEROE DION PEED ic cas o's Cet pattind opt ad tuisal cretet 236 
John 5:39, Oracles of God, Preparation for 
Consulting the—Irving 372 
John 7: 37, Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. .501 
John 12: 24, The Dying Grain of Wheat—Dixon.179 
John 12:32, The Final Triumph of Christian- 
ity—Hitcheock 341 
John 14: 2, Heaven—Stalker 
John 14: 27, Parting Words—Martineau 
John 16:31, 32, Loneliness of Christ, The— 


I GREOIL  « Sitck sh Samet ee << tettiek uawtomes vas 655 
John 19: 2, Christian Warfare—Tomkins........746 
John 19:19, Jesus of Nazareth—Stanley......... 704 


John 20: 8, Unconscious Influence—Bushnell... 69 
sae 12, Christ, the only Hope of the bade! ce 


Page. 
Prominence of the— 


1 Cor. 2:2, Atonement, 
Park 

1 Cor. 2:14, Natural Man, The—Melvill........ ced 

1 Cor. 3:9, Divine and Human Co-partnership 
POWELL o oss. cee etek Anon oe oe ceotatentrae 245 

1 Cor. 6:17, Believer’s Union with the Lord— 
Pierson 633 

1 Cor. 11: 26, Lord’s Supper, Import of the— 


WeeCUNGICE 5.3 oaiueevnaedccndebebesaee eke 433 
1 Cor. 15: 20, Resurrection of our Lord, The— 
SUMP BAT 5 sac acpi ead ieebs ceeee ae abe se esedhe an 
1 Cor. 15:47, Two Greek Books on the Life 
Bavond HAVEN, ooo scrccn cscs avacenbedtncht rea 325. 
2 Cor. 4:5, Christ, the Center of Christianity 
= Bradford. sok os65 eee een ak eee 810 
2 Cor. 5:14, St. Paul’s Apology for his minis- 
try—Cadman eee ce cee Rect crate thictelsis pap tents 7 
Gal. 6:14, The Cross of Jesus Christ—D’Au- 
DICE oe cdccastewes avescteeapateesavpeaeat sae ta 170 


Eph. 2:12, Modern Infidelity Considered—Hall.303 
Ephesians 4: 30, Grieving the Spirit—Chapman.139 


Eph. 6:10, Be Strong—Parr..........++eeeeeeeeees 612 
Col. 1: 10, What is Christ te Me?—Beecher..... 13 
Col. 2:6, Walking in Christ—Moule............ 538 
Col. 1:12, The Believer’s Portion in Christ— 
Meclivaing * ios 6cs<.cccnccstanrecdsamhwosks s¢scs 


Col. 1: 20, The Jarrings of Heaven Reconciled 
Leland 
1 Tim. 3:16, Justification and. peri e 


Campbell. vi ccmsesnevanaspnunsnvaes rhe pases 
2 Tim. 1:12, Believed, I Know Whom— 
Behrens... s.04s5 wowts Jhon Ordmaamnaccehan> denna 24 
2 Tim. 2:12, The Uses of Suffering—Hillis..... 334 
Heb. 2:9, Justification and Coronation— 
Campbell) vncy sas os adaedabesccannoswedse rs 


Heb. 9:22, Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of 
God—Nicoll 570 
1 Pet. 2:5, Priesthood of ‘the Church of God— 
Nicholson 576 
2 Pet.-1:3, 8, Character Building—Broadus.... 34 
1 John 2:15, Expulsive Power of a New Affec- 


tlon—Chalmers ...5.....ccceecreecccereccecees 
1 John 3: 2, God’s Workshop—Abbott........... 805 
1 John 4:7, Everyone that Loveth—Parkhurst.606 
Rev. 14:3, The New Song—Lanceley........... 399 
Rev. 22:17, Gospel Invitation—Warren........ .T74 


Addresses having no particular Texts. 


Re MRM STURNT 01 o5d Se anh-onc cobs cee waveee Non-Christian Religions—Burrell .............. 60 
Acts 6: 15, Secret of a Radiant Personality..... 9] The Jolly Earthquake—Conwell...............-152 
Acts 20: 31, Paul as a Pastor—Whyte ..... seeeee 800| The Atonement in the Light of Self-evident 
Rom. 1:15, Paul the Ready—Spurgeon......... 695 Pruthi—-O00M ooo on swsivoust- sa teepieewalrs aiken y pene 
og 1: 16, Gospel, aise Ashamed of i ed The Changed Life—Drummond ......... ty Ge 191 
em 18 Christianits "s. Rational Religt eats Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S. D. Gordon..... ++ +261 
Channing... ty eoonn nena cca uns--+l4 | Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. 
Hom, 8:22, Dilference, There ia no—_Moody..... 517 | Hal eee eeeevereeceeeceeeeecceencerectceceseees 
+ Rom. 5:15, Fall and Recovery of on eae ee - The et of the Family—Pere Hya- 
Rom. 9: 5, Christ over all—Talmage ores & | CEC! c Goie'n se Repu usw wduleucamis ccls tien ie og PV emaeuee 
Rom. 10:12, 15, An Enquiry—Carey ..........+: ee An Old Preacher on Preaching—McLaren SgoMe - A461 
Rom. 12:1, Religion in Common Life—Caird.. 85 | Money—Schauffler ...........+..000- vee Meteo seer 
1 Cor. 2:2, Christ Crucified, The Central Missionary Work, Permanent Motive in— 
Theme—Tupper ........ BD da data bier aah ae 751 Storrel i cazecesb ainaed Wausau Weave On aoneloped an aM 714 
Index According to Character. 
BACCALAUREATE SERMONS. Page. CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE.—Continued. Pave 
bt ws steecereecceceeece meer Believed, I Know Wht Bitetatin. th slants 24 
MUC—Van DYKE .....0.02.0000eeseeeeee ++++eee+++-%62| Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing. ..124 
BIBLE STUDY. eee ee The Final Triumph ation 
Masticated Word—MacArthur ...........e.see- COCK cccvececcccwocasescsices svccoascue eanenes 
Oracles ot S04 Preparation for Consulting a Only Hope of the World—J.’P. 
Sl i ee nirvaveu naeuon canadien 372 Christ, The Uplifted—-Guonaulus... eeeeneer 
CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. Cross, The, of Jesus Christ—D’ Aubigne. op euaeayaue 
Atonement, Prominence of the—Park........... 589 | Ecclesiastes, or Under the Sun—Moorehead. ..526 
Atonement, The, in the Light of Self-evident Faith, The Old and the New—Lorimer.........420 
TREN —O00K «avs supe swsblewsswssnee viectdadan 159| Fire, The God that Answereth by—Pearse..,...616 


radia 


ng se F 
we Bw 
oma 

hed ind 


Index According to Character.—-Continued. 


CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE.—Continued. 


Gospel a Combative Force, The—Hurst........ 
Gospel, Not Ashamed of the—Spreng........... 
Gospel to the Poor, The—Mason 
Holy Spirit, Influences of the—Liddon.......... 411 
Infidelity, Modern, Considered—Hall............ 303 
Jarrings of Heaven Reconciled—Leland........ 405 
Justification and Coronation—Campbell ....... 97 
Religions, Non-Christian—Burrell ........ Rravateie (OO 
Resurrection of our Lord, The—Simpson..... . 672 
Sovereignty of God, The—Dwight..............- 214 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 
Adversity and Prosperity, Blessed—Taylor..... 728 
Affection, Expulsive Power of a New—Chal- 
AMET a raped cha taco aia tsteictovelele fetal nia’ aieivfejalaistarstarayetsl si ... 114 
Backslider, Peter the—Watson 
Candle of the Lord—Brooks.............ee-eees 
Character Building—Broadus ........... 
Choice and Service—Hopkins..............0.e00> 
Common Life, Religion in—Caird............... 85 
Communion with God—Newman ....... 
Day in Life of Jesus, A—Wayland.............. 
Discipleship, Christian—Sheldon ............... 
Faith, The Littleh—McKenzie.......... daetsiaiaeens 
Forgetfulness, Duty of—Black.............+0.0-- 
Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God—Nicoll..570 
Healing Waters, The—Punshon ..............+. 646 
Influence, Unconscious—Bushnell ...... GRACE 69 
Jesus of Nazareth—Stanley ............ 
Light, The Life is the—Murray................. 
Loneliness of Christ, The—Robertson 
Loveth, Every one that—Parkhurst............. 
Wroney—Schawiler iis. c cece. sven csnew nes csawnie nen 
Natural Man, The—Melvill ........... 
Parting Words—Martineau ............eeeeeenees 
Prosperity and Adversity, Blessed—Taylor..... 728 
Restorer, Christ the—Cuyler ................05, , 815 
St. Paul’s Apology for His Ministry—Cadman. 78 
Salt—Van Dyke ........... Wein siavelen aie mateielslerele ate 762 
MtHONS. Be PA erie reac as healers inate aanesielecorstete acaiate 
Suffering, The Uses of—Hillis........... 
The Changed Life—Drummond 
MRE SOWE— DOS! telasamienehiaslelelie sieves ac rcsmaeie clere 
Warfare, Christian—Tomkins ................0.. 
Weary, A Word in Season to Him that is.....601 
What David Said in His Heart—McNeil........454 
What God Requires—Farrar ............ ejeininis nieces 
CHRISTMAS. 

Glory to God—Stockton ........ mloleiaintaisteisie eyaicisintern 707 
Star in the East—Buchanan ....... atetaleinlstateia's wee 46 
COMMUNION. 

Lord’s Supper, Import of the—McClintock..... 433 
DEATH AND HEAVEN. 

Pi eaven——S talker) afc hcicisseeieisia slew cicin eitia/aim tleie tele vies = 699 
Life Beyond, Two Greek Books on the—Hayven.325 
Paul the Ready—Spurgeon .............eegeecees 695 


EASTER AND GOOD FRIDAY. 


Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God—Nicoll..570 
Jesus in Gethsemane—Tholuck ............ 22-739 


eee ie our Lord, The—Simpson....... 672 


“EVANGELISTIC OR EXHORTATIVE,—Cont’d. 


Page 
Christ the Center—Bradford........ baabasckatch lac 810 
Christ the only hope of the world—J. P. New- 
MAI) ace es ater ABH OOBNS sce eppeaieier 564 
Christ the Restorer—Cuyler ................- oo es 8LD 
Fall and Recovery of Man—Eyans.......... vee e220 
God Calling to Man—Vaughan..............-+00: 768 
God’s Love for a Sinning World—Finney......236 
Human Judgment, Reversal of—Moseley..... 543 
Invitation, The Gospel—Warren................. 774 
Separation of the Soul from God—Mallalieu....471 
The Lost Sheep—Arnot ...........ceseeeees 


There is no Difference—Moody.... 


Unconscious Influence—Bushnell ............... 69 
HIGHER CHRISTIAN LIFE. - 
Authority, Under—Webb-Peploe ............. «2 194 
Believer’s Portion in Christ, The—MclIlvaine. .446 
Christ, What is Christ to me?—Beecher........ 18 
Co-partnership, Divine and Human—Fowler...245 
Crucifixion, The—Krummacher ................+ 393 
Grieving the Spirit—Chapman.............. seeaced 
I am with you all the days—Morgan..... ieee .532 
Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S. D. Gordon......... 261 
Paul as a Pastor—Whyte ................- Bat ee 800 
Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson...576 
Radiant Personality, Secret of—Banks.......... 9 
Song, The New—Lanceley...........cseeeeeeees 2399 
Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer..............501 


Spinel Unity in the Name of Christ—C. Cc. 


o b6v.e ws ew a6 «0 oy alls /els nisl otal atete ee 287 
Union with the Lord, The Believer’ s—Pierson .633 
Walking in Christ—Moule.............. Avlew eal 
Watch—Guinness ...........00eeee a<idsios ets a-isaipRene 
Wheat, Dying Grain of—Dixon............ bh eT: 
LECTURES OR ADDRESSES. 
Atonement, The, in the Light of Self-evident 
Truth—Cook,.......\..-.«'s.0 ssseeenioe pomno die a. . 159 
Earthquare, The Jolly_Commrelt a pinibighess slate Ataiat eae 152 
Gentleman, Definition of a—Newman.......... 562 
Preaching, An Old Preacher on—McLaren.....461 
The Changed Life—Drummond .................191 
The Reformation of the Family—Pere Hya- 
CINTHG, % oc.p 1015 01> «aie je. « nisi shale ciaal el eee eee 0300 
The Strength of Being Clean—Jordan...........382 
MISSIONARY. 
An Enquiry as to Obligations—Carey...........109 


Chief End of the Christian Church—Duff.......204 
Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God—Nicoll..570 


Money—Schauffler ...........eeceeeee a a'gueanale toem 662 

Non-Christian Religions—Burrell slclceleer atetolcineate 60 

Permanent Motive in Missionary Work—Storrs.714 

Star in the Bast—Buchanan.............c0.+.--. 46 
PARABLES. 

The Lost Sheep—Arnot ......... = ieforatéa falteteometdie’e 

The Sower—Dods ........... slp:irio(a/stalalelaishatetatelaieiatatats 
PROPHECY. 


Christ, The Light and the Glory—Gordon.. 
Healing Waters, The—Punshon ................646 
Human Judgment, Reversal of—Moseley.......543 
Ritual, False Peace of, The—Smith.............681 
Watch—Guinness .:...........006. BporiCc i ronscage 7) 


SOCIAL AND POLITICAL. 


Criminal, God’s Child—Pickard...............+.-625, 
Individual and the State—Potter ........ «641 


20 253 


ee eeee 


(v1) 


INTRODUCTION. 


ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D. D. 


Man has yet to learn fully the majesty and might of the tongue. 

We have never yet adequately weighed the value of words nor measured their 
power for good or evil. Hobbes tersely said that the difference between man and the 
lower animals consists “‘rationale et orationale’”—in the gifts of reason and speech. 

“The words of the wise are as goads;” and God has singularly used the tongues 
and pens of wise and good men, during the century past, to urge His people on to 
new, higher, holier endeavor. 

The volume which these words introduce is an attempt to select some hundred 
sermons or addresses of the nineteenth century, each by a different speaker, which 
the compiler deems worthy to rank among the words which, spoken on great themes 
and grand occasions, have moved the Church and the world, and influenced the great 
onward march of God’s elect host toward the goal of history. In making this selection 
there has been an unusual endeavor to be fair, impartial, and liberal in spirit. Some 
eighteen or twenty scholars and divines on both sides of the sea have been consulted, 
as well as practical preachers, and the list is the result of this consensus of opinion. 
It covers for the most part discourses in the English tongue, because mainly for 
English readers. All may not agree with the compiler and his counsellors in their 
selection, and probably no two, even of the most intelligent of the readers of the 
volume, would make the same choice and form the same list. But, taken as an 
approximation to the best hundred, which is all that any such compilation couid be, 
there is something worth careful study in this group of sermons. 

It may not be improper for the writer to premise that, of the hundred names here 
mentioned, he has himself known forty; and that, of the hundred discourses here men- 
tioned, he has heard more than thirty and read about double that number; so that 
there is the better opportunity of forming at least a fairly intelligent judgment upon 
their merits and desert as to the high rank here accorded them, 

One of the most conspicuous features of this list is that it presents the greatest 
variety alike of topic and of talent; and it is particularly helpful and encouraging to 
observe how power is both awakened and exercised in different ways. These hundred 
sermons might be classified under perhaps twenty heads in order to bring out this 
unique and interesting characteristic of variety. 

First, we have a class of sermons, suggested by great occasions, such as a mission- 
ary anniversary, or a political agitation, or a world crisis—like Robert Hall’s discourse 
on “Modern Infidelity,” prompted by the French Revolution that shook the very 
fabric of society, or Edward Irving’s, before the London Missionary Society. Henry 
Ward Beecher was never so great as when a great crisis in affairs moved him to exert 
all his strength. Some men are like Sampson—they shew their full gianthood only 
when there are gates of Gaza to be lifted from their hinges, or pillars of Dagon’s temple 
to be thrown down. 

A second class of sermons were begotten of a great theme. Some mighty concep- 
tion of truth and duty, some overwhelming vision of God and grace, of history and 
destiny—had the framing of the structure of speech; as in John M. Mason’s mind when 
he saw in the preaching of the Gospel to the Poor, the crowning work and proof of 


VIII Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Messiah’s mission and of the Church’s imitation of her Master, or as when Matthew 
Simpson discoursed of the Resurrection, or Roswell D. Hitchcock forecast the Final 
Triumph of Christianity. 

A third class of sermons exemplifies, on the contrary, the fact that a great 
discourse may owe its origin to a seemingly trivial incident; as when Chalmers, riding 
on a stage coach, asked the driver why, as he turned a sharp curve in the road he 
whipped up his leading horse, and was told that it was to “give Jim something to 
think on till he got by a big white stone at which he always shied.” Chalmers went 
home and wrote that marvellous exposition of the “Expulsive Power of a New and 
Mightier Affection” which shews every man that what he needs is something better to 
think of till he gets past the temptation which lies in his path. Doubtless John Caird’s 
“Religion in Common Life” owed its suggestion to some little incident which revealed 
the need of piety in the most minute and commonplace matters. ‘ 

A fourth class of sermons illustrate how a wide range of learning, theological and 
literary, may prepare a man to use pen and tongue with the power of a skilled master. 
Take as examples, Edwards A. Parks, who, in discoursing of the Atonement, brought 
the accumulated treasures of a life of study to his enrichment of thought and style. 
Joseph Cook, on the same theme, revealed the vast resources of a big brain in which 
the learning of ages was stored like honey in cells. Canon Liddon, in his sermon on 
the Holy Ghost, likewise condensed into an hour the researches of a lifetime. 

Another group of sermons illustrate the genius of intellectual and spiritual insight. 
Some men are seers. They look at the Word of God and it opens before them as 
though they had some strange secret key that unlocks apartments closed to others. 
Horace Bushnell was a man of this sort. His “Unconscious Influence” was suggested 
by the simple incident of Simon Peter’s saying “I go a fishing,” and the others saying, 
“We also go with thee.” How few would ever have seen that suggestion behind that 
brief, commonplace dialogue! Who ever equalled Frederick W. Robertson, however, 
for his wonderful power of reading deep meaning into sacred words? John McNeil 
is not much behind in the same line. 

Yet again there is another class of sermons which shew what power attends inten- 
sity of conviction and emotion. No man of the century more richly exemplified this 
than Alexander Duff. He swayed others because he himself was so profoundly moved. 
Even reporters ceased to take notes and found themselves leaning on their arms 
and looking up at the man who burned and glowed with his theme. They forgot 
their pencils in the charm and fascination of a speaker who was logic, rhetoric, and 
ethics—all on fire. It was so, at times, with Charles G. Finney, who held men in the 
white heat of his own ardor and fervor and moulded them like iron, out of the furnace, 
on the anvil of his purpose. Pere Hyacinthe in the same way swayed the great 
crowds at Notre Dame. ‘ 

Other sermons owed their power to their extensity. From a wide field of facts 
they marshalled a host of witnesses that swept like a victorious army against both the 
prejudices and the apathy of hearers. Claudius Buchanan’s “His Star in the East” 
was a mighty presentation of what the gospel was doing in the Orient in drawing 
even sages to Christ’s cradle and cross. Krummacher could discourse on The Cruci- 
fixion in a like strain, and Mark Hopkins impelled men to a right choice and a holy 
service by showing that the whole history of infidelity presents one series of disastrous 
disappointments and failures. Garfield said of him that to sit on one end of a log with 
Mark Hopkins on the other would be to any man a liberal education. 

An eighth class of sermons illustrate the permanent attraction of the gospel mes- 
sage. Nothing else wears. Spurgeon played on this one theme as Paganini did on his 
violin, but other preachers felt like going home and burning their sermons, as the 
Campsie fiddler smashed his violin when he heard the great Italian bring out of one 


cae as, 


Introduction. IX 


string music that he could not, out of four. Punshon proved that the Healing Waters 
always draw a great multitude of impotent folk to the porches of God’s Bethesda. And 
Theodore L. Cuyler, in a long life, has vindicated the claim of the cross to its 
universal and perpetual drawing power. 

Yet, again, this list of a hundred sermons shows us the power of a child-like 
simplicity of thought and utterance. J. Hudson Taylor rarely uses a word of more 
than one syllable. He has few if any of the arts of the rhetorician, speaks in a mono- 
tone, and uses a few gestures. Yet how he stirs men! Drummond was so simple and 
unaffected that he seemed only talking; his manner so quiet that he never raised his 
voice above a conversational tone, and betrayed no excitement. Yet few essays in 
English have ever commanded attention like his brief portrait of Love. 

Some of these sermons evince again the wonderful effects of long brooding over 
a subject. It takes some men years to get ready, but when they are ready, they shake 
the world. William Carey was ten years preparing to preach that sermon at Notting- 
ham which taught the Church to “Attempt great things for God, and expect great 
things from Him.” When one hears W. G. Moorehead, the impression is made that 
the materials of his sermon have been wrought in the quarry and the shops, before 
they are brought to the place of building, and one hears no sound of tools in fitting 
them to their place. And so of Canon Melville and Canon Moseley. The prepara- 
tion seemed always careful and slow. 

Some sermons exhibit the effectiveness of a concealed art. We are not to despise 
the graces of style. It is worth something to set forth truth in a forceful and winning 
way. Dr. A. J. Gordon was a man of singular fidelity to the gospel and of marked 
singleness of aim. Yet one can but notice how he brought to his aid all the resources of 
language. He was especially master of antithesis. The most notable illustration is 
his contrast between legal conviction and evangelical conviction. The former, wrought 
by law and conscience, alarms the sinner by’suggesting: 

1. Sin as committed. 

2. Righteousness as impossible. 

3. Judgment as impending, 

But the latter, the fruit of the Spirit and the Gospel, convinces of: 

1. Sin as pardoned. 

2. Righteousness as imputed. 

3. Judgment as abolished. 

F. W. Farrar’s style exhibits every subtle attraction of the rhetorician; and R. S. 
Storrs was, in America, the master of every device that adorns 4 discourse, though he 
followed the architectural maxim, not to “construct ornament,” but to “ornament 
construction.” 

Some men exhibit the startling, the abrupt, the spectacular, the grotesque—what, 
for want of a better term, is called the sensational. Joseph Parker heads this school. 
He has eccentricity mixed with genius. His idiosyncrasy borders on idiosyncraziness. 
Pathos at one moment, and something akin to bathos the next. T, De Witt Talmage, 
in America, astonishes an audience by scintillations that remind one of pyrotechnics. 
And Russell H. Conwell belongs to the same class. Witness his “Jolly Earthquake!” 
God has a place and sphere for all types of men. 

Other preachers rise to a high level of dignity and majesty of utterance, and never 
descend from this high level. Above all men I have heard, this is true of Alexander 
Maclaren, the greatest living preacher, who in his long life of magnificent models of 
preaching has never uttered a frivolous word. There is always something that reminds 
one of an eagle’s lofty, calm, imperial flight. When he perches it is on the mountain 
top. Dr. Storrs, in America, was his nearest counterpart, always dignified and stately, 
yet never affected or self-conscious. Timothy Dwight was a mighty advocate and 


od Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


loved great themes like the Sovereignty of God, and they befitted his massive mind. 
So of Tholuck, in “Gethsemane” seeking to enter into the sorrows of the Son of Man. 


Not a few of these sermons owed their power to the great character behind them— 
the gigantic man behind the message. Phillips Brooks was not only a large man 
physically, but there was the mark of a great soul on all his utterances. Magnanimity’ 
is stamped upon them. John A. Broadus might well discourse of character building, 
for he was an illustration of his theme. And H. G. C. Moule, the new bishop of 
Durham—is a man whose every utterance is fragrant with the manhood of the man, 
who practices what he preaches. 

Some others owe their power simply to the practical helpfulness of their messages. 
They are not great in learning or logic and are not masters of oratory. Yet they are 
most useful men. F. B. Meyer has had a wide ministry, and his discourse on “Spiritual 
Growth” is a good index of the work he does and why he is so acceptable. He is one of 
the Keswick speakers whose great mission seems to be to help men and women to be 
more holy. Dr. L. A. Banks studies to bring men practical truth in illustrative forms. 
He is a great illustrator and master of anecdote. The same is true of G. Campbell 
Morgan, who loves to talk to men on matters that touch daily life, though he is by 
no means an inferior man in mind or culture. 


This reminds us of a class of sermons that owe their unique power to their timeli- 
ness. They are made and meant for the times. They have no odor of antiquity—no 
dead orthodoxy. They live and breathe with present-day messages. Theodore 
Christlieb studied men and their deepest wants and his words had a strange freshness, 
like bread just from the oven. Charles H. Parkhurst is the great preacher of citizen- 
ship. He is largely studying the city life and the remedy for its corruption. As 
Christlieb met German rationalism, he grips the greed and vice of city politics. C. M. 
Sheldon aims to show how Christ’s ethics fit today’s moral and spiritual needs, and 
how men can follow “in his steps.” So of J. Wilbur Chapman. 


A few preachers have illustrated the tremendous power of concentration. Alex- 
ander Maclaren has exemplified his-own motto—‘place one foot of your compasses in 
the Cross as a center and you may sweep over as wide a circumference with the other 
as your instrument allows.” D’Aubigne was great because he kept close to the “Cross 
of Jesus Christ,” like Paul. Christmas Evans, for the same reason, led the Welsh pulpit. 
He was always treating the ‘Fall and Recovery of Man.” So-of H. Grattan Guinness 
and Mark Guy Pearse and Francis Wayland. 

Mastery of the Bible is the grand secret of Prebendary Webb-Peploe. Beyond 
any other man I have known he knows God’s Book and can, without a note of any 
sort, give you an analysis of its contents. He is like a lawyer who has at his fingers’ 
ends his authoritative court decisions, or like the physician who knows every nook and 
corner where disease hides. J. H. Brookes of St. Louis was a like master of his 
inspired Text Book and could give chapter and verse unerringly. Alexander Whyte 
is a deep student of Bible portraits and has rare power in reproducing them. 


’ 


Mr. Moody represents “self-made men,” if indeed all true men are not in the best 
sense self-made. He-stands for the class who, from the plow and anvil and loom and 
shoemaker’s bench—‘‘apostates of the trades’—as Sydney Smith called them, are 
summoned to be apostles of Christ to humanity. There are not many such. But 
Carey, Spurgeon, McNeil, like Moody, prove that God chooses men from common 
callings, and without a formal training in the schools, to sway great masses of man- 
kind. When God wants a vessel He knows how to shape it and use it, though it may 
not have felt the moulding hands of the master potters of this world. 

We turn to one more class of preachers—those who owe power to that inde- 
scribable quality—unction. We have heard men, who wielded supernatural weapons, 


Introduction. XI 


like George Miiller, the elder Thomas H. Skinner, C. G. Finney, Charles Inwood, 
Bishop Moule, Hudson Taylor, A. J. Gordon; but, beyond any man we have known, 
William Arnot was invested with this nameless charm. He could discourse on that 
“lost sheep” in Luke fifteenth, and hold a great audience in tears, and sway them as a 
field of wheat waves before the wind. Not an attempt at rhetoric! Everything homely, 
simple, unstudied, but such depths of emotion; such quietness and repose, yet the calm- 
ness of a deep stream; such noiseless movement, yet such carrying power in the current; 
such clearness and transparency, yet such volume and strength. He was saturated 
with the Word, but above all with the Spirit that gives it meaning. It was a great 
heart that beat in his speech and through it you felt the greater heart of God. Once 
only we heard Arnot, but then we went away with the feeling that we had been listening 
to a voice from Heaven. Of all pulpit types of power, this is the most enviable; but, 
as Dr. Maclaren aptly says, “this divine investment of power is sought by but few, 
because so few are willing to be made invisible by the investiture.” 

Paul Veronese called painting, ‘‘a gift from God.” And so is true preaching, and, 
like the poet, the real preacher “is born, not made.”’ Nevertheless, there are high models 
that help to make preachers, or to perfect them in their sacred art, and we can ask 
no greater mission for this volume than to be as the mallet and chisel that sculpture 
out of the rude, crude material, a nobler realization of the artist’s conception. “Ideals” 
are still “the world’s masters,” and perfection is reached only through a painstaking 
attention even to trifles. Let him who aspires to be one of God’s masters in that 
foremost of fine arts, the preaching of the Gospel, give careful study to this volume, 
and learn some of the secrets of true pulpit power—learn especially how the best 
sermons owe their value to the message, the occasion and the man. 


ee ee re ey 


ee. 


xii Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE COMPILER’S STORY. 


The making of a collection of sermons first occurred to me when considering 
features for Current Anecdotes, a monthly publication, where I thought a series of the 
one hundred best sermons of the century would run three years, but on account of 
the length of the discourses of the earlier part of the century it would have required 
five years. Then it was decided to make them into a book, and here is the book. I 
do not pretend to the exalted position of even Ian Maclaren’s sermon-taster, and as 
for judging the relative value of several hundred sermons, the great majority of which 
I had never heard or read, it was beyond me. Therefore I asked the men, whose 
names appear on the title page, if they would not give me of their wisdom, as to which 
were the ten best sermons of the century. They were gracious, and for this selection, 
or the greater part at least, you are indebted to them. A number of the remaining 
sermons were suggested by preachers, and some by personal friends, so that the com- 
piler’s story should really be signed by a list of names. 


The few who take the trouble to read prefaces, unless written by famous persons, 
may be interested in some of the correspondence of the men whose advice I sought. 
It follows: 


President Barrows of Oberlin College wrote: 


“T would suggest as among the greatest sermons of the century, Professor E. A. 
Park’s sermon on ‘The Prominence of the Atonement’; Professor Park’s sermon on 
‘Conscience,’ a recent sermon by Dr. Gunsaulus on ‘Having Therefore this Ministry, 
We Faint Not’; a recent sermon by Dr. Charles E. Jefferson on ‘Eternal Punish- 
ment’; Edward Caird’s sermon on ‘Religion in Daily Life. I would pick out two 
or three of Mr. Beecher’s sermons, if I had the volumes here. I would also include 
Dr. Richard S. Storrs’ sermon before the Congregational Council in New Haven in 
"74 on “The Evidences of the Divine Existence.’ I would include one of Joseph 
Parker’s sermons, and one of Father Hyacinth’s.” 


Following is the reply of President Bashford of Ohio Wesleyan University: 


“T regard Frederick Robertson as the greatest preacher of the nineteenth century. 
His sermon upon ‘The Loneliness of Christ’ is a characteristic one. Phillips Brooks’ 
‘Candle of the Lord’ is, in my judgment, his greatest sermon. I think this was Mr. 
Brooks’ judgment, from the frequency with which he preached it. I am inclined to 
think that you ought to have one sermon by Henry Drummond, one by Bishop 
Simpson, one by Henry Ward Beecher, and one by Mr. Spurgeon in your collection. 
I am in greater doubt in regard to Mr. Spurgeon than in regard to the others. I am 
quite sure your volume should include a sermon by Canon Liddon; perhaps his ser- 
mon on ‘Humility.’ It seems to me, also, that you should have a sermon by Mar- 
tineau; perhaps the one entitled ‘Parting Words,’ or else the one on ‘Worship in 
Spirit,’ or on ‘The God of the Living.’ I think, also, you ought to have a sermon by 
John Henry Newman. I base these suggestions on the fact that I judge you_are 
aiming to make a collection of the most representative sermons of the 19th century.” 

President J. G. K. McClure of Lake Forest University said that among the ten 
best sermons of the century with which he was familiar, are: ‘‘Canon Moseley, ‘The 
Reversal of Human Judgment’; F. W. Robertson, ‘Obedience, the Organ of Spiritual 


The Compiler’s Story. iii 


Knowledge’; Horace Bushnell, ‘Every Man’s Life a Plan of God, or His Unconscious 
Influence’; Thomas Chalmers, ‘The Expulsive Power of a New Affection’; President 
Woolsey, ‘The Self-propagating Power of Sin’; Canon Liddon, ‘The Doubt of 
Thomas’; Dr. J. W. Worcester, Jr., ‘Christianity a Virile Religion.’ ” 


“Frank W. Gunsaulus, president of Armour Institute: Robert Hall, “Modern 
Infidelity’; Canon Liddon, “Holy Spirit’; Robertson, ‘“‘Caiaphas”; Beecher, “What is 
Christ to Me”; Bushnell’s “Our Loving God is Letting God Love Us’; Martineau, 
“Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God”; Moody, “Faith”; Hitchcock, “Eternal Atone- 
ment”; Brooks, “Withheld Completion of Life’; Munger, “God, Our Reward.” He 
said he would also add one sermon from each of the following men: Spurgeon, 
Maurice, Simpson, Channing, Park, Storrs and Joseph Parker. 


Kerr Boyce Tupper gave the following: Robert Hall, “Modern Infidelity Con- 
sidered”; Christmas Evans, “Fall and Recovery of Man”; John Leland, “Heaven 
Reconciled by the Blood of the Cross”; Chalmers, “Expulsive Power of a New 
Affection’; John Mason, “The Gospel for the Poor’; Francis Wayland, ‘““The Apos- 
tolic Ministry’; F. W. Robertson, “Obedience the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge”; 
Beecher, “Love, the Fulfilling of the Law’; W. E. Channing, “Christianity a Rational 
Religion.” 


W. G. Moorehead, Xenia Theological Seminary: Chalmers, ‘““Expulsive Power of 
a New Affection’’; President Nott, ‘“Dueling—Occasion of Duel of Burr and Hamil- 
ton”; Canon Liddon, “Divinity of Christ”; Spurgeon, “Luther Memorial’; Carey, 
“Tsaiah 54: 1, 2”; Mason, “The Gospel to the Poor’’; Robert Hall, “Modern Infidelity.” 


Prof. A. H. Currier, Professor of Exegesis: Chalmers, “Expulsive Power of a 
New Affection”; Bushnell, ‘Unconscious Influence”; Phillips Brooks, “The Opening 
of Eyes”; Alexander McLaren, “The Living Dead”; W. M. Taylor, “Who is this?”; 
John Henry Newman, “The Invisible World”; F. W. Robertson, “The Illusiveness of 
Life”; Robert Hall, “Death of Princess Charlotte.” 


Frances E. Clark, president of the United Society of Christian Endeavor: “The 
sermons that have most helped me have been those of Horace Bushnell, Alexander 
McLaren, Canon Liddon, Phillips Brooks, Charles H. Parkhurst, Andrew Murray and 
F. B. Meyer, among modern writers, though it is difficult to draw the line where so 
many of my brethren have written helpful and worthy sermons.” 


A. T. Pierson, editor Missionary Review of the World: Carey, “Isaiah 54:1, 2”; 
Buchanan, “Star in the East”; Robert Hall, “Modern Infidelity”; Mason, “To the 
Poor the Gospel is Preached”; Arnot, “Luke 15:1”; Christlieb, “Modern Unbelief’; 
Alexander Duff, as moderator of the Scotch Assembly; Alex. McLaren at the French 
Jubilee; Wayland, “Apostolic Ministry’; Phillips Brooks on “Foreign Missions.” 


F. B. Meyer, the English preacher most widely known in America: Carey, 
“Isaiah 54:1, 2”; Hall, Modern Infidelity’; Parker, “The Dying Thief’; Mc Laren, 
“Time for Thee to Work”; Spurgeon, ‘‘Deep Calling to Deep’; Moody, “Sowing and 
Reaping’; Brooks, “‘The Pattern in the Mount’; Irving, “London Missionary Society 
Sermon.” 


Bishop J. S. Mills of the United Brethren Church: Adolph Monod, “God is 
Love”; Tholuck, “Christian Life a Glorified Childhood”; Krummacher, “The Be- 
liever’s Challenge”; Julius Muller, “Relation of Religion to Business.” Lecture ser- 
mons—Joseph Cook, “Does Death End All”; Punshon, “Daniel in Babylon”; Christ- 
lieb, “Modern Unbelief’; Wendling, “Ingersoll from a Secular Standpoint.” The 
greatest preachers in English—Spurgeon, Joseph Parker, McLaren, F. W. Robertson, 
Beecher, Phillips Brooks, Matthew Simpson and Moody. 


xiv Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Bishop Mills also gave the following list of sermons of past ages, which are by 
general concensus of opinion regarded as the best: 


“The Sermon on the Mount.” By Christ. 

“The Smali Number of the Saved.” By Massillon. 
“Passion of Christ.” By Bourdalone. 

“Funeral Sermon of Turenne.” By Bossuet. 

“The Nature and the Control of the Passions.” By Saurin. 
“The Crucifixion of Christ.” By Barrow. ? 
“The Image of God in Man.” By South. 

“The Foolish Exchange” and “The Marriage Ring.’ By Jeremy Taylor. 
“The Redeemer’s Tears.” By John Howe. { 
“Modern Infidelity.” By Robert Hall. 

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” By Jonathan Edwards. 
“Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” By Chalmers. 

“The Compassion of Christ to Weak Believers.” By S. Davies. 
“The Gospel for the Poor.” By J. M. Mason. 

“The Great Assize.”’ By John Wesley. 

“God is Love.” By A. Monod. 

“And There Shall be no Night There.” By Melville. 

“Glorying in the Cross.” By McLaurin. 


ey 


H. C. G. Moule, bishop of Durham, England: Thomas Chalmers, “Original Sin”; 
Charles Simeon, ‘““The Watchman’s Duty’; Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (of Oxford), 
“Future Punishment’; C. I. Vaughan, “I Have Been Young and Now Am Old”; 
McNeil, “Vain Excuses’’; Moody, ‘Consequences of Sinning’’; Spurgeon, “Supposing 
Him to be the Gardener”; Adolph Monod, “Four Sermons on St. Paul.” 


Russell H. Conwell, pastor of the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, suggested the 
following: H. W. Beecher’s, on “Ideal Christianity,” II Peter 1:11; D. L. Moody’s, 
on “Watch and Fight and Pray’; Hugh McMillans, “Leviticus, 14: 34’; Spurgeon’s 
“Traivailing for Souls,” Isaiah 56:8; Alexander McLaren’s “The Bridal of the Earth 
and the Sky,’ Psalms 35:10; William Taylor’s “The Boy Jesus,” Luke 11: 48. 


George C. Lorimer, recently of Tremont Temple, Boston, and later of New York 
City, suggested only one, which he regards as the greatest preached in the nineteenth 
century: John Caird’s sermon entitled, ‘Religion of the ‘Commonplace.’ ” 


Joseph Cook, when he was suffering from what proved to be his last illness, very 
kindly dictated a reply to Mrs. Cook, saying that he endorsed Dr. A. T. Pierson’s list 
with the addition of Prof. Park’s discourses, especially the one on “Conscience,” «and 
Dr. Storrs on “Foreign Missions.” 


A chart of the subjécts of the sermons and those who selected them would show 
that some of the sermons were chosen by as many as four different men—a remark- 
able coincidence, considering the mental iatitude of the men consulted, and the fact 
that I suppose the world would not contain the sermons written. And the judgment 
as to the men who should be represented in such a collection was more unanimous 
than that on the particular sermons which should be used. As to those who should 
be represented, the choice fell on: Horace Bushnell, Phillips Brooks, Henry Ward 
Beecher, John Caird, Thomas Chalmers, Canon Liddon, D. L. Moody, John M. 
Mason, Henry Martineau, Alexander McLaren, F. W. Robertson, Charles H. Spur- 
ee and W. M. Taylor; entitled thus, as it were, to a position in a preachers’ hall 
OL fameoneg gure 


+ 


The Compiler’s Story. XV 


The following sermons were regarded by three or more of the men consulted as 
the ten best sermons of the century: 


“Unconscious Influence,” by Horace Bushnell, recommended by President Mc- 
Clure, Addison P. Foster and Prof. Currier. 


Carey’s sermon on “Isaiah 54: 1, 2,” recommended by F. B. Meyer, W. G. Moore- 
head and A. T. Pierson. 

Chalmers’ “Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” by Kerr Boyce Tupper, Presi- 
dent McClure, Bishop Mills and W. G. Moorehead. 


Robert Hall’s ‘“Modern Infidelity,” by F. W. Gunsaulus, F. B. Meyer, Kerr 
Boyce Tupper and W. G. Moorehead. 

John M. Mason’s “To the Poor the Gospel is Preached,” suggested by A. T. 
Pierson, W. G. Moorehead and Kerr Boyce Tupper. 


A number of the sermons suggested were not used, for several reasons; their 
length, or the fact that a sermon on the same or nearly the same subject or text had 
been determined upon, or that, in the cases of living preachers, they personally ex- 
pressed a preference for some other than the one chosen. While men are not always 
the best judges of their own productions, they know their own repertoire best. 


Again, there are some of the sermons here chosen by the compiler, but in most 
cases after consultation with friends. The fact that the peculiar value of the book 
would consist in the selections being made by men of such known reputation and wide 
experience as those mentioned on the title page was kept in mind at all times. If the 
selection meets your approval tell them, if not, tell me, confidentially. 


For suggestions as to single sermons, I am indebted to many: W. B. 
Pickard, for suggesting a sermon of John Lanceley’s; G. B. Townsend, Christian 
Missionary Society, for Alexander Campbell’s “Justification and Coronation’; Rev. 
W. W. Barker, for Kerr Boyce Tupper’s “Central Theme of Christianity.” Bishop 
McCabe wrote me that when he had time to read a sermon he usually turned to one 
of Phillips Brooks or John Wesley. To publishers who have given me permission to 
use copyrighted sermons, I have given full credit in connection with the sermons. 
Librarian Root of Oberlin College Library and William H. Brett, Cleveland 
Public Library, I desire to thank for favors. One example of interest that particularly 
impressed me was that Mrs. Gordon personally wrote out from the manuscript of the 
late A. J. Gordon, the copy of the sermon which appears here, as she thought it more 
nearly represented his principal themes than the one that had been selected. One 
who has been especially kind as to suggestions and encouragement, was asked to write 
the introduction. 


If the readers of this volume, and those who refer to it, get as much pleasure as 
the compiler has gotten in reading proof, he will be very much pleased to have under- 
taken the work, which he trusts will prove, by reason of the selection having been 
made as the result of the concensus of opinions of so many able men, to be the most 
valuable collection of sermons thus far published. 


FREDERICK BARTON. 


PHE “LOST SHEEP. 


WILLIAM ARNOT. 
(Luke 15: 1-7.) 


Although by another saying of the Lord, it is rendered certain that hired, and 
even in a sinister sense “hireling,” shepherds were known at the time in the country, 
the presumption that the flock which this shepherd tended was his own property is 
favored both by the specific phraseology employed in the narrative, and the special 
circumstances of this particular case. The size of this flock, consisting of only one 
hundred sheep, points rather to the entire wealth of a comparatively poor man than 
to the stock of a territorial magnate. The conduct of the shepherd, moreover, is 
precisely the reverse of that which is elsewhere ascribed to the “hireling whose own 
the sheep are not.” The salient feature of the man’s character, as it is represented in 
the parable, constitutes a specific proof of his ownership—‘the careth for the sheep,” 
and that too with a peculiar and self-sacrificing tenderness. 


We assume, therefore, according to the terms of the narrative in their literal 
acceptation, that this is a man “having an hundred sheep”—that the sheep are his own. 
He is feeding them on pasture land far from cultivated fields and human dwellings. 
Hills impervious to the plough, and patches of vegetation interspersed through rugged 
stony tracts, have in all countries and ages constituted the appropriate pasture for 
flocks of sheep. These are indicated here by one word, “ the wilderness.” The term is 
obviously used not in a strict but in a free popular sense; it means simply the region 
of pasturage, consisting generally of hills and moors, not suitable for being ploughed 
and sown. 

A flock of a hundred sheep, although small, is yet sufficiently considerable to 
render it impossible for the shepherd to detect the absence of one by merely looking 
to them in the lump and from a distance; he must have minutely inspected them ere 
he discovered that one was missing. Knowing them all individually, he knows the 
one that has strayed; he loves them all as his children, and grieves when one goes out 
of sight. 

It was no mark of carelessress in the shepherd, as some have erroneously 
imagined, to leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness while he went to seek the one 
that was lost. The main body of the flock was left in its own proper place, where it is 
often left from morning till night by the most careful shepherd, even when he is not 
employed on the urgent duty of recovering wanderers. 

The shepherd knows the nature of the country in which the sheep is straying; 
and also the nature of the sheep that is straying there. He knows the roughness of 
the mountain passes, and the silliness of the solitary truant sheep; he divines accord- 
ingly what track it will take. He conjectures beforehand, with a considerable measure 
of accuracy, the pit in which it will be found lying, or the thicket in which it will be 
seen struggling. He follows and finds the fugitive. Wearied by its journey, and per- 
haps wounded by its falls, the sheep, when discovered, cannot return to the fold even 
under the shepherd’s guidance; he takes it on his shoulders and bears the burden 
home. He does not upbraid it for its straying; he does not complain of its weight. 
He is glad that he has gotten his own again, after it was “ready to perish.’ Happy 


2 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


while he bears it homeward, and happy when he has gotten it home, he invites all his 
neighbors to share in his joy. 

Such is the simple and transparent outline of this ancient eastern pastoral scene; 
let us now endeavor to see in the symbol those lessons which it at once veils and 
reveals. 

The parable is spoken expressly for the purpose of determining and manifesting 
the character and work of the Son in the salvation of sinful men; it declares the 
design, the method and the terms of the incarnate Redeemer in His intercourse with the 
creatures whom He came to save. But in the fact of accomplishing this, its immediate 
object, it strikes also a chord which runs through the center—constitutes, as it were, 
the medulla of the divine government in all places and all times. The parable spoken 
in order to afford a glance into the heart of Jesus, incidentally at the same time 
sketches the outline of God's universal rule; as in drawing the figure of a branch you 
necessarily exhibit, in its main features and proportions, an image of the tree. This 
wider subject certainly and accurately outlined, although incidentally introduced, 
demands some notice at our hand. 


Eyer since the scientific observation discovered the true system of the material 
universe, and so, as it were, changed those twinkling sparks of light into central 
suns, the rulers of tributary worlds, philosophy apart from faith has been, more or 
less articulately, scattering the question, at once a fruit and a seed of unbelief, how 
could the Creator of so vast a universe bestow so much of His care on one small spot? 
Some have been disposed to say, and perhaps more have been disposed to think, with 
fear or joy, according to their predilection, that modern discovery is gradually putting 
the Bible out of date. A feeling, if not a judgment, has in some quarters arisen, that 
in view of the vastness of creation, the Scriptures ascribe to this globe and its con- 
cerns a share of its Maker’s interest disproportionately great. 


This phase of unbelief is refuted both by the necessary attributes of God and by 
the written revelation of His will. What relation, capable of being appreciated or 
calculated, subsists between material bulk and moral character? The question between 
great and small is totally distinct from the question between good and evil. Number 
and extensions cannot exercise or illustrate the moral character either of God or of 
man. We should ourselves despise the mischievous caprice which should give to the 
biggest man in the city the honors that are due to the best. Right and wrong are 
matters that move on-other iines and at higher levels than great and small, before 
both human tribunals and divine. 

There is, perhaps, as much reason for saying that this earth is too large, as for 
saying that it is too small, for being the scene of God’s greatest work. The telescope 
has opened a long receding vista of wonders, where the observer is lost in the abyss 
oi distance and magnitude; the microscope has opened another long receding vista of 
wonders, where the observer is lost in the abyss of nearness and minuteness equally 
beyond his reach. Between the great and the small, who shall determine and pre- 
scribe the center-point equi-distant from both extremes, which the Infinite ought to 
have chosen as a theatre for the display of His greatest glory? 4 

In the divine government generally, as well as in revealed religion particularly, 
the aim is not to choose the widest stage, but on any stage that may be chosen to 
execute the Creator’s purpose, and achieve the creature’s good. A battle is fought, 
an enemy crushed, and a kingdom won on some remote and barren moor; no man 
suggests, by way of challenging the authenticity of the record, that a conflict waged 
between hosts so powerful, and involving interests so momentous, could not have 
taken place on an insignificant spot, while the continent contained many larger and 
more fertile plains; neither can the loss incurred by the sin of men and the gain gotten 
through redemption of Christ, be measured by the size of the world in which the 


: The Lost Sheep—Arnot. 3 


events emerged. It is enough that here the first Adam fell and the second Adam 
triumphed—that here evil overcame good, and good in turn overcame evil. There 
was room on this earth for Eden and Calvary; this globe supplies the fulcrum whereon 
all God’s government leans. The Redeemer came not to the largest world, but to the 
lost world—‘‘even so, Father.” 

“He took not on Him the nature of angels.””’ In aggregate numbers they may, for 
aught we know, be the ninety and nine, while we represent the one that strayed; but 
though all these shining stars were peopled worlds, and all their inhabitants angels 
who kept their first estate, He will leave them in their places in the blue heaven afar, 
like sheep’ in the wide moorland, and go forth in search of this one shooting star, to 
arrest and bring it back. It is His joy to restore it to law and light again. Rejoice 
with great joy, O inhabitants of the earth! the Savior Almighty has passed 
other worlds and other beings, some of whom do not heed, and some oi 
whom do not get, salvation—has passed them and come to us. He has taken hold of 
the seed of Abraham, that we who partake of Abraham's sinful flesh may partake also 
of Abraham's saving faith. There is much in this mystery which we do not know, 
and in our present state could not comprehend; but we know the one thing needful 
regarding it—that ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.” 

Having noticed cursorily that grand characteristic feature of God’s universal 
government to which the principle of the parable is applicable, we proceed now to 
examine more particularly the recovery of lost men by the Lord our Redeemer, to 
which the lesson of the parable is, in point of fact, specifically applied. 

1. The shepherd misses one when it has strayed from the flock. The Redeemer’s 
knowledge is infinite; He looks not only over the multitude generally, but into each 
individual. When I stand on a hillock at the edge of a broad meadow and look 
across the sward, it may be said in a general way that I look on all the grass of that 
field; but the sun in the sky looks on it after another fashion—shines on every down- 


_spike that protrudes from every blade. It is thus that the Good,Shepherd knows 


the flock. Knowing all, He misses any one that wanders. He missed a world when 
it fell, although His worlds lie scattered like grains of golden dust on the blue field 
of heaven—the open infinite. When the light of moral life went out in one of His 
worlds, He missed its wonted shining in the aggregate of glory that surrounds His 
throne. With equal perfectness of knowledge He misses one human being who has 
been formed by His hand, but fails to hang by faith upon His love. The Bible speaks 
of falling “into the hands of the living God,” and calls it “‘a fearful thing” (Heb. 10: 
31); but an equally fearful thing happened before it—we fell out of the bosom of the 
living God. He felt, so to speak, the want of our weight when we fell, and said, 
“Save from going down to the pit.” But the omniscience of the Savior does not stop 
when it passes through the multitude, and reaches the individual man; it penetrates 
the veils that effectually screen us from each other, and so knows the thoughts which 
congregate like clouds within a human heart, that He misses every one that is not 
subject to His will. When the mighty volume is coursing along its channel towards 
the ocean, He marks every drop that leaps aside in spray. It is a solemn thought, 
and to the reconciled a gladsome one, that. as the shepherd observed when one sheep 
left the fold, the Shepherd of Israel, who slumbers not nor sleeps, detects every 
wandering soul, and in that soul every wandering thought. The physician’s thorough 
knowledge of the ailment lies at the very foundation of the patient’s hope. 


2. The shepherd cared for the lost sheep; although he possessed ninety and 
nine, he was not content to let a unit go. A species of personal affection and the 
ordinary interest of property, combine to cause grief when the sheep is lost, and to 
contribute the motive for setting off in search of the -wanderer. 

In attempting to apply the lesson at this point, we very soon go beyond our 


4 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


depth. Our own weakness warns us not to attempt too much; but the condescending 
kindness of the Lord, in speaking these parables, encourages us to enter into the 
mystery of redeeming love on this side as far as our line can reach. In that inscrut- 
able love which induced the Owner of man to become his Savior when he fell, there 
must be something corresponding to both of the ingredients which constituted the 
shepherd’s grief. There was something corresponding—with such correspondence as 
may exist between the divine and the human—to the personal affection, and something 
to the loss of property. When we think of the Redeemer’s plan and work as wholly 
apart from self-interest, and undertaken simply for the benefit of the fallen race, we 
form a conception of redemption true, as far as it goes, but the conception is not com- 
plete. The object which we, from our view-point, strive to measure, has another and 
opposite side. For His own sake as well as for ours, the Redeemer undertook and 
accomplished His work. ‘‘For the joy that was set before Him He endured the 
cross, despising the shame.’”” When He wept over Jerusalem, mere pity for the lost 
was not the sole fountain of His tears. Those tears, like some great rivers of the 
globe, were supplied from two sources lying in opposite directions. As the possession 
oi the ransomed when they are brought back affords the Redeemer joy, the want of 
the lost, while they are distant, must cause in His heart a corresponding and equiva- 
lent grief. It is true, that if we too strictly apply to the divine procedure the analogy 
of human affairs at this point we shall fatally dilute our conception of the generosity 
displayed in the gospel; but, on the other hand, if we do not apply this analogy at all, 
we shall inevitably permit some of our sweetest consolation to slip from our grasp. To 
be merely pitied does not go so kindly or so powerfully about our hearts as to be 
loved; Christ's regard for fallen men is not merely the compassion of one who is 
loftily independent. When an infant is lost in a forest, and all the neighbors have, at 
the mother’s call, gone out in search of the wanderer, it would be a miserably inade- 
quate conception of that mother’s emotion to think of it as pity for the sufferings of 
the child; her own suffering for want of her child is greater than the child’s for want 
of his mother; and by the express testimony of Scripture, we learn that the Savior’s 
remembrance of His people is analogous to the mother’s remembrance of her child. 
If you press the likeness too far, you destroy the essential character of redemption, 
by representing it as a self-pleasing on the part of the Redeemer; but if you take away 
the likeness altogether, you leave me sheltered, indeed, under an Almighty arm, but 
not permitted to lie on a loving breast. My joy in Christ’s salvation is tenfold 
increased, when, aiter being permitted to think that He is mine, I am also permitted 
to think that Iam His. If it did not please Him to get me back, my pleasure would be 
small in being coldly allowed to return. No, the longing of Christ to get the wanderer 
into His bosom again, for the satisfaction of His own soul, is the sweetest ingredient 
in the cup of a returning penitent’s joy. 3 


3. The shepherd left the ninety and nine for the sake of the one that had wan- 
dered. I find no difficulty in the interpretation of the parable here. The doctrinal 
difficulty which some have met at this point, has been imported into the field by a 
mistake in regard to the material scene. The leaving of the ninety and nine in the 
wilderness, while the shepherd went out to seek the strayed sheep, implied no dere- 
liction of the shepherd’s duty—no injury to the body of the flock. In this transaction 
neither kindness nor unkindness was manifested towards those that remained on the 
pasture—it had no bearing upon them at all. Nor is it necessary, at this stage, to 
determine who are represented by the ninety and nine. Be they the unfallen spirits, 
or the righteous in the abstract, or those who, in ignorance of God’s law, count them- 
selves righteous, the parable is constructed for the purpose of teaching us that the 
mission of Christ has for its special object, not the good, but the evil. As the specific 
effort of the shepherd, which is recorded in this story, had respect not to the flock that 


7 


The Lost Sheep—Arnot. 5 


remained on the pasture, but to the one sheep that had gone away, the specific effort 
of the Son of God, in His incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection, has respect 
not to the worthy, but the unworthy. 


Thus the Pharisees were entirely at fault in regard to the first principle of the 
Gospel. They assumed that, because the publicans and sinners had gone astray, 
Jesus, if He were the true Messiah, would not have any dealings with them; without 
either conceding or expressly denying their assumption of superior righteousness— 
that being precisely the point on which He determined that then and there He would 
give no judgment—He intimates that the strayed sheep is the peculiar object of His 
care, and that because it is the strayed sheep, and He is the Good Shepherd;—He 
intimates, taking the Pharisees and their own word, that the sinners are the objects 
whom a Savior should follow, and seek, and find, precisely because they are sinners. 
It concerns us more to know who are represented by the strayed sheep, than to know 
who are represented by the sheep that did not stray, for to the former class, and not 
to the latter, we most certainly belong. . 


4. How does the shepherd act when he overtakes the wanderer? He does not 
punish it—he does not even upbraid it for straying; his anxiety and effort are con- 
centrated on one point—to get it home again. Would that guilty suspicious hearts 
could see through this glass the loving heart of Jesus, as He has himself presented it 
to their view! He takes no pleasure in the death of them that die. His ministry is 
general, and this lesson in particular, proclaim that Christ’s errand into the world is to 
win the rebellious back by love. You may suppose the truant sheep t6 have dreaded 
punishment when it was overtaken by the injured shepherd; but his look and his act 
when he came must have immediately dispelled the helpless creature’s fears. The 
Lord has held up this picture before us that in it we may behold His love, and that the 
sight of His love may at length discharge from our hearts their inborn obdurate sus- 
piciousness. 


5. The shepherd lays the sheep upon his shoulders. This feature of the picture 
affords no ground for the doctrine which has sometimes been founded on it, that 
the Savior is burdened with the sinners whom He saves. His suffering lies in another 
direction, and is not in any form represented here. He weeps when the sinful remain 
distant and refuse to throw their weight on Him; He never complains of having too 
much of this work in hand. The parable here points to His power and victory, not to 
His pain and weariness. 


The representation that the shepherd bore the strafed sheep home upon his 
shoulder, instead of going before and calling on it to follow, is significant in respect 
both to this parable and its counterpart and complement, the Prodigal Son., In as far 
as the saving of the lost is portrayed in this similitude, the work is done by the Savior 
aione. First and last the sinner does nothing but destroy himself; all the saving work 
is done for him, none of it by him. This is one side of salvation, and it is the only 
side that is represented here. It seems hard to conceive how any converted man can 
be troubled by doubt or difficulty concerning this doctrine. Every one whom Christ 
has sought and found, and borne to the fold, feels and confesses that, if the Shepherd 
had not come to the sheep, the sheep would not have come to the Shepherd. If any 
wanderer still hesitates on the question, Who brought him home? it is time that 
he should begin to entertain another question, Whether he has yet been brought 
home at all? The acknowledgment of this fundamental truth, that salvation is begun, 
carried on and completed by the Savior alone, does not, of course, come into collision 
with another fundamental truth, which expatiates on another sphere, and is represented 
in another parable, that except the sinful do themselves repent, and come to the 
Father, they shall perish in their sins. 


6 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


6. Far from being oppressed by the burden of his strayed sheep, the shepherd 
rejoices when he feels its weight upon his shoulder. His joy begins not when the 
work is over, but when the work begins. While the lost one is on his shoulder, and 
because it is on his shoulder, the shepherd is glad. The doctrinal equivalent of this 
feature is one of the clearest of revealed truths, and yet it is one of the last that a 
human heart is willing to receive. The work of saving, far from being done with a 
grudge in order to keep a covenant, is a present delight to the Savior. This lesson 
falls on human minds like a legend written by the finger on dewy glass, which dis- 
appears when the sun grows hot; but when it is graven on the heart as by the Spirit 
of the living God, it is unspeakably precious. When I habitually realize not only that 
Christ will keep His word in receiving sinners, but that He has greater delight in 
bearing my weight than I can ever have in casting it on Him, I shall trust fully and 
trust always. There is great power in this truth, and great weakness in the want of it. 
Let even an experienced Christian analyze carefully the working of his own heart, not 
in the act of back-sliding towards the world, but in its best efforts to follow the Lord, 
and he will discover among the lower folds of his experience a persistent suspicion 
that the great draft which a sinner makes on the Savior’s mercy will, though hon- 
ored, be honored with a grudge because of its greatness. Look on the simple picture 
of His love which Jesus has in this parable presented—look on the words, “He layeth 
it on His shoulders rejoicing’—look till you grieve for your own distrust, and the 
distrust melt in that grief away. 


7 


7. The shepherd on reaching home not only himself rejoiced, but invited his 
neighbors to rejoice with him over his success. To this last intimation of the parable 
the Lord immediately adds an express exposition of its meaning—Ver. 7—"'I say unto 
you that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over 
ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.” In the parallel explanation 
an appended feature is expressed, “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God 
over one sinner that repenteth;’’ both obviously refer to the same fact, and should be 
taken together as one announcement. 

The kingdom of God recognizes two successive homecomings in the history of 
every citizen. The exile discovered and borne back by the discriminating mercy of 
the Redeemer, comes home when through the regeneration he enters a state of grace; 
and he comes home under the leading of the same chief, when in the resurrection he 
enters a state of perfect glory. It is instructive and comforting to observe that, while 
both homecomings are joyful, it is of the first that the Lord expressiy speaks when 
He intimates that over it Himself and the hosts of heaven will rejoice. It is over the 
repentance of a sinner that a jubilee is held in heaven; they do not wait till the ran- 
somed one shall appear in bodily presence near the great white throne. There is no 
need; the entrance into grace ensures the entrance into glory. The children will all 
get home. No slip can come between the cup of the Redeemer’s glad anticipation 
when a sinner is renewed, and the lip of his complete satisfaction when He welcomes 
the ransomed at length into the mansions of the Father’s house. 

In this brief but lucid exposition of His own similitude which the Lord gave at 
the moment, and the evangelist has preserved for us, something is taught first regard- 
ing the companions, and second regarding the measure of His joy. Both present 
points of interest which require and will repay more particular attention. 


(1) In regard to the participation of the angels in the Redeemer’s joy over the 
salvation of the lost, the intimations bear that there is joy “in heaven,’ and “in the 
presence of the angels of God.’’ It seems unaccountably to those who look carefully 
into the terms of the record, to be universally assumed from these expressions that 
the angels, in the exercise of their inherent faculties, are in some way cognizant of 
conversion as it proceeds in human soul upon the earth, and that they rejoice accord- 


Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 7 


ingly when another heart melts, and another rebel submits to God. Capital has even 
been made out of this passage by Romanists in support of prayers addressed to unseen 
created spirits. All this proceeds upon an exegesis, which is, I believe, demonstrably 
erroneous. In order to settle all questions that can arise here, nothing more is nec- 
essary than a simple straightforward examination of the terms. The rejoicing takes 
piace “in heaven,” and “in presence of the angels.” This is not the form of expression 
that would naturally be employed to intimate that the angels rejoiced. Expressly it is 
written, not that they rejoice, but that there is joy in their presence—before their 
faces. The question then comes up, Who rejoices there? In as far as the terms of 
: the exposition go, the question is not expressly decided; but its decision can be easily 
and certainly gathered from the context. Both in the case of the lost sheep and in 
J that of the Jost money the comparison is introduced by the term “likewise.” In this 
manner there is joy before the angels; in what manner? Obviously in the manner of 
1 
y 
: 


the rejoicing which took place after the strayed sheep was brought home, and the 
piece of money found. He who sought and found the lost rejoiced over his gain; but, 
not contented therewith, he told his neighbors about his happiness and its cause; he 
manifested his joy in their presence, and invited them to rejoice in sympathy with 
himself. It is after this manner that joy in heaven over a repenting sinner begins and 
spreads. We are not obliged, we are not permitted to guess who the rejoicers are, or 
how they came by the news that gladdens them. The shepherd himself, and himself 
alone, knows that the strayed sheep is safe in the fold again, for he has borne it back 
on his shoulder; his neighbors did not know the fact until he told them, and invited 
them to participate in his joy. It is expressly in this manner, and none other, that 
there shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. The angels do not become 
aware of the fact by a species of subordinate omniscience. He who saved the sinner 
knows that the sinner is saved; rejoicing in the fact, he makes it known to his attend- 
ants and invites them to share in his joy. 

The gladness that thrills in the angels is a secondary thing, caught by sympathy 
from that which glows in the heart and beams in the countenance of Jesus. The Son 
of God the Savior having won a sinner by the power of his love, and brought the 
wanderer back forgiven and renewed, rejoices on His throne over this fruit of His 
soul’s travail. Ere the ransomed sinner has risen from his knees or wiped his tears 
away—ere he has had time to sing a hymn or sit down at the communion table on 
1 earth, the Lord in heaven, feeling life owing from Himself into that living soul, 
__ rejoices already in the fact, and calls upon His friends, whether the spirits of just men 
or angels unfallen, or both in concert, to participate in His joy. The Apocalyptic 
witness saw no sun in the new heaven; “the Lamb is the light thereof;” from that sun 
the light streams down on the sea of upturned faces that surround the throne, and 
the sympathetic gladness that sparkles in the members is a reflection from the glad- 
ness that first glows in the head, as a separate sun glances on the crest of every wave- 
let, when the breeze is gentle and the sky is bright. 


(2) The intimation that there is greater joy in heaven over the return of a single 
wanderer than over ninety and nine who never strayed, presents indeed a difficulty; 
but here, as in many other similar cases, the difficulty lies more in the way of the 
scientific expositor, whose task is to express the meaning in the form of logical 
definitions, than in the way of the simple reader of the Bible, who desires to sit at the 
feet of Jesus, and learn the one thing needful from His lips. In this, as in many other 
portions of Scripture, a hungry laborer may live upon the bread, while it may baffle 
a philosopher to analyze its constituents, and expound its nutritive qualities. A devout 
_ reader may get the meaning of the parable in power upon his heart, while the logical 
___ interpreter expends much profitless labor in the dissection of a dead letter. 
Who are the just persons who need no repentance? The suggestion that they are 


8 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the members of the Old Testament Church, who really possessed the righteousness of 
the law, although they had not attained the righteousness of the Gospel, creates a 
greater difficulty than that which it proposes to remove. There is not any such essen- 
tial difference between the righteousness of Abraham, who looked unto Jesus ae, 
and the righteousness of Paul, who looked unto Jesus come. 

The true solution I apprehend to be that in the mind of the Lord this declaration 
had a double reference. It expressed an absolute and universal truth, known to Him- 
self and to His enlightened disciples; and also, at the same time, took the Pharisees 
on their own terms, condemning them out of their own mouth. The parable was 
spoken expressly to the Pharisees, and spoken specifically in answer to their objection, 
“This man receiveth sinners.’’ They meant to intimate that it became the Messiah to 
shun the evil and associate only with the good. From their own view-point He 
exposes their mistake; even granting their assumption that themselves were the right- 
eous, their sentence was erroneous. According to the principles of human nature, 
and the ordinary practice of men, they might have perceived that the chief care oi 
the shepherd must be bestowed on the sheep that has gone astray, and his greatest 
joy be experienced when it has been discovered and restored. The Savior’s delight 
over a publican’s return to piety should be more vivid than His joy over a Pharisee, 
who, by the supposition, has been pious all his days. 

Had the Lord then and there intimated to the Pharisees that they were deceiving 
themselves in regard to justifying righteousness—that they needed repentance as much 
as the publicans, His word would have been true, but that truth, He perceived, was 
not suitable in the circumstances. It pleased Him at this time not to fling a sharp 
reproof in their faces, but rather to drop a living seed gently into their ears, that it 
might find its way in secret to some broken place in their hearts. A certain portion 
of the truth He communicated to them; more they would not have received. The 
whole truth on this subject, if it had been biantly declared, would have driven them 
away in disgust. 

Elsewhere the Master expresses His mind very clearly nee your righteous- 
ness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter 
into the Kingdom of Heaven;’’ but it pleased Him on this occasion to teach another 
lesson, namely, that even although they were as righteous as they deemed themselves 
to be, the recovery of a lost one would afford the Redeemer a greater joy than the 
retention of the virtuous. Beyond expression precious is the doctrine unequivocally 
taught here that so far from receiving prodigals with a grudge, the Savior experi- 
ences a peculiar delight when a sinner listens to His voice and accepts pardon at His 
hand. This doctrine we learn is divine; we know it is also human; almost every family 
can supply an example of the familiar principle that the mother loves most fondly the 
child who has cost her most in suffering and care. 


[This sermon was included on the recommendation of A. T. Pierson, D. D. It 
is from a volume of Arnot’s sermons, published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, New 
York, in 1874, under the title of “Parables of Our Lord.” 

William Arnot was born at Scone, Scotland, November 6, 1808; died at Edinburgh, 
June 3, 1875. A Scottish minister and theological writer. He was ordained minister 
of St. Peter’s Church in Glasgow in 1838, joined Dr. Chalmers’ Free Church move-~ 


ment in 18438, and became minister of a Free Church congregation in Edinburgh in 
1863.] 


) 


THE SECRET OF A RADIANT PERSONALITY. 


ALBERT LOUIS BANKS, D. D. 


“And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face 
shone.” —Exodus 34: 35. 

“And all that sat in the council, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had 
been the face of an angel.”—Acts 6: 15. 

“And his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.”— 
Matthew 17: 2. j 

Christ has made it clear that it is our duty to be radiant and full of light. “Ye 
are the light of the world,” is Christ’s deliberate announcement concerning those who 
are His followers. None of us have a right to live darkened lives. It is not only our 
privilege, it is our duty, and we are under solemn obligation to live lives that shall be 
so cheerful and bright, so radiant with hope and courage, that the world looking on 
shall inquire the reason, and when they come to know it give glory to God. 

I wish to call your attention to these three cases of supreme radiance in person- 
ality, with the hope that from them we may learn the secret of the radiant life. The 
first is from the story of Moses. For forty days Moses had been on Mount Sinai 
with the Lord. He had talked face to face with God and the radiance of heaven was 
_ reflected from his face. When he came down the mountain and appeared before the 
people, though he was not conscious that there was any change in him, the people 
could not look upon his face, it was so radiant with the divine glory. 

Now in Moses’ case it was his divine associations which had given him this radiant 
personality. Here then is one of the secrets of the illuminated life. Associations will 
have their influence upon us. There is one kind of a diamond which aiter it has been 
exposed for some minutes to the light of the sun will when taken into a dark room 
emit light for a long time. The human heart is like that. The man who associates 
with God, who keeps in the divine fellowship of Jesus Christ, whose heart and soul 
rise in communion with all good and pure spirits, will gather the heavenly light, and 
it will shine forth from him in the walks of life. 

‘In one of the old palaces the spaces between the windows of one of the rooms are 
hung with mirrors, and by this device the walls are made just as luminous as the 
windows, through which the sunshine streams. Every square inch of surface reflects 
the light. Our natures may be like that. If we are completely consecrated to God, 
walking in perfect fellowship with Jesus Christ, with all selfishness cast out, there will 
be no part in darkness anywhere, and the whole realm of the soul will be ablaze with 
moral illumination which will make the personality radiant and glorious. 

Some traveller says that the brightly colored soil of volcanic Sicily produces 
flowers of brighter tints than any other part of the earth. So it is true that the soil 
of Christian hearts, from which all the dullness and darkness of selfishness and evil 
has been expelled, a spiritual soil that is bright with the radiance of love and hope and 
faith, will produce deeds of brighter tint and sweeter fragrance than any other heart- 
soil possible to man. 

Henry Varley tells the story of Sybil, a negro slave, whose mistress said to her: 
“When I heard you singing on the housetop I thought you fanatical; but when I saw 
your beaming face, I could not help feeling how different you were to me.” Sybil 


10 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


answered, “Ah, Missus, the light you saw in my face was not from me, it all came 
‘flected from de cross, and there is heaps more for every poor sinner who will come 
near enough to catch de rays.” 

It is almost impossible for us to overestimate the power of associations on life. If 
we are to live bright and radiant lives our associations must be taken into account. 
An English writer recently related this incident: About a year ago a friend gave to a 
young man a lovely picture, and asked him to hang it up in his room for a year. The 
recipient of the picture was a lively young Oxford undergraduate, who cared much 
more for having a ‘good time” than he did for his studies, and who was not over 
particular as to the character of his good time. Calling upon him at his rooms one 
day, the writer found this picture hung in a prominent place, but surrounded by an 
incongruous medley of low sporting prints and questionable pictures. The young 
man himself did not seem to be conscious of the glaring contrast, but cheerfully called 
his visitor’s attention to the splendid picture which had been given him. Six months 
passed away, and the writer called again, and was startled by the change. The picture 
still hung in its old place, but its low companions had vanished, and their places were 
filled by other pictures in harmony with its beauty and purity. The face of the visitor 
expressed surprise, and in answer to a look the young man was quick to speak of the 
change. 

“You see,” he exclaimed, “I couldn’t leave them up with that. The contrast was 
too dreadful. I didn’t see it at first, but I suppose looking at the picture opened my 
eyes till I did see it, and then, I tell you, those cheap prints came down in a hurry! 
And it was the same way in putting up new pictures. That one set the standard, and 
I knew I couldn’t have, and didn’t want, anything that wasn’t in harmony with it.” 


Now that is the supreme glory of association with Jesus Christ. If we open the 
door of our hearts to Christ and He comes in and sits at the head of our table, His 
presence sets the standard for the guests at our soul feast. The rest must be in har- 
mony with him. If you would live a radiant, glorious life, let Christ become the central 
figure of your affection and friendship, and then there shall group about Him only 
those radiant, and hopeful, and beautiful spirits that are in harmony with Him. 


Our second picture brings before us that young and picturesque first martyr for 
Christ, Stephen. I have not time adequately to paint that wonderful picture. It is a 
court scene; the judges are grave and dignified men, full of bigotry and prejudice 
against the new religion. The mob gathered about are vindictive, and hate everything 
holy and good; and there before the council is Stephen, a young man with the glow 
of youth upon him, but a far more brilliant glow than any mere physical or youthful 
spirits or youthful strength can give. It is the glow that comes from a perfect loyalty 
to Jesus Christ. He does not seem to see the mob or the judges; his eye is on the 
throne of God; it pierces the veil, and he sees his glorified and risen Lord, and he 
bears witness to him with an utter fearlessness that astonishes and overwhelms the men 
who listen. As he thus loyally witnesses for Christ. those prejudiced men, who look 
on his face, are compelled to acknowledge that it is like the face of an angel. 


It is a tremendous truth that as life goes on the human face becomes the dial-plate 
of the soul, into which men may look and tell the time of day in character. As Dr. 
W. F. Crafts has said, the face is a bulletin-board that constantly indicates the working 
ofthe heart. Every day we see how anguish of heart “disasters the cheeks” and fur- 
rows the face, arfd writes upon it the epitaphs of buried hopes; every day we meet 
faces tramped as hard as a highway by the hoofs of pain and oppression, and sorrow 
as well as joy engraves its story on the countenance. Sin writes its record also on the 
face. There are places you may go in this city and look into faces that seem to con- 
tain, as some one has said, “the ruin of the ten commandments’’—faces that hurt you 
more than a blow, faces where “from the eyes the spirit wildly peeps,” faces like petri- 


, 


jae 


A Radiant Personality—Banks. a 


fied vices, not a finger-touch of God left whole upon them—and you will realize that 
vice as well as misery makes its trademark on the visage while it ravages the heart. 
Great soul-artists in fiction always recognize the fact that we are to see the mind in 
the face. Dickens makes even the dogs to lead their blind masters up side alleys to 
escape the cruel face of Scrooge, while on the other hand the little boy in the church- 
yard looks with tears into the face of “Little Nell” as her countenance is being trans- 
figured by approaching death, to see if she is already an angel, as the neighbors have 
said she will be soon. 

The teaching of all this is that whoever masters your soul will in the end make 
your personality bear witness to Him. Yow cannot escape the grip of your Master. 
If sin is your master, in the end you will be his living moving monument. But if 
Christ is your Lord, and from the profound depths of your soul you are loyal to him, 
out from that whole-souled loyalty to Christ there will come a glorious light on your 
face, and your whole personality will become radiant and bear witness to the Lord 
whom you serve. 

, _In our third picture we have the Christ accompanied by His three most intimate 
friends, Peter, James and John. They have gone up on the mountain, either Tabor or 
Hermon, and there while Jesus prays the fashion of His countenance is altered, and 
the astonished disciples, looking on, behold the face of Jesus shining like the sun and 
His raiment white as the light. 


Now in this case we have the radiance of a perfectly pure heart. Moses wore a 
veil when coming out from the presence of God, so that the people might look upon 
his face; and so Christ during all His earthly life was veiled, that He might live with 
men without the awiul glory of His perfect purity overwhelming the people with whom 
He associated. As some one has said, the transfiguration of Jesus was not a miracle, 
but a witness of the abiding presence of Christ’s divinity; His whole being shone. If 
He had been outwardly true to what He bore within Him He would have been seen 
always with His glory unveiled; it would have been about Him in the manger at 
Bethlehem—transfigured Babe! In His home at Nazareth—transfigured Boy! It 
would have shone about Him during His ministry in Galilee—transfigured Man! And, 
at the last, on Calvary’s cross—transfigured Sufferer! For our sake Christ veiled the 


_ outward glory that He might live among us as one of us; but for a moment on that 


mountain top, with these close friends about Him, the inner glory shone forth in His 
face, and the disciples fell to the ground before the radiance of that light. 


Here we have, then, three characteristics of a radiant personality, all of which 
are within our reach. A pure heart, divine associations, and a whole-souled loyalty to 
Jesus Christ. I say all of these are within our reach. If the heart is hard and selfish 
and sinful, bring it unto God at the mercy-seat, and He will take out of your breast 
the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Surrender yourself to do His will, to 
obey Him, and He will cleanse your heart of all unrighteousness. With sin banished 
you shall realize the promise of Christ, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall 
see God.” 

Divine associations are also possible to us. We may always reach Christ and 
heaven through the gate of prayer. Down in Asheville, North Carolina, there is living 
a remarkable old saint, with a face as black as ebony, who is known as “Uncle Bar- 
ney.” A few weeks ago Uncle Barney was in attendance on a “quarterly meeting.” 
The presiding elder brought up the question of family prayers, and he began with one 
of the brethren and went round the circle, asking each brother if he had family prayers 
and requiring him to tell something about the worship that was daily held in his 
family. At last he came to Uncle Barney. Now Uncle Barney, like Paul, is an old 
bachelor, and so he said, “I cannot have family prayers, seeing that I have no family. 
But,” continued the old man with a shining face, “when I get up in the morning and 


PON Ay: Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


wash my face, I say, ‘O Lord, wash my heart and keep me clean of sin this day.’ And 
when I put on my clothes, I say, ‘O Lord, clothe me today with the white garments of 
righteousness.’ And when I put on my shoes, I say, ‘O Lord Jesus, get into these 
shoes with me and make me to walk in Thy paths every step I take this day.” No 
wonder that this old man, a humble old black cook, has an influence which pervades 
the whole community, white as well as black, and is wherever he goes a radiant testi- 
mony for Jesus Christ. 

And so the perfect loyalty is possible to every one of us. Do not allow yourself 
to be discouraged because you are naturally timid and easily thrown into a panic. God 
can make the inner courage all the more glorious as it shines out through natural 
weakness. There is a moral courage which is far greater than physical courage. The 
Duke of Wellington once sent two officers on service of great hazard, and as they were 
riding, the one turning to the other saw his lips quivering and his cheeks blanched. 
Reining in his horse he said, ‘‘Why, you are afraid.” “I am,’”’ was the answer, ‘‘and if 
you were half as much afraid as I am you would relinquish the duty altogether.’’ With- 
out wasting a word the officer galloped back and complained bitterly that he had been 
sent in the company of a coward. “Off, sir, to your duty,’ was the Iron Duke’s 
reply, ‘or the coward will have done the business before you get there.” And Wel- 
lington was right. There was a physical timidity, perhaps the result of a highly 
wrought nervous organization, but there was a lofty regard for duty which bore the 
officer above his fears to triumph. Associate with Jesus and meditate upon His love; 
commune with Him, keep your heart pure in His sight, and there shall grow in your 
soul a moral courage so sublime and splendid that no trial or difficulty of life shall 
ever Overcome it. 

After all, everything that we have said is only saying in different ways, from 
different standpoints, that the secret of great and glorious life is in Jesus Christ. Our 
preparation, our fellowship, our reward, is all in Him. Paul’s ne comes back 
to us, “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ 
Jesus.” Wise and happy, then, are we when we can sing with Henry Lavely, 


“Enough for me to know “Enough for me to cast 

That Christ is God indeed; On Him my every care; 
Enough for me to feel Enough for me to wait, 

He shall supply my need. And all His crosses bear. 
“Enough for me to kneel “Enough for me to hear 

Close to His bleeding side; The tender Shepherd’s voice; 
Enough for me to seek Enough for me to trust, 

Him for my peace and guide. And in His love rejoice.” 


[This sermon was delivered on the occasion of Dr. Banks’ farewell to his congre- 
gation of over one thousand, whom he was leaving to accept a call to one of the two 
leading Methodist churches of New York City. At the conclusion he made this 
impressive statement: And this radiant personality is within the reach of every person 
in this audience. And I call you to witness this day that I have in the years past 
preached that to you which you could reach. I have not preached the impossible. 

Louis Albert Banks, D. D., was born at Corvallis, Ore., in 1855. Since his entrance 
to the Methodist ministry he has filled pulpits in Brooklyn, Boston, Cleveland and on 
the Pacific coast. He was Prohibition candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 
1893. He is the author of some thirty-five volumes of sermons, illustrations, etc.] 


(13) 


WHAT IS CHRIST TO MEr 


HENRY WARD BEECHER. 


“That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every 
good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.”"—Col. 1: 10. 
This is to be interpreted by such passages as that of the 27th verse: 


“To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery 
among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” 


One of the passages fitly interprets the other. We are to “walk worthy of the 
Lord unto all pleasing;” and Jesus Christ as formed in us, “the hope of glory,” inter- 
prets that God to us, and stands for Him. The command to grow in the knowledge 
of God requires only a few words; but the thing itself is the labor of ages; and, as in 
all sciences and in every school of philosophy, growth has been hindered by wrong 
methods, so that science began and went out almost, with Aristotle, because false 
methods were applied; and it waited for the days of Bacon and the modern school 
before any great advance was made. History was but clustering fables until the 
philosophic methods of history were developed. And, as the development of science 
in every department—for instance, physiology, the science of the mind, etc.—stumbled 
and blundered by wrong methods, coming continually short, and began to brighten 
and bear fruit sogsoon as right methods were found out and made use of; so the 
knowledge of God has waited through the ages for right methods. It has been pursued 
in various ways; and yet no other subject so important has received so little increment, 
compared with the time during which the world has existed and the human mind has 
been active, as this one matter—the knowledge of God. 


It is made the central and critical relation of Christ to every human soul. As we 
are to be saved by our faith in Jesus Christ, it becomes a matter of transcendent 
importance to each one of us to know Christ, to increase in our knowledge of Him and 
‘therefore to know how to increase in that knowledge. The fact is that very few 
persons now have any view or experience in regard to the Lord Jesus Christ as the 
interpreter of God’s nature, which answers at all either to the experience of the apos- 
tles, or to that which they aimed at in their preaching. 


The question, therefore, comes up with emphasis: Is Jesus Christ so presented 
to men that they may reap the best fruits of faith? Are the methods of presentation 
the wisest and the best? Are the modes of study which are employed by the great 
mass of Christian people the best and the wisest? It is to the consideration of this 
‘general subject that I shall devote this morning’s discourse. 


To His personal disciples the relation of Christ was one of intense admiration and 
love. With all the glow and enthusiasm which belongs to heroic friendship, they 
loved Jesus during His life. Not only that, but after the bewilderment of His cruci- 
fixion was over, and after His resurrection became an article of assured faith to them, 
they continued to have an intense personal love for Him. It was in each case the 
fidelity of a clansman to his chief. It was the enthusiasm of a man to some high and 

‘noble friend. 

The expectation, doubtless, of soon seeing Him again increased the intensity of 

this feeling—for all the early years of Christendom were passed in the expectation of 


14 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the immediate coming of Christ. It was the whole aim of the apostles to inspire in 
every man just this personal love and enthusiasm toward the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Does it exist? I do not ask whether men say “Lord, Lord,’ enough. I do not 
ask whether men say they are going to act thus and so “for Christ’s sake;” that they 
must “honor Christ;” that they must ‘glorify Jesus.” Of words there are enough. 
The question is far deeper than that. Is there an intense inward consciousness of the 
reality, the presence, the love, and the power of the Lord Jesus Christ which gives 
to many men such an impulse that they can say that their “life is hid with Christ in 
God?” 


Is there any such affection as this? Christ is the neighbor of a great many per- 
sons; does He abide in their households? Does He come into their midst? Does He 
dweil with them, and do they dwell with Him? An intense personal love for the Lord 
Jesus Christ being the germinant element, the beginning experience, so far as His 
relation with men was concerned, it was to this that the apostles directed all their 
exertion. Hence, the first argument was an argument to disabuse the Jewish mind of 
its prejudice and to show the serious-minded and moral men among the Jews that 
Jesus answered to the Old Testament description of the Messiah. Therefore, in the 
preaching and in the letters of the apostles, the views of Jesus Christ in relation to 
the prejudices and education of the Jews, in relation to the text of the Old Testa- 
ment, in relation to the Jewish sacrifices, and in relation to foregone history, figure 
largely; and much of modern theology has been similarly occupied in presenting views 
of Christ in relation to certain national Jewish prejudices or notions. 

Now, we have no such history as the Jews had; we have no such prejudices as 
they had; we have no such system as they had; we have no sacrifices; we have no 
altars; we have no priesthood; and to present Christ to us in the same way that He was 
presented to the Jews would be utterly void, unless by education you raised up an 
artificial] condition which should be equivalent to that of the Jewish system. To a cer- 
tain extent, this has been done. A most extraordinary thing is the artificial view into 
which men have been educated in order to make modern theology match with the 
relative arguments of the apostles on the subject of Christ’s relations to the old Jewish 
national system. 


If I wished to stimulate our people in New England to heroism, do you suppose 
I would talk to them of Marathon and Pultowa? I would talk to them of Bunker Hill 
and Lexington. If I were in Louisiana and wished to inspire patriotism in the people 
there, I would not talk to them of Waterloo or of Wagram; I would talk to them of 
the battle of New Orleans and of the defeat of Pakenham. It is not wise to attempt 
to inspire men with a heroic sense of the Lord Jesus Christ by preaching to them of an 
altar that for two thousand years has not existed; of a temple that was long ago in 
ruins; or of a ritual that they never saw, and that is a mere historical reminiscence. 
There must be an inspiration that shall open Christ up to our sympathy and reason as 
He was opened up to the sympathy and reason of the Jews. The genius of the phil- 
asophy of the apostles was peculiarly to develop the character of Christ in such a way 
as to meet the special national want which existed in their time; and the peculiar 
nature of our theology should be to meet the want which is the outgrowth of our 
national education. 

As the Christian religion went forth and began to take hold of and subdue the 
mind of the world, it fell naturally first into the Greek line of thought; and it was made 
a matter largely of mental philosophy. During the period of gestation of theology 
Christ’s nature, His relation to the Godhead, and His equality or non-equality with 
God—all these elements were profoundly discussed. Christ Jesus, when the Greek 
philosophy prevailed, was presented to the human mind in His dynastic relations, as 
a part of the reigning Deity—as belonging to the imperial God. More and more this 


What is Christ to Me?—Beecher. 15 


took place, so that men had a psychological problem put to them instead of a solving 
process. They had an analyzed, arranged, classified God; and he was to them what, 
to a lover of flowers, is a hortus siccus—an herbarium in which last summer’s plants 
have been skillfully culled and dried and arranged with reference to their genera and 
species and varieties. There they all are; none of them are growing; they are all dried; 
but they are scientific. The work of the Greek mind on the character of God was to 
analyze it, to classify its relations and parts, and to present it to the world as a problem 
in mental philosophy applied to theology. 

Then, coming down still further, theology became Romanized. The Romans, 
introduced the legal element into it. Instead of having a simple personal Christ such 
as the Jews had; or instead of having psychological problems such as the Greeks had, 
they had a scheme of theology which treated of the moral government of God, of the 
Law-Giver, of the Atoner, of the Spirit, and of the Church. At length the administration 

of religion and theology fell into priestly hands, and became a power more universal 

and more imperious than any that was ever developed on earth in any other direction. 
The imagination, the reason and the conscience were all put into the hands of the 
priest, who exercised authority over the soul, and personal liberty died out. Men 
believed in God as the Church believed in Him, and the Church believed in God as 
they were taught to believe by the imperial view. 


Thus, in the third estate, Christ, instead of being simply a person standing in 
personal relation to each man that sought Him, had become the center of a great 
system of moral government; and away down to the early days of this generation we? 
almost never heard of Christ as a person. During all my early life I heard of sinful- 
ness—though that-I did not need to hear abeut. for my own soul, and my own poor 
stumbling life taught me enough on that subject. I also heard of the atonement 
oi Christ. But almost never did I hear of Christ. He was something that I was to 
find after I had got through certain enigmas; after I had, as it were, been initiated, 
and had gone through certain stages, and become a sort of mason. Religion was 
regarded as a kind of masonry, in which one passed in at a certain gate, giving a cer- 
tain signal, and took certain successive steps, and rose through certain gradations, and 
at last came to a point where Christ was opened up to him. After the law had been 
shown to me, and I had gone through a process of repentance, and become regen- 
erated, there was to be a Christ for me; but Christ was never presented to me when J 
was young as a great influencing power operating in advance of all other things. 1 
had come to my majority before I had such a view of Christ. One of the most 
extraordinary epochs of my life was the hour (I never knew how or exactly why) in 
which I discovered, or in which it dawned upon me, that I had a personal Christ as 
something separable from problems of mental philosophy, from the Church, from any 
plan of salvation, and from any doctrine of atonement—a living, loving God, whom I 
had a right to approach on my own personality, and who had toward me such feelings 
as made me welcome to come to Him at any time. The opening of that conception 
to me was the beginning of the revolution of my life. I should not have been here 
today, nor through the last quarter of a century, but for that single view of Christ 
which rose upon me with healing in its beams. 


A personal Savior, to be studied and learned, must be presented in such a way 
that we can make Him personal to ourselves. This was done in part by that great 
revulsion called the Protestant Reformation. Salvation by faith was the glory of 
Luther. He unquestionably had in his own inward experience the right element; but 
it does not follow that the presentation of it was the one which was the best adapted 
to enlighten the whole world. Experience has shown that it was not. It was much 
covered with habits and prejudices and philosophies; for no man can throw off in a 
moment the opinions of the ages of which he is a child and product. Everywhere, 


16 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


when a philosophy is renounced, it still lives. Its detritus remains. Men find a thou- 
sand prejudices and habits clinging to them after they have abandoned the beliefs 
which begot these incumbrances. When a philosophy has been set aside the fruit stays 
by, for good if it was good, and for bad if it was bad. 

In the main, by the Protestant system, Christ was presented as a part of theology 
in a certain way; and although the element Jesus Christ, as a living God, was the 
glory and the secret power of that system, yet it was not brought out and freed from 
the accumulations and incrustations of the ages. 

We come, now, to the truth that a personal Savior must be studied from the 
standpoint of one’s own soul. It 1s not the relation of the Lord Jesus Christ to God; 
it is not His relation to the divine government; it is not His relation to a system of 
theology, but it is His relation to you, as representing the very God that you are to 
study. His personal relation to your wants—to your understanding, to your imagina- 
tion, to your moral sense, to your vearnings, to your strivings—this is the only point 
at which you can come to any knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ that shall be avail- 
able to you. 

This will bring us back to the apostolic experience. It will bring us back to the 
interior element of Christianity as distinguished from those external elements. which 
have been thrown around about it. It will bring us from Jewish misconceptions, from 
the Grecized view, from the Roman view, and from the heterogeneous modern view, 
to the Lord Jesus himself, the Saviour of the world, by faith in Whom each soul is to 
he redeemed. : 

First, we are to understand that He is to be our thought God—by which I do not 
mean that any man can define God. No man can take a pencil and mark the features 
of Jehovah, and say, *“Thus far is God, and no farther.” How poor a God must that 
be whom I can understand! He would be no larger than the measure of my thought— 
and that would be small, indeed. No man can limit and define God. After all intel- 
lectual statements have been made, aiter all definitions have been given, immensely 
more is left untouched than has been touched. But the functions of divine nature, the 
quality of that nature and its moral essence, one may suspect or know without com- 
prehending all of God. 

Bring me but a glass of water and I know what water is. I may not know, if I am 
untraveled, what are the springs in the mountain, what are cascades, what are the 
streams that thunder through deep gorges, what are broadening rivers, what are bays, 
or what is the ocean; and yet I may know what water is. A drop on my finger tells 
me its quality. From that I know that it is not wood, that it is not rock, that it is not 
air, that it is not anything but water. 

I am not able by searching to find out God unto perfection; and yet I know that, 
so far as I have found Him out, and so far as He is ever going to be found out, what- 
ever there is in nobility, whatever there is in goodness, whatever there is in sweetness, 
whatever in patience: whatever can be revealed by the cradle, by the crib, by the 
couch, by the table: whatever there is in household love and in other loves; whatever 
there is in heroism among men; whatever there is of good report; whatever has been 
achieved by imagination or by reason; whatever separates man from the brute beast, 
and lifts him above the clod—I know that all these elements belong to God, the 
eternal and universal Father. Although I may not be able to draw an encyclopediac 
circle and say, “All inside of that is God, and anything outside of it is not God;” yet 
I know that everything that tends upward, that everything which sets from a lower 
life to a higher, that everything which leads from the basilar to the coronal, that 
everything whose results are good, is an interpretation of God, who, though he may 
be found to be other than we suppose, will be found to be not less, but more glorious 
than we suspect. 


— 


What is Christ to Me?—Beecher. 17 


Every man, then, is to understand that Christ represents God, so far as the human 
mind is in a condition to understand and take Him in. I find no difficulty in saying 
that Christ is God, because I never undertake to weigh God with scales or to measure 
Him with compasses. There are men who have sat down and ciphered God out; they 
have figured up the matters of omnipotence, of omniscience and of omnipresence; 
they have marked the limits to which divine power can go; they can tell why God may 
do so and so, and why He may not do this, that or the other; and I can understand 
how they should raise objections to saying that Christ is God. To some extent we 
may comprehend to divine nature in certain points; but God is too large, not simply 
for the intelligence of individuals, but for the intelligence of the race itself, though 
it has been developed for many ages. If it should be developed through countless 
ages to come it would still be incapable of understanding God, so vast and voluminous 
is He; and yet I find no difficulty in saying, “Christ is God.” So far as the human 
mind is competent to understand the constituent elements of the divine nature they 
are in Jesps Christ, and He presents them to us. 

I draw out from my pocket a little miniature, and look upon it, and tears drop 
from my eyes. What is it? A piece of ivory. What is on it? A face that some 
artist has painted there. It is a radiant face. My history is connected with it. When 
I look upon it tides of feeling swell in me. Some one comes to me and says, “What is 
that?” I say, “It is my mother.” ‘Your mother! I should call it a piece of ivory 
with water colors on it.” To me it is my mother. When you came to scratch it and 
analyze it and scrutinize the elements of it, to be sure it is only a sign or dumb show, 
but it brings to me that which is no sign or dumb show. According to the law of my 
mind, through it I have brought back, interpreted, refreshed, revived, made potent in 
me, all the sense of what a loving mother was. 

So I take my conception of Christ as He is painted in dead letters on dead paper; 
and to me is interpreted the glory, the sweetness, the patience, the love, the joy- 
inspiring nature of God; and I do not hesitate to say, “Christ is my God,” just as I 
would not hesitate to say of that picture, “It is my mother.” 

“But,” says a man, “you do not mean that you really sucked at the breast of that 
picture?” No, I did not; but I will not allow anyone to drive me into any such min- 
ute analysis as that. 

Now, I hold that the Lord Jesus Christ, as represented in the New Testament, 
brings to my mind all the effluence of brightness and beauty which I am capable of 
understanding. I can take in no more. He is said to be the express image of God’s 
glory. He transcends infinitely my reach; for when I have gone to the extent of my 
capacity there is much that I cannot attain to. 

When, therefore, Christ is presented to me I will not put Him in the multiplica- 
tion table; I will not make Him a problem in mathematics; I will not stand and say, 
“How can three be one?” or “How can one be three?” I will interpret Christ by the 
imagination and the heart. Then He will bring to me a conception of God such as the 
heavens never, in all their glory, declared; such as the earth has never revealed, 
either in ancient or modern times. He reveals to us a God whose interest in man is 
inherent, and who through His mercy and goodness made sacrifices for it. God so 
loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to die for it. What is the only 
begotten Son of God? Who knows? Who cares to know? That His only begotten 
Son is precious to Him we may know, judging from the experience of an earthly 
father; and we cannot doubt that when he gave Christ to come into life, and humble 
Himself to man’s condition, and take upon Himself an ignominious death, He sacri- 
ficed that which was exceedingly dear to Him. And that act is a revelation of the 
feeling of God toward the human race. 

There had sat and thundered Jupiter, striking the imagination of men; there had 


18 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


been the Grecian deities, good and bad, reaching through the great mythological realm 
of the fancy; there had been the grotesque idols of the heathen; these things had 
given to the world a thousand strange phantasies and vagrant notions; but nothing 
had given men a true conception of God until Christ came, declaring that God so 
loved the world that He gave the best thing He had to save it. 


Now, measure what the meaning of that truth is. Away, ye Furies! Away, ye 
Fates! Away, ignoble conceptions of Greece, of Rome, and of outlying barbarous 
nations! Heaven is now made radiant by the Son of God, teaching us that at the 
center of power, of wisdom and of government, sits the all-paternal love, and that it 
is the initial of God. It is the Alpha and the Omega; and the literature and lore of 
divinity must be interpreted according to its genius. God so loved the world, before 
it loved Him, knowing its condition, that He gave His only Son to die for it. This 
is the interpretation of the everlasting sacrifice of the divine nature in the way of loy- 
ing. Jesus Christ epitomizes, represents, interprets God to us as the central fountain, 
source and supply of transcendent benevolence and love in the universe. This intense 
interest and love in God works to the development of every soul toward Him. It is 
not divine indifference. It is not divine good nature. It is not divine passivity. It 
is a parent’s desire for a child’s development from evil toward goodness, toward pur- 
ity, toward sweetness, toward godliness. God is one who is laborious and self-sacri- 
ficing, seeking the race, not because they are so good, but to make them good, stimu- 
lating them, and desiring above all things else that they shall be fashioned away froin 
the animal toward His sonship. That is the drift and direction of the divine govern- 
ment. 

It is said that to preach God’s love effeminates the mind. It is said that it makes 
men careless and indifferent. It is said, ‘If God is a great central love, why, then, it 
does not make much difference how men live.” Ah! the truth as it is set forth in 
the Bible is, that God loves in such a way as to urge men forward to that which is 
high and ennobling. Through love he chastens and pierces by way of stirring men 
up. By joy and by sorrow, by pleasure and by pain, by all means, God seeks to make 
the objects of His love worthy of Himself.’ He that loves only to degrade is infernal. 
He that loves so that the object of his love withers under his influence loves as fire 
loves, consuming to ashes that which he loves. No one has true love who does not 
know that it is the inspiration of nobility; that it is a power which is carrying its 
object upward, being willing to suffer for the sake of lifting it higher and higher. That 
is the test of man’s love, because God has given it to us as the test of His own love. 

Every man, then, is to seek Jesus Christ personally. The way of salvation is the 
way of heart-faith in Christ. He represents God, and God represents love, and love 
represents development from sinfulness toward righteousness. And every man is to 
seek this Christ as interpreting God to us for his own sake. The perception of Christ’s 
relations to one’s own salvation is a thousand times more important than a percep- 
tion of His relation to the Old Testament, or to the Godhead, or to theology, or to the 
history of the church. It is ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory” that the apostle was 
to preach. Your own want—the want of your character and of your whole nature— 
that is to be the starting point in every investigation in this direction. “What is Christ 
to me?” is to be the question. 

When for ten days the Java had sailed without an observation, and when, at last, 
there came an opportunity to take one, did the captain take it for the sake of naviga- 
tion at large? No; he took it to find out first of all where the good ship was on her 
voyage. Not that navigation was of no account, not that astronomy was of no 
account; but that observation was taken for the particular ship on that particular 
voyage. 

I do not undertake to say that there is nothing else to be thought of in the world 


What is Christ to Me?—Beecher. 19 


but one’s own spiritual condition; but I do say that the prime consideration with 
every man is, ‘What is Christ to my soul?” How does your soul need Christ? How 
does He interpret Himself as being the outlet of every want in your nature? These are 
the all-important inquiries which concern you. 


No man can have another man’s Christ—if you will not misunderstand my words 
and pervert my meaning. As a physician is who stands over you in sickness, so is 
Christ Jesus. What to your thought a teacker is who labors with you according to 
your ignorance, that is the Lord Jesus Christ. 

When, during the famine in Ireland, the benevolent people of this country sent 
provisions to the thousands who were starving there, a government ship—a man-of- 
war—was appointed to take it over; and never was there an armament that slew 
prejudices and animosities as did the cargo which was discharged out of the sides of 
that old frigate. But when the vessel arrives in Ireland, we will suppose that one set 
of the inhabitants go down to the shore where she lies at anchor, and say, “This thing 
is to be looked at in the light of naval architecture.” Another set go down, and say, 
“A government vessel! What is the relation of government to the wants of people 
who are suffering from hunger? What business has a government to send provision 
in a warship?” They are disposed to discuss the question in the light of civil polity. 
Another set go down and say, “Wheat and potatoes; what is the excellence of wheat 
compared with that of potatoes, chemically considered?” The suffering men stand 
on the shore and cry, “Our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters are dying 
for the want of food—unload! unload! unload!’ But those who are standing by inter- 

_ pose and say, “You do not believe in chemistry; you do not believe in civil govern- 
ment; you do not believe in architecture!” I preach Christ as every man’s Savior; 
as his strength, as his bread, as his water; as his life, as his joy, as his hope. I say 
everything is trash as compared with that; and men exclaim, ‘‘Loose theology! He 
does not care for the church, nor for ordinances, nor for the Trinity, nor for the 
atonement, nor for a plan of salvation!” 

When men are starving it is not the time to talk of ships, of navigation, or of 
what government may or may not do; it is the time to talk of wheat and meat. Corn 
and beef are better than politics under such circumstances. 

Now, when men are under heavy burdens that they do not know how to bear, is 
there a burden-bearer anywhere? When men are unillumined, is there any light in 
this world? When men are in trouble, and cannot see their way out of it, and they say, 
in despair, ‘The day of my birth be cursed, and the day of my death be blessed!” is 
there any hope that shines forth and makes the darkness of the future bright as a 
morning star in the horizon? Is there anything in the Lord Jesus Christ that you 
need? Is there anything for you, who are sorrowing for your companion that has 
been smitten down; for you, whose affection has been disappointed; for you, who are 
heartsick from hope deferred; for you, whose affairs are all in a tangle; for you, whose 
prosperity is like pasture ground which the plow has turned upside down to prepare 
for new and unknown harvests? Is there anything in Him for me—for me, that am 
poor; for me, that am desolate; for me, that am stripped and peeled of all that makes 
life desirable; for me, that am smitten and cast down; for me, that am struggling to 
perform a task that I do not understand; for me, who am aiming at that which I can- 
not reach; for me, whose days are well-nigh spent; for me, a little child; for me, a boy: 
at school; for me, an apprentice; for me, a pauper; for me, that am to be hanged? 
That is the soul’s cry through life. 

What does it matter to me that the Jews had a system, that the Greeks had a 
system, or that the Romans had a system? Let their systems go to the dust. What do 
I care for such things when I am rolling in pain that I cannot endure? Then, if there 
is anything in the universe which will relieve my suffering, I want it, 


20 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Have you ever had a fever? Have you ever tossed all night with hateful dreams, 
and waked in the morning parched and well-nigh perishing with thirst? Have you 
ever felt as though you would give the world for a drop of water? Go to a person 
who is in that condition, and read to him the ‘“‘Midsummer’s Night Dream,” or 
“Romeo and Juliet.””’ What does he care for them? ‘‘Oh, for a drop of water!” is his 
cry. Read to him Bacon’s Maxims. What does he care for Bacon’s Maxims? He 
cries, “Water!’’ Read to him the most exquisite literature the world has known. He 
will not listen. ‘“‘Give me water! Give me water!” he says. The whole sum of his 
being is concentrated in that one want, and it dominates. The way to give him other 
things is to supply first that overmastering want. 

When men are in their sins, and they wander, wayward, in the dark, longing for 
something—they know not what, Christ says, “I am the way; I am the light.” Art 
thou the way out of this tangle? Art thou my unclouded light which no storm can 
-dissipate or blow out? When’men are hungering, art thou, Jesus, the soul’s food? 
Is there something in God as interpreted by Christ that shall meet every want in the 
human soul? Yes, there is just that. 

Are you a little child? The glory of the incarnation is that Christ was a little 
child. There is no little child in whose path Jesus has not walked, or one that was 
exactly like it. He knows every child’s experience—his hopes and fears; his expec- 
tations and disappointments; his pleasures and pains; his joys and sorrows. It may 
not help Him that He knows your troubles; but it helps you to know that He knows 
them. 

Christ was in His early life subject to His parents, even after He was filled with 
divine efflatus, so that He disputed with the doctors in the temple; He went back 
home, and submitted Himself to the control of His father and mother. With con- 
scious power and glory, He put Himself under the direction of those who were in- 
ferior to Him, willingly and cheerfully. 

If you are toiling in an unrequited way in life, think how Christ labored. Old 
Galilee was mixed up with all manner of detritus. People from every nation under 
the Roman banner had flocked thither. A vast cosmopolitan population was gathered 
there. And there Christ was brought up as a Jew. He learned the trade which His 
father followed. He worked at the bench. When a young man, by laboring with His 
hands He scraped up a small competence with which to buy His daily bread. Every 
man that toils, then, has in Christ one that has been like Him. 

Are you turmoiled and driven hither and hither, not knowing where to lay your 
head? The Son of Man had not where to lay His head. The birds had nests; the 
foxes had holes; the very sea was allowed to rest at times; but Jesus almost never 
rested. By day and by night, and everywhere, He was a man of sorrow and of toil. 

Are you abiding at home? Are you happy and contented? There are no sweeter 
pictures in the Bible than those which portray the joys of Christ at the festivities 
which He attended, and in the thousand ways in which He made others happy. In 
creating so much happiness He could not but have been happy Himself. 

Christ stands for men in all their relations. He stands for them in their crimes. 
I do not know why it should be so, but it seems to me there is nothing else—not even 
the scene of the cross itself—that touches me so much as the incident which took 
place when He came back to Capernaum and was surrounded by rich men, and was 
invited to go to a feast in a nobleman’s house. As He entered, a crowd, among whom 
were publicans and harlots, pressed in after Him, and actually sat down at the table 
with Him, unbidden, and ate with Him. Those who were looking on stood, and 
pointed, and said, ‘See, He eateth with publicans and sinners!” Eating with another is 
a sign of hospitality and friendship and fidelity. 

Christ’s conduct towards these poor creatures awoke a ray of hope in their most 


What is Christ to Me?—Beccher. at 


desperate depravity. It is this light which dawns in the midnight of the human soul 
that touches me. That which affects me is the voice that goes far down to the depths 
below, where hope usually goes, and says to the child of sin and sorrow, “There is 
salvation for you.” God does not cast away even the most depraved. The man who 
lies right by the lion’s head; the man who is half brother to the wolf; the man who 
slimes his way with the worm—even he has One who thinks kindly of him, and says 
to him, ‘‘Thee, too, have I called; for thee I have a refuge and a remedy.” 


There was but one single class that Christ had no mercy for, and that was the 
class who had no mercy for themselves. I mean those men whose intellects were 
cultivated, whose imaginations were cultivated, whose moral sense was cultivated, but 
who turned all their talents into selfishness. They were dissipated by the top of the 
brain. Christ did not disregard dissipation of the passions; He regarded it as evil in 
the extreme; but He regarded the dissipation of the top of the brain as worse still. 
He said to these proud proprietaries, those men who had outward and not inward 
morals, those men who knew so much, and used their knowledge to oppress others 
with; who were so scrupulous about themselves, but did not care for anybody else— 
He said to them, pointing at those miserable harlots and those extortionate publicans, 
“You never do such things as they are guilty of doing, oh, no; and yet they have a 
better chance of going to heaven than you have.” 

Even in the case of Zaccheus, when he said, “Lord, I am trying to do right,” 
Christ said, “Come down; I will go to thy house.” There was not a creature on earth 
who felt the need of a Savior to whom Christ did not at once open the door of His 
heart; and the beauty of it was that Christ’s heart stood open for all that were behind 
Him, or before Him, or on either side of Him. When Christ came from the eternal 
sphere He brought with Him as much of God as He could put into the conditions 
which He was to assume; as much as the human mind could comprehend; and 
though He laid aside that part of His being by reason of the circumstances in which 
He was to be placed, yet having entered upon our estate, when He spake, God spake; 
and when He showed mercy, it was an exhibition of God’s mercy. 

Now, have any of you, interested in the texts of Scripture, considered the sub- 
ject of your own want; of your own hope; of your own fear; of your own strivings; 
of your own unworthiness; of your own longings of soul; and have you said, “Lord, 
being what I am, what canst Thou do for me?” Have you said, ‘What canst Thou do 
for one who is slow and lethargic? What canst Thou do for one who is always 
behind his conception?” There is a Christ for just such a one as that. Have you 
said, “Lord, what canst Thou do for a fiery nature?” There is a divine power for 
those that are fiery. Have you said, “Lord, what canst Thou do for me that am proud 
and hard?” There is a God of love and mercy for such as you are. Have you ever 
said, ‘What canst Thou do for dispositions that are cold and selfish?” There’is a 
medicine for just such dispositions. Have you said, “Lord, what canst Thou do for 
those who are self-seeking?” There is provision for them, too. 

Oh, come, ye that are weary and heavy laden; oh, come, all ye that are sinful; 
oh, come, all ye who feel the burden of your sin to you, today, I preach a risen Christ. 
I preach today no plan and no atonement, although there is a plan and there is au 
atonement. But that which you want is a living Savior. What you want is a person 
that your mind can think about as you think about your father and mother, your 
brother and sister, your friend, your physician, your deliverer, your leader, your guide. 

Such is Christ. Such is He—ready to be over against every want. Being the 
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the Alphabet, He is the sum of the 
whole literature. He is the highest of all. He is broader than the earth. He is uni- 
versal in sympathy. He says to every man, “I am the Sun of Righteousness.” 

What art thou, O Sun? Thou that bringest back from captivity the winter day; 


22 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Thou that teachest all the dead things in the earth to find themselves again; Thou that 
dost drive the night away from the weary eyes of watchers; Thou that art the universai 
bounty-giver; Thou that dost travel endlessly carrying benefactions immeasureable, 
illimitable, beyond want and conception of want—Thou art the figure that represents 
God; and God is as much greater in bounty and mercy and power than Thou art as 
spirit is greater than matter. For the Sun is a spark. Around about the brow of Him 
that reigns are suns sparkling as jewels in a crown. What, then, is that God who is 
accustomed to speak of Himseli to us as the Sun of Righteousness that arises with 
healing in His beams? 


li there are those who have been accustomed to judge of their hope by their life 
alone; by whether they are living right or wrong; by whether they are living in a 
constant state of self-condemnation, and under a perpetual state of bondage to their 
conscience or not, then they only know one thing—that they are striving, with a 
greater or less degree of earnestness. And they mourn, saying, “I am so insincere! 
Iam so cold! I so often promise and do not fulfill!” Why that it is to be man. 


The doctor has come. He has taken charge of the patient that has been near to 
the border of death. The crisis is past; and he says to the child, “You are going to 
get well. I have got the upper hand of the disease.” The next day, in the afternoon, 
the physician comes again, and the poor child lifts up its hands and says, “Doctor, I 
know that I am not going to get well. Not long after you went away yesterday, a 
pain shot through me here;-and I am sure I am not going to get well. I cannot 
sleep; I am very, very tired; and I can see no hope.” ‘“Well,’”’ says the doctor, “if you 
did not have pain you would not be sick. To be sick is to have poor digestion; it is 
to have that kingdom of the devil, the liver, the scent of all manner of impish tricks; 
it is to have various signs of weakness and disease; but I have begun to get the 
ascendency, and you are going to recover. Today you may walk across the room.” 
The child walks feebly, and is faint, and goes back to the couch, and says, “It is just 
as I thought—I am not going to get well.” The very weakness clouds the sight of a 
beginning of strength, and makes hope hang heavily. The despondency is a portion 
of the disease. 


So it is with people in spiritual things; and, oh, if the continuity of your fight 
against evil, and your salvation, depended on your strength and fidelity, you might 
feel discouraged; but who is He that has called you? Who is He that has said, “I 
carry your lineaments on the palm of My hand, as one carries the portrait of a friend 
in his hand, and you are ever in My memory. A mother may forget her sucking 
child, but I will not forget thee.” The eternal God, who bears up the orbs of the 
universe, with whom is no weariness, no variableness, no shadow of turning, has 
bowed down His love, and has shown Himself to be God, in that He has had com- 
passion on you; and your hope lies in Him. It is because of the fidelity and grandeur 
of His continuing love, and not because you are virtuous and strong and skillful and 
wise, that you are to hope. 

Sleep, child, though the storm rages. But suppose the little passenger, tossed 
about by the waves on the good staunch ship, should go on deck to see if he could not 
do something? What can a child do with the Atlantic ocean? What cana child do 
with a scowling, howling northern storm? What can a child do with a ship that 
he does not understand? But there is the old sturdy captain, who is gruff to the 
passengers, and gruffer yet to nature. He weathers the storm, and brings the ship 
safe into harbor. Then, when all the smiles and glory of the continent seem to light 
up the great bay, how grateful everybody is! How willing the passengers all are to 
sign a letter congratulating the good captain! 

God is the Captain who directs the great world-ship; and though He will not 
always speak when you want Him to, yet He carries you, night and day, safely on 


What is Christ to M 2f—Beecher. 23 


_the stormy sea; and ere long He will bring you safely into port; and when He has 


brought you in, and you see Him as He is, no word can describe, no experience can 
interpret, nothing that has entered into the heart of man can conceive, the rapture 
and joy which we shall feel. When we are lifted up out of this lower realm, and we 
stand in the celestial sphere and behold our Deliverer, we shall be satisfied. O, word 
of wonder, to one wandering through the earth among men, and finding no home-- 
satisfied! We do not yet know what that means; but you and I and all of us are 
rushing fast towards the day when we shall stand, without spot or blemish, and shall 
see Him as He is, and shall be like Him. We shall be satisfied; and that will be 
heaven! 
Sermon by Henry Ward Beecher, Dec. 21, 1873. 


[This sermon is from the Plymouth Pulpit Notes, which is now published by the 
Pilgrim Press, Boston, Mass. It was selected as one of the ten best sermons of the 
nineteenth century by F. W. Gunsaulus, D. D. 

Henry Ward Beecher was born at Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813; died, at Brook- 
lyn, N. Y., March 8, 1887; Congregational clergyman, lecturer, reformer, and author, 
son of Lyman Beecher. He was graduated at Amherst College in 1834; studied the- 
ology at Lane Theological Seminary; and was pastor in Lawrenceburg, Indiana 
(1837-39), of a Presbyterian church in Indianapolis (1839-47), and of the Plymouth 
Congregational Church in Brooklyn (1847-87). He was one of the founders and 
early editors of the Independent, the founder of the Christian Union and its editor 
(1870-81) ; and_one of the most prominent of anti-slavery orators. He delivered Union 
addresses in Great Britain on subjects relating to the Civil War in the United States 
in 1863. He published Lectures to Young Men (1844), Star Papers (1855), Freedom 
and War (1863), Eyes and Ears (1864), Aids to Prayer (1864), Norwood (1867), 
Earlier Scenes, Lecture Room Talks, Yale Lectures on Preaching, A Summer Parish, 
Evolution and Preaching (1885), etc.] 


24 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


‘*T KNOW WHOM I HAVE BELIEVED.”’ 


ANE. BEER ENDS, DEE 


The man who wrote that sentence was not far from sixty-five years old when he 
penned it. He wrote it in a Roman dungeon, and under sentence of death. He was a 
Hebrew of the Hebrews, a blue-blooded Jew, and a Pharisee of the Pharisees. But 
in spite of its nationality his family had been honored with Roman citizenship; for 
he tells us himself that he was free born. He belonged to the aristocracy of Tarsus, 
no mean city. He had been sent to Jerusalem, to sit at the feet of Gamaliel, the most 
famous rabbi of his time. There is good ground for believing that as soon as his 
age permitted he was chosen to a seat in the Sanhedrim, the highest judicial court 
among the Jews; for he tells us himself that when Christians were put to death he 
cast his vote against them. When one reads the story of his journey to Damascus 
and of his sudden conversion, it seems as if this man must have been carried away by 
a whirlwind of emotional excitement, likely to be followed by an equally violent 
reaction. There is no evidence of any prolonged and painful mental conflict. The 
change came with the swiftness of a bolt of lightning. No wonder that Ananias was 
incredulous. No wonder that the Christians in Damascus were amazed. They could 
not believe their eyes and ears. No wonder that the Christians “in Jerusalem were 
afraid of. him, and did not believe that he had been converted. Barnabas alone gave 
him his hand and his heart; and Barnabas was not an apostle. James and John and 
Peter were in Jerusalem at the time, but not one of them, so far as we know, gave him 
their apostolic welcome. James he met three years afterward, upon his return from 
Arabia, where he spent two weeks with Peter in Jerusalem. For some time he labored 
in comparative obscurity, until a great revival broke out among the Grecians in the 
metropolis of Syria, when Barnabas hastened to Tarsus and brought Paul to Antioch. 


Such testimony cannot be gainsaid. The weight of thirty years’ experience is in it. 
Time is the fiercest sifter of systems and of men. And hence it is that in all the con- 
troversies which have raged about the origin and the divine authority of Christianity, 
Paul has had to be taken into account. His conversion and apostolic ministry, 
crowned with martyrdom, are as great a miracle as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
Neither can be resolved into myth or legend. Within a year of the crucifixion, Saul 
of Tarsus casts in his lot with the despised and hated Nazarene. He glories in the 
Cross. He knows only Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. The earliest literature of the 
New Testament, and the greater part of it, issued from his hands. The cry has been 
raised, “Back to Christ, and to the Gospels!” But the Gospels are of later date than 
the Epistles. Three of the Gospels are anonymous; the Pauline Epistles are not. The 
earliest Christian documents in circulation were the letters of Paul. You cannot 
get to Christ except through Paul. You cannot know the contents of the 
primitive Gospel unless you consult Paul, and. he proclaims it with so fierce an 
intensity of personal conviction that he pronounces an anathema upon an angel 
from heaven who should dare to preach any other message. The ardor which 
suffers no abatement through more than thirty years of challenge and of criticism. 
in the great cities of the Roman Empire, and which, in prospect of impending death, 
declares: “I know whom I have believed,” cannot be discredited. No wonder that 


I Know Whom I Have Believed—Behrends. 25 


every great Christian teacher, since that time, has been an ardent and admiring pupil 
in the school of Paul. 

But while Paul is conspicuous in the weight which more than thirty years of 
Christian experience give to his testimony, he does not stand alone. John, in his old 
age, writing the Gospel which bears his name, declares that sixty years had not shaken 
his faith. Polycarp of Smyrna, when summoned to swear by the fortune of Caesar 
and to reproach Christ, replied: ‘Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He 
never did me any injury. How, then, shall I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” 
And they gave him up to the fire. So the story rums, repeated through sixty gener- 
ations, down to our own day, and always with the same result—the weight of years 
is with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 


With this great array of witnesses I want this day to take my stand. Forty-three 
years have nearly passed since Jesus Christ laid His hand upon my heart and gave 
me His peace. Nearly thirty-five years have gone since I assumed the duties of the 
Christian ministry. Nearly half of that time has been spent in the service of this 
church, for this day completes seventeen years of my present pastorate. These years 
have been years of searching and of sifting. They have been years of mental stress 
and strain. But at the end of forty-three years of Christian discipleship, after thirty- 
five years of ministerial activity, after seventeen years of pastoral service among you, 
I can say with Paul, and I am glad that I can say it, “I know whom I have believed.” 


After all these years my faith in the Holy Scriptures, as the divinely authenticated 
and authoritative record of God’s redeeming action remains undisturbed. I have not 
been ignorant of, nor have I been indifferent to, the critical debate of these years. I 
have listened to all that friend and foes have had to say, and I have not been con- 
sciously or intentionally unfair. Cautious I have been, and for accurate knowledge 
cautien is imperative. I am free to say that the assumptions and the methods of the 
critics have not appealed to my confidence. There is so much that is fanciful and 
artificial in their procedure, that I cannot regard them as safe guides. And in all 
the sharpness of the debate, one fact has remained fixed, namely, that Jesus Christ 
and Paul used exactly the same Old Testament which I read. For them it was already 
old and authoritative. Tradition is not infallible. But a uniform tradition carries 
more weight in it than a literary guess. I cannot believe that Deuteronomy is a pious 
forgery of a late age; I cannot believe that the Pentateuch is a collection of legends 
and of manufactured history to give sanction to late priestly legislation; I cannot 
believe that the Psalter contains few, if any, of David’s hymns. I can understand 
that the critical and literary judgment of Christ’s day may not have been infallible in 
all details, but I cannot believe that He and His contemporaries were the victims of 
wholesale fraud and deception. Certainly, so far as the New Testament is concerned, 
the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the record is beyond successful impeachment. 
Zahn’s great work, just from the press, makes that clear. And that indirectly guaran- 
tees the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the older record. In both of them we 
may trace the story of what God has done for the salvation of fallen men. Let me 
hasten to add, that the Scriptures impress men most profoundly when I withdraw 
from all critical questions, when I let them speak to my waiting heart in their own 
way. There is in them a moral earnestness which makes me tremble. There is in 
them an emphasis of righteousness which fills me with awe. There is in them a 
passion for holiness which makes me cry out in agony. There is in them a fearless 
honesty and completeness of confession of moral weakness and wickedness which 
compels my assent. I am what they picture me. I ought to be what they summon 
me to be. And there is in them so clear a revelation of the saving grace of God in 
Jesus Christ that my heart responds to it with an unutterable eagerness. They shine 
in their own light. They speak in their own tongue. When I deal with them in this 


26 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


simple, straightforward way, I am sure that they are able to make me wise unto salva- 
tion, that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 


I can say, with even greater emphasis, that these years have wrought in me an 
ever deepening conviction of what constitutes the essence of the Gospel message. On 
many points, critical and theological, I am densely ignorant, where once I thought 
that I had some knowledge. On many other points I am not so sure of my ground 
as in earlier years. But I know what God has done to save man, and that God’s way 
is the only way in which men can be saved. This is a faithful saying and worthy otf 
all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. And what He 
did to save sinners is clearly stated when it is said that He died for our sins and rose 
again for our justification, that by His death sinners have been reconciled to God, 
of our sins. The incarnation and the atonement. These are the pillars of our Chris- 
tian confidence and hope. These are the eternal piers upon which rests the bridge 
of salvation. They have not given way and they cannot be shaken. With an ever 
increasing boldness of certainty do I confess that Jesus Christ is very God and very 
man, and that His atoning death is the procuring cause or ground of our forgiveness. 
I cannot make Paul say less than that. I cannot understand Christ to claim less than 
that. And what John says in his Gospel has no meaning for me unless these thing: 
be true. The New Testament collapses when these foundations are loosed. Dr. 
Henry B. Smith was right when he summed up the Gospel in this: “Incarnation in 
order to atonement.’’ The Gospel is interpreted by what Christ is and by what Christ 
has done. I cannot understand the dogmatism which tells me that man has been 
upon this planet two or three hundred thousand years, that there never was an Eden 
nor a Fall; and then adds that neither the Church fathers nor Paul nor Christ Himselt 
believed that “God came down and was incarnated and suffered and died” to work 
out ‘an atonement for lost humanity.” That was the one thing which they all believed 
and taught with the utmost clearness. We have a letter from Clement of Rome, writ- 
ten near the close of the first century, to the Church of Corinth, in which he writes: 
“Let us look steadfastly to the blood of Christ and see how precious that blood is 
to God, which, having been shed for our salvation, has set the grace of repentance 
before the whole world. On account of the love He bore us Jesus Christ our Lord 
gave His blood for us by the will of God, His flesh for our flesh, and His soul for our 
soul.” Inthe Epistle to Diognetus, written about the year 130, Christ is spoken of as 
the “holy and incomprehensible Word, the very Creator and Fashioner of all things, 
by whom He made the heavens, by whom He inclosed the sea, whom the moon obeys 
and whom the stars also obey, who was given as a ransom for us, the holy one for 
transgressors, the blameless one for the wicked, the righteous one for the unrighteous, 
the incorruptible one for the corruptible, the immortal one for them that are mortal. 
Oh, sweet exchange! Oh, unsearchable operations! Oh, benefits surpassing all 
expectations; that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous one, and 
that the righteousness of one should justify many transgressors.” Polycarp suffered 
martyrdom about the year 150. He speaks of Christ as the “Son of God, our everlast- 
ing High Priest, who for our sins suffered even unto death, to whom all things are 
subject, the judge of the living and the dead.’’ When the old man was being bound 
to the stake and before the torch was applied, he prayed, closing the prayer with these 
words: “I bless Thee, I glorify Thee, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus 
Christ, Thy beloved Son, with whom to Thee and the Holy Ghost be glory, now and 
to all coming ages.’ Ignatius of Antioch suffered martyrdom under Trajan, at Rome, 
about the year 107. From him we have seven genuine epistles. These letters contain 
such sentences as these: ‘There is one physician, who is possessed both of flesh and 
spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary 


I Know Whom I Have Belicved—Behrends. 27 


and of God—even Jesus Christ our God. For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived in 
the womb of Mary, of the seed of David, but by the Holy Ghost. He was with the 
Father before the beginning of time, and in the end was revealed; who died for us in 
order, by believing in His death, ye may escape from death.” The so-cafled Epistle 
of Barnabas belongs to the first century. In it Christ is declared to be “not the Son 
of man, but the Son of God, who was manifested and came into the flesh, who endured 
to give up His flesh to corruption that we might be sanctified through the remission 
of sins, which is effected by His blood of sprinkling.”’ Justin Martyr died in 165. He 
speaks of Christ as “the Word, who took shape and became man; who is the only 
proper Son who has been begotten of God, born of a virgin; being crucified and 
dead, He rose again, and having ascended into heaven, reigned. He became man for 
our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings He might also bring us healing. 
Christ, the Son of God, who was before the morning star and the mvon, submitted to 
become incarnate and be born of a virgin of the family of David, in order that by this 
dispensation the serpent and the angels like him may be destroyed. He existed as 
God before the ages, and submitted to be born, to be crucified and to die; after which 
He rose again and ascended into heaven. And as the blood of the Passover saved 
those who were-in Egypt, so also the blood of Christ will deliver from death those 
who have believed.”’ Irenzus of Lyons died in 202. From his voluminous writings I 
select a few representative sentences: ‘The only begotten Word, who is always 
present with the human race, united to and mingled with His own creation, accord- 
ing to the Father’s pleasure, and who became flesh, is Himself Jesus Christ, our 
Lord, who did also suffer for us, and rose again in our behalf, and who will come 
again in the glory of His Father to raise up all flesh and for the manifestation of salva- 
tion, and to apply the rule of just judgment to all who were made by Him. He is 
the only begotten of the Father, the Word of God who became incarnate when the 
fullness of time had come, at which the Son of God had to become the Son of man. 
For the creator of the world is truly the Word of God; and this is our Lord, who in 
the last time was made man, existing in this world, and who, in an invisible manner, 
contains all things created, and is inherent in the entire creation; and therefore He 
came to His own in a visible manner, and was made flesh, and hung upon the tree 
that He might sum up all things in Himself.” One fragment I venture to quote in 
full: “With regard to Christ, the law and the prophets and the evangelists have pro- 
claimed that He was born of a virgin, that He suffered upon a beam of wood, and that 
He appeared from the dead; that He also ascended to the heavens, and was glorified 
by the Father, and is the Eternal King; that He is the perfect intelligence, the Word 
of God, who was begotten before the light; that He was the founder of the universe, 
along with it (the light), and maker of man; that He is all in all, patriarch among 
patriarchs, law in the laws, chief priest among priests, ruler among kings, the prophet 
among prophets, the angel among angels, the man among men, Son in the Father, 
God in God, King to all eternity; the Shepherd of those who are saved and the Bride- 
groom of the Church; the chief also of the cherubim, the Prince of the angelic powers, 
God of God, Son of the Father, Jesus Christ.” What now, in the face of this testi- 
mony, becomes of the claim that the “belief that God came down and was incarnated 
in man and suffered and died to save men” first took shape in the Nicene Creed? 
' That creed dates from 325 a hundred and twenty-three years after the death of Irenzus, 
the latest Church father whom I have quoted. I might have summoned Origen and 
Tertullian, and Cyprian, the last of whom died in 258, nearly seventy years before the 
Council of Nice. But the voices to which I have asked you to listen proclaim, with 
one consent, that in Christ God was incarnate, suffered, died and rose again, for our 
salvation. That was the Gospel seventeen hundred, and eighteen hundred, years ago, 
in Syria, in Asia Minor, in Northern Africa, in Italy, in France. What these men 


28 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


preached is still preached. What these men believed is still believed. I will not spend 
time in proving that this is the ancient Gospel, fully expounded by Paul and deeply 
rooted in the sayings of Christ. What Paul taught Christ to be, you may learn from 
the first eleven verses of the second chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians. What Paul © 
believed concerning the death of Christ you may learn from the fifth chapter of the 
Epistle to the Romans. What Jesus Christ believed Himself to be, you may learn 
from the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John. What Jesus Christ regarded 
as the meaning of His life on earth you may learn from the first eighteen verses of 
the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, from the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke, 
and from the account of what Christ said when He instituted the holy supper. There 
never has been any other Gospel than this, that in Jesus Christ God was incarnate, 
for the eternal redemption of a lost humanity. 


These years have confirmed my faith in the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God, 
and in Jesus Christ as God Incarnate, dying for us sinners and for our salvation. And 
I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life, Comforter and Guide of 
Souls, revealing to men the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, the divine agent 
in conviction, regeneration and sanctification. The Holy Spirit is the executive oi 
the Godhead. He makes known and applies the finished work of Jesus Christ, just as 
Christ made actual in history-the eternal purpose of God. And this simply means 
that God Himself is making effective the means of grace which He has provided. 
By their faithful use we draw near to God. But the more blessed fact is, that in them 
God draws near to us. Through them we influence our children and neighbors to 
come to God, and through our use of them for that purpose God Himself is drawing 
our children and neighbors to Himself. There is this difference between the Scrip- 
tures of Christ on the one hand and the Holy Spirit on the other; there is no con- 
tinuous production of Holy Scriptures. The Bible is complete. Nor is there any- 
thing to be added to the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. Our redemption is com- 
plete in Him. But the work of the Holy Spirit in the minds and hearts of men is 
continuous. It cannot for a moment be suspended. He must touch the lips of the 
speaker, else His words will be as sounding brass. Holy Ghost preaching, as our 
Methodist friends call it, is the only preaching that tells. And He must touch the 
ears and the heart of the hearer, if the message is to provoke penitence and faith. 
Paul plants, Apollos waters; God gives the increase. That conviction masters me 
more and more. I survey the history of 1900 years, and I see great men inaugurating 
new epochs of religious life, conspicuous for their zeal, devotion and success—Augus- 
tine, Bernard, Luther, Wesley, Edwards, Finney, Moody. One feature is common 
to them all. They are anointed of the Holy Ghost. They are His messengers and 
agents. God is conspicuously in them and their human influence incarnates the divine 
energy. 


But, conspicuous as they are, they do not possess the monopoly of the Spirit’s 
indwelling. He dwells in all believers. He inspires all prayer. He provokes all 
praise. He directs and makes effective all service. Now and then a voice is needed 
to stir us all from our slumbers. But that voice is always intended to direct us to 
the ever present and ever active power of the Holy Ghost, in whom alone is our 
strength and hope. 


Such voices, too, are needed to call us away from the refinements of speculation, 
of which we are in as great danger as were the Nicene Christians and the centuries of 
scholasticism, to the simplicity of the Gospel, the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. An 
earnest soul like Moody makes short, sharp work with scholarly pretensions and 
perplexities. The tone is defiant, the manner is brusque, the scorn is withering. It 
seems the coronation of ignorance. But it is not. It is the seizure of the deeper, vital 
truth, bursting away from artificial and suffocating bandages. The letter still killeth, 


I Know Whom I Have Believed—Behrends. 29 


whether it be the letter of scholastic theology or the letter of minute criticism. In 
both directions you can make dissection end in death. The Spirit maketh alive, and 
the quickening spirit is what we want; the Spirit who makes the face of Christ so 
luminous that we see only Him, and all things in Him. It was a true note which 
Moody struck when he said that all the theology and religion he wanted was in 
Christ’s own words: “Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.’ In that simple and 
sweet message the Holy Ghost speaks and works; and the more closely we adhere 
to the simple majesty of the Gospel, the better will it be for us, and for all. -This doc- 
trine of the Holy Ghost, leading us into all truth, and by it convicting the world, has 
come to mean, for me, that Jesus Christ is the Gospel of salvation, and that whenever 
Christ is preached God is at work saving men. Our sole anxiety should be to make 
Christ known. That is our whole duty. We do not need to act as His advocates. 
The Holy Spirit will take care of that. And when we make Christ known we may 
rest in the assurance that the Holy Spirit is owning and enforcing our message. Men 
are not argued into religion. But Christ wins them. We are in danger of forgetting 
that. An iron logic leaves me hard and cold as steel. But when you tell me who 
Jesus is, and what He has done for you and for me, my heart dissolves in thankfulness 
and tears. In that message the Holy Spirit works. And that is always the message 
which monopolizes our speech, when the Holy Spirit has his way. We pray for the 
baptism of the Holy Spirit. It may be a selfish and ambitious prayer. Simon asked 
for that, and Peter denounced him. He wanted the gift for personal gain. And we 
may be as selfish as he. The gift is bestowed where mind and heart are captive to Jesus 
Christ. Let us continue to tell the story of His love, and never grow weary of it! 
For to be able to say with Paul, “I know whom I have believed,” though we be 
ignorant of all else, is better than to have all other knowledge and not be able to say 
this. For this is the faith that overcometh the world. 


[This sermon, which is reproduced from Christian Work, was preached (February 
25, 1900) by Dr. Behrends upon the completion of his seventeenth year in the pulpit 
of the Central Congregational Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., and the thirty-fourth year 
of his entire ministry. He was a prominent figure in the Ecumenical Missionary 
Conference, and shortly after his death was announced. 

A. J. F. Behrends was born in Holland in 1839, ordained to the ministry in 1865. 
He is author of several well-known works, The World for Christ, Socialism and 


. Christianity, etc.] 


30 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE DUTY OF FORGETFUERES 


REV. HUGH BLACK, A. M.,,OF EDINBURGH. 


“Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth.”’—Isaiah 54: 4. 


The miserable years of the exile had almost run out, with their terrible sense oi 
being forsaken by God, and the prophet here in announcing the joyful release tells 
them that the release is the sign of God's forgiveness. This prophecy, then, is a mes- 
sage of peace, the promise of redemption. The voice that came to the exile was a 
voice of hope and consolation. “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.” 
The good tidings was not only that the sore captivity of Israel would be turned, but 
that the turning would be that God remembered and forgave, and smiled on them 
again. Through all the darkness of exile the prophet was convinced that God’s love 
was still the same, still true and tender and gracious as in the early days. Israel was 
united to God in a bond so close that not even a temporary alienation would break 
it. A favorite figure of speech to describe that bond by the prophets was the figure 
of marriage. God was the husband of Israel, Israel was the bride of God; the nation’s 
sin was unfaithfulness, punished by separation, with its shame and sorrow. And this 
is the figure which is used here to tell the good tidings. Israel, says the prophet, will 
be taken back by her offended husband, and will become again the bride of him; the 
stain of divorce will be taken away, and the sin will be forgiven. The music of the 
marriage song is in the prophet’s heart as he predicts the glad time when the Lord 
of Hosts will again be Israel’s husband, having redeemed her with His great love. 

Babylon’s slave will become Jehovah's bride. The dark years of separation 
are forgotten as he sings the joyful epithalamium. It was just a hideous night- 
mare, that separation from God; Israel will awaken from her sin to learn how 
pure and true and strong is the love of her husband. “In a little wrath I hid 
My face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have 
mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.” There is nothing petty in this love, 
nothing to mar the perfect joy of the reconciliation. When God gives, He gives 
without reserve; when God forgives, He forgives utterly. There is no going back on 
the past; there is no recounting former injuries, no reproaches and recriminations; 
it is a full reconcilement, wiping out the past, blotting the handwriting against them. 
God’s forgiveness is so complete that it is forgetfulness, casting transgressions behind 
His back, remembering their sins no more. 

And, further, the prophet promises such a complete reconciliation that even they, 
he says, even they will forget the evil past; it will be swallowed up in joy and sweet 
content. The unfaithful bride that had been left in worse than widowhood will be 
received back with such a perfect love that the painful memory will be past. What a 
wonderfui figure of divine love this is! “Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, 
and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker 
is thine husband; the Lord of Hosts is His name.” Is that not too much for even 
God to promise? He might out of His abundant mercy promise to forgive so freely 
and fully, that the thought of their sin may be said to be cast away from Him, but 
how can He give to them self-forgetfulness and save them from self-reproach and kill 
the memory of their shame? Will it not come back to them in lonely hours, and 


The Duty of Forgetfulness—Black. 31 


sting with regrets? What waters of Lethe can bring complete oblivion? A word, a 
thought, a moment of brooding can bring back all the past again, with all its mem- 
ories, be they buried ever so deep. If remorse is bound up in remembrance, if recol- 
lection means sorrow, how can God save them from that? 


When vain desire at last, and vain regret, 
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, 
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain, 

And teach the unforgetful to forget? 


The explanation which the prophet gives only makes the promise more beautiful. 
Painful memory can only be obliterated by the full flood of joy. When happiness is 
complete there is no room for sad recollection; when there are no brooding moments 
the past is kept at bay; where there is no cause for remembrance there is no oppor- 
tunity for remorse. And the joy which the prophet thus announces has its source 
in the full consciousness of God's love. The recovered happiness is the fruit of the 
recovered love. Held in the clasp of that wonderful love, the burden of the past 
disappears, “thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the 
reproach of thy widowhood any more.” This is the prophet’s promise if they will 
but live in the light of God’s love. 

To many religious people the burden of the past about which we have spoken 
is “the heaviest burden of their lives.” 

No difficulties and trials of the present can match it for bitterness. They can see 
through faith some of the purpose of their heavenly Father in their present trials; 
they see something at least of the meaning of discipline, and they can at least school 
their hearts to learn, and, if not learn, to bear; they know that His grace is sufficient 
for them, and in the strength of that they find it easy to bear even a heavy load; and 
their faith is potent enough, not only to lighten the burdens of the present, but to 
lighten the burden of the future. They look forward calmly and hopefully to whatever 
the years may bring. Faith panoplies them against fate; they have no unworthy fears, 
no nervous anxiety about tomorrow. Even the valley of the shadow has little terror 
for them, believing as they do that they will be shepherded through that to the 
eternal fold. And yet they to whom the burden of the present and the burden of the 
future are so little are often weighted by a sore burden of the past; they are hag- 
ridden by shadows of dead days. Sometimes it is the very greatness and success and 
joy of the past which induce this constant recollection. To men of a certain tempera- 
ment there is a temptation to live too much in the past, and so to weaken life for the 
duties of today. In reviewing times that are gone memory has a hallowing, softening 
power, setting things in a soft and tender light for us. Thus it is an infirmity of old 
age, though it is not confined to old age, to glorify the past, and to think that the 
former times were better than these. It is often a harmless sentiment, but it carries 
with it a very real temptation which sometimes robs life of its full power. 


But the burden of the past about which I desire especially to speak, and which is 
more in keeping with the thought of our text, is not the recollection of some joy or 
success of the past, but of some failure, some sorrow, some loss, some sin, some 
shame. And to some who live ever under the shadow of this memory it would 
mean new life to them if the promise came to them with the meantng it had in the 
prophet’s lips, “Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remem- 
ber the reproach of thy widowhood any more.” Of course, there is a certain sense 
in which we cannot forget and are not meant to forget. Experience has its lessons 
to teach, and everything that happens to us leaves its mark, which it is folly for us 
to cover up till at least we understand the markings. There is a levity of mind, a 
childish thoughtlessness, which makes no account of what happens, and which finds 


es Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


it easy to forget, for there is not depth enough in the mind for events to leave any 
mark at all. It is not any such levity, a light-headed, shallow enjoyment in the pres- 
ent, which can be set forth here or in any part of the Bible as a religious ideal. To 
such the word is not Forget, but Remember. All religion begins with repentance, 
and the appeal to repentance is an appeal to memory. ‘‘Remember” is the ethical 
method of all ages; probing men to the roots of life, excavating into the past, laying 
bare the sins and faults of youth, revealing the secret things to a man’s own aston- 
ished soul, tearing his very heart with the despair of memory. Not by any easy facile 
optimism can true peace and true forgetfulness be achieved. The gate of repentance ~ 
stands at the entrance of the way of life, and repentance implies the very terror of 
remembrance; godly sorrow for the past, an enlightened conscience reviewing all that 
is gone, till the heart is sick and would give the world for a nepenthe that could bring 
oblivion. 


This burden of the past, which is the burden of moral existence, cannot be 
relieved by merely turning the back on what is uncomfortable, uncomfortable to think 
about, and concerning one’s self with the details of present life. But I speak to those 
whose captivity has been turned, who are home from the exile of the far country, at 
least to those who believe in the forgiveness of sin, who accept the love of the Father, 
and who therefore know that all things work together for good to them that love the 
Lord. And yet some of these still are oppressed by some shadow of the past, they are 
still weakened by the old sorrow or haunted by the old shame, and have never realized 
that the love of God carries with it this sweet promise, “Thou shalt forget.” It is 
quite true, as we have seen, that the past cannot be altogether undone, cannot be just 
as though it had never been. Many men who have emerged out of the struggle into 
peace, and who are not tormented any more by despairing remorse, have still, and 
will ever have as long as they live, the sad feeling that they are not what they might 
have been, that they are not the fine, true, perfect instrument for God’s purpose, which 
they would have been but for the evil of the past. Even when good now reigns in the 
heart, to many a man the past has ruined the instrument for good their lives might 
have been, and the sting has not quite been taken out of the past so long as they feel 
they must stand as mute as one with full strong music in his heart whose fingers stray 
upon a shattered lute. But the promise of our text is a tacit condemnation of the senti- 
mental brooding on the past, whatever that past may be, which weakens the present life, 
which keeps a man from gathering up the fragments of his life that remain, keeps him 
from doing his duty calmly and giving himself to whatsoever things are true and pure 
and lovely and of good report. In the Christian life St. Paul tells us that progress towards 
perfection is attained just by forgetfulness of the past. Forgetting the things which 
are behind and reaching forward to the things which are before, I press towards the 
goal, to the mark of the prize.” It does not mean, as we have seen, that we should 
forget everything even if we could, the blessed hallowed memories which are our 
best angels still, the events and passage of our pilgrimage. Some of the sorrow of the 
past we cannot rid ourselves of, and some of its joy clings about us like sweet per- 
fume. We are expected to remember the lessons of the past, lessons both of failure 
and success, of sorrow and joy, of moral defeat and moral victory. The principle is a 
simple one. All that would hinder us from running the Christian race, all that would 
impede, must be put behind us, as we bend to our present tasks and face our future. 
The past must not be a burden which clogs and weights us at every step. Indulgence 
in the retrospective, self-complaining, self-accusing temper, which is so common, 
must be seen by us to be a temptation. If we believe in the eternal love of God 
-we must not let any pale ghost of the past, spectral figures of the night, chill our 
blood and keep us from our pilgrimage. If even your sorrow weakens you, if 
it is not making you truer and stronger, you must forget it. Forget not, forget 


The Duty of Forgetfulness—Black. 33 


never, the love which was yours and which you have lost, but forget what of self 
is in your sorrow, what hinders you from present duty. You believe in God, then 
let the memory of your love rather inspire you. Look not backward for it, look 
forward, it is there; all true love is there, to be found again in God. 

If even your sin—the shame of your youth, the reproach of your past—if even 
your sin weakens you, if it is not bracing you to redeem the time, you must forget it. 
This is the Gospel, the goodness of the love of God, the Gospel of forgiveness full 
and free and without reserve. Christ frees us from the past, from that thraldom of 
the things that are behind. A man who had lived for many years the Christian life 
told me how there was a place in a street in Edinburgh which was associatéd with a 
sin. Every time in his early life he passed it, it brought back again the keen remorse 
and shame. It seemed to stain his life afresh whenever he saw the very place. But 
when he came to God and gave his heart and life to Christ, the first time he passed 
that place afterwards his soul, he told me, was filled by a great transport of joy that 


all that was done, that it was no longer part of his life, that God had forgiven and 


forgotten and cast it behind His back. And he entered, he told me, for a moment at 
least in foretaste, into the perfect joy of soul, and he forgot the shame of his youth 
and remembered the reproach no more. It is pagan teaching, common though it be, 
that sin is inexpiable and must hang on you to the end and shroud your life with 
its blackness. Do not fear that this Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sin will 
make sin easy; it is the only thing that can make sin impossible—the light that drives 
out the darkness, the love of God that fills the heart and leaves no room for evil, 
not even for evil memory. And God offers to man a reconciliation so complete, a 
communion so close, that nothing, neither things past, nor things present nor to 
come, can separate the believer from the love of God in Christ Jesus his Lord. Thou 
shalt forget, thou shalt forget, is part of His blessed promise. Surely we must forget 
what He has forgiven. We must forget all that hinders as we press towards the goal 


unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. 


[This sermon was selected because it is on a subject not often used for a 
sermon. Ten sermons are preached on remembering to one on forgetfulness. It was 
delivered in the City Temple, London, and is the verbatim report made for the 
British Weekly, from whence it is reproduced. 

Rey. Hugh Black, M. A., minister of St. George’s Free Church, Edinburgh 
(1900), was born at Rothesay in 1868, and was ordained in 1891. After five years’ 
ministry at Sherwood church, Paisley, was called to Edinburgh in 1896. He is best 
known, generally, as the author of Friendship.] 


34 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


CHARACTER BUILDING. 


JOHN A. BROADUS, D. D. 


Text: 2 Peter 1: 3, 8; more especially commencing at fifth: verse. 


I suppose we will all agree that the important work we have to do in this life, as 
regards ourselves, is the building of our characters. The business man knows how 
important it is for him to understand the character of his subordinates. A large part 
of the capital in trade of some men is this power to look into the hearts of others. 
How important is this gift to the politician. Have you never got a letter from a 
stranger proposing some great thing, and wished to look that man in the face for five 
minutes that you might be able to know him? MHave you looked the letter over and 
over again, in hopes that it might reveal something about the character of the sender? 
Have you never observed a skilled physician at the bedside of a very sick patient, 
endeavoring to draw the sick man into a conversation, talking on things unimportant, 
until you have wondered what it all meant? That physician, so quiet, seemingly 
indifferent in his talk, knew what he was about. He wished to understand the 
character of his patient. You, parents, all know how necessary it is that you find out 
the nature of your children. And pastors know how essential it is for them to look 
into the hearts of their parishioners. 

But important as it is to know the character of others, it is still more important 
that you understand your own. What a man is is more essential than his possessions or 
standing in the world. We have almost a morbid desire to know about our fellow- 
men. The press seeks to gratify this curiosity by its publication of what others are 
doing. We should look to ourselves—at the revelations our actions make of our own 
natures. Then, character is the only thing which we shall carry away from this fast 
fleeting life. Our body, touched by death, shall soon drop from us, then what we are 
will remain, will pass on. Z 


The Apostle, in the passage, is speaking of the building of character. He treats: 
1. Of some reasons for this work. 

2. Of lessons as to the way it is to be done. 

3. The motives for doing the work. 


First—The Reasons or Encouragements. 


1. The Apostle says that God’s divine power has given us all things which are 
necessary for the development cf life and piety. He does not say that we will, unaided, 
be able to build up ourselves. We all know, who have tried it, how hard this work is. 
All things we need God gives us. Can we think of anything God has failed to give— 
donate—to us when we were earnestly desiring to perfect ourselves? 


2. Then the Apostle adds, as another reason, that God has given us exceeding 
great promises for the future. ‘As the day is, so shall thy strength be.” This cheers 
us in our greatest trouble. We do not know, when in the severest trial, but what God 
is just then, in this, fulfilling some promise. A wise father does not give at once to 
his son a large capital. It might be ruinous to him. He gives him capital and 
responsibility and power as he is able to bear it. “Exceeding great and precious 


Character Building—Broadus. 35 


promises.” How these words give us courage in our battle of life! Have you not 
walked out with a child in the darkness, where, if alone, it would be terror-stricken? 
It tightly grasps your hand. It wishes to assure itself that it has hold of your hand. 
Thus assured, it is not afraid. Why? It has confidence. So we walk in dark places 
with God. We have a confidence that relieves us from fear. We need to be assured 
that God is with us. His promises, great, exceeding, and precious, give us this 
assurance. 


3. Then we have an inspiring ideal. He has given us a nature that partakes of 
the divine nature. It is true, we are animal. How the animal in us does assert itsel!! 
It is no wonder that many scientific men come to the conclusion that man is nothing 
but animal; that there is only a difference of degree. When you stop and think, shake 
yourselves, and listen to the voices in you, you will know there is a difference. Beasts 
reason a little, but exhibit no sign of a moral nature. They have no conscience. 
They know nothing whatever of right and wrong—of the word ought—a word a little 
child may utter, but which can shape the universe. Now, with this moral nature, 
which brings into kinship with the divine nature, we have an inspiring reason for 
building up a right nature in us. 


Second.—Next, the Apostle shows how we are to proceed in the work. 


1. To your faith add virtue. He starts with faith, the foundation of all. He 
assumes that you believe. Without believing, you would not be a Christian. But 
you are not to stop with belicving. He who stops there is no Christian. He mus: 
exercise his faith. And in the exercise of it virtue will be furnished. That is the 
meaning of the passage, “To your faith” supply “virtue;” that is, try to be good. The 
mother says to the child, “Try to be good.” The learned philosopher, the poet, with 
his mighty word-power, angels, God Himself, cannot say anything better than “try to 
be good.” 


2. To virtue supply knowledge. It is not enough that you simply desire to do 
what is right. You are to know what is right. You must get light. How often we 
say, had we known what we do now, we would not have done this or that. Even 
those who try the hardest to be good stumble in the darkness. Then there are very 
many who don’t more than half try. How these do go astray! Very important is it 
that the Apostle has said, supply knowledge to thy faith. In the whirl of our daily life, 
when everything is so confusing, we need light as well as a desire to be good. 


3. To your knowledge supply a good degree of self-control. That is the meaning 
of temperance. Passion and prejudice blind knowledge. We must control ourselves, 
or the light will be put out. Men often cheat themselves more than they do others. 
_ You say we are speaking about simple things, as if to children. True, these things are 
simple, but they are the very essence of right living. The greatest things, the things 
that lie right near the foundations of life, are simple. Do some of you think that to 
gain’self-control is easy? If you think so, you have never made a real effort at it. 
Do some of you think it hard? Remember God works with and in him who tries to 
be right and to do right. 


4. Then, in your exercise of self-control, have a good supply of patience. You 
_ have seen how sometimes those who have succeeded in gaining control of themselves 
are impatient with others who lack in this respect. Persons may obtain this mastery 
of themselves by heroic effort; or, it may be, they lack temptation. One has no 
_ patience with a drunkard—and it is hard enough to have patience with such an one. 
The impatient man is cold and narrow, and could hardly be a drunkard if he tried. 
Did you never hear a drunkard, ashamed of himself, say, “Well, I ain’t stingy and 
mean, as that fellow.” Says the Apostle, let your self-control supply patience. In 


36 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


this mad, rushing age of ours how needful is this injunction! There are some who 
think patience to be a weak thing. It is no sign of strength that through lack of 
self-control we give vent to temper and passion. A horse that runs away does not 
prove that it is strong, but that the driver is weak. 


5. Then, lest that we should think that this life is all, the Apostle continues, 
To patience supply piety. Piety controls all the other graces. Then, says he, See 
that in this piety is brotherly kindness; and in this brotherly kindness is charity— 
love. Where there is so much to bear, so much roughness, so much that is selfish 
and hard, that worries and irritates, as in this world, how essential that the Christian 
should have patience and brotherly kindness and love. 


Third.—Observe some additional motives to this work— 


1. Through these things we will make progress in the life of a Christian, “For 
if these things be in you and abound, they make you that you shall neither be barren 
nor unfruitful,”’ etc. If you are teaching a clerk his duties, you tell him to do this and 
that, and then he will understand how to do these other things. So with children; so 
with scholars at school. We learn duty through the discharge of duty. Christianity 
is a practical thing. If these truths be in you and abound, then will you know more 
of Christ and of His sustaining sympathy, and of the whole round of Christian truths. 
All this will be wrought through the atonement and intercession of Christ. So there 
will be no place for boasting. He who has developed the most, done the most, will 
be the most humble. " 


2. Another reason is given in verse 10: You will make “your calling and 
election sure; for if you do these things, you will never fall.’ I remember when a 
boy how those words, “calling and election,” often sent a shiver through my soul. 
How many stumble over them. What does the Apostle say? If you do these things, 
if you-will supply to your faith, virtue, etc., you will never fall, and so you will make 
your calling and election sure. There is a divine side to this doctrine of election; but 
with that we have nothing to do. If aman wishes to know whether he is a Christian, 
one of the elect, let him try to do these things. How we are constantly brought back 
to the practical! 


3. But a crowning motive is given in verse 11: “For so an entrance shall be 
ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior, 
Jesus Christ.” The word ministered may be rendered supplied. Is not this motive 
enough that we give all diligence to perfect our characters? 

Brethren, I have tried to preach you a practical sermon, one that would = me 
in my troubles, and I pray God it may help you. 


(37) 


7 


Pe on Owe OF THE: LORD. 


PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
Copyrighted E. P. Dutton & Co., 1881. By permission. 
“The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.”—Prov. 20: 27. 


The essential connection between the life of God and the life of man is the great 
truth of the world; and that is the truth which Solomon sets forth in the striking words 


_which I have chosen for my text this morning. The picture which the words suggest 


is very simple. An unlighted candle is standing in the darkness and some one comes 
to light it. A blazing bit of paper holds the fire at first, but it is vague and fitful. It 
flares and wavers and at any moment may go out. But the vague, uncertain, flaring 
blaze touches the candle, and the candle catches fire and at once you have a steady 
flame. It burns straight and clear and constant. The candle gives the fire a mani- 
festation-point for all the room which is illuminated by it. The candle is glorified by 
the fire and the fire is manifested by the candle. The two bear witness that they were 
made for one another by the way in which they fulfil each other’s life. That fulfilment 
comes by the way in which the inferior substance renders obedience to its superior. 
The candle obeys the fire. The docile wax acknowledges that the subtle flame is its 
master and it yields to his power; and so, like every faithful servant of a noble master, 
it at once gives its master’s nobility the chance to utter itself, and its own substance is 
clothed with a glory which is not its own. The disobedient granite, if you try to 
burn it, neither gives the fire a chance to show its brightness nor gathers any splendor 
to itself. It only glows with sullen resistance, and, as the heat increases, splits and 
breaks but will not yield. But the candle obeys, and so in it the scattered fire finds 
a point of permanent and clear expression. : 

Can we not see, with such a picture clear before us, what must be meant when 
it is said that one being is the candle of another being? There is in a community a 
man of large, rich character, whose influence runs everywhere.. You cannot talk with 
any man in all the city but you get, shown in that man’s own way, the thought, the 
feeling of that central man who teaches all the community to think, to feel. The very 
boys catch something of his power, and have something about them that would not be 
there if he were not living in the town. What better description could you give of 
all that, than to say that that man’s life was fire and that all these men’s lives were 
candles which he lighted, which gave to the rich, warm, live, fertile nature that was in 
him multiplied points of steady exhibition, so that he lighted the town through them? 
Or, not to look so widely, I pity you if in the circle of your own home there is not 
some warm and living nature which is your fire. Your cold, dark candle-nature, 
touched by that fire, burns bright and clear. Wherever you are carried, perhaps into 
regions where that nature cannot go, you carry its fire and set it up in some new 
place. Nay, the fire itself may have disappeared, the nature may have vanished from 
the earth and gone to heaven; and yet still your candle-life, which was lighted at it, 
keeps that fire still in the world, as the fire of the lightning lives in the tree that it 
has struck, long after the quick lightning itself has finished its short, hot life and died. 
So the man in the counting-room is the candle of the woman who stays at home, 
making her soft influence felt in the rough places of trade where her feet never go; 
and so a man who lives like an inspiration in the city for honesty and purity and 


38 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


charity may be only the candle in whose obedient life burns still the fire of another 
strong, true man who was his father, and who passed out of men’s sight a score of 
years ago. Men call the father dead, but he is no more dead than the torch has gone 
out which lighted the beacon that is blazing on the hill. 

And now, regarding all this lighting of life from life, two things are evident, the 
same two which appeared in the story of the candle and its flame: First, there must 
be a correspondency of nature between the two; and second, there must be a cordial 
obedience of the less to the greater. The nature which cannot feel the other nature’s 
warmth, even if it is held close to it; and the nature which refuses to be held where 
the other nature’s flame can reach it—both of these must go unlighted, no matter how 
hotly the fire of the higher life may burn. 


I think that we are ready now to turn to Solomon and read his words again and 
understand them. “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord,’ he says. God is the 
fire of this world, its vital principle, a warm pervading presence everywhere. What 
thing of outward nature can so picture to us the mysterious, the subtle, the quick, live, 
productive and destructive thought, which has always lifted men’s hearts and solemn- 
ized their faces when they have said the word God, as this strange thing—so heavenly, 
so unearthly, so terrible, and yet so gracious; so full of creativeness, and yet so quick 
and fierce to sweep whatever opposes it out of its path—this marvel, this beauty and 
glory and mystery of fire? Men have always felt the fitness of the figure; and the fire 
has always crowded, closest of all earthly elements, about the throne on which their 
conception of Deity was seated. And now of this fire the spirit of man is the candle. 
What does that mean? If, because man is of a nature which corresponds to the nature 
of God, and just so far as man is obedient to God, the life of God, which is spread 
throughout the universe, gathers itself into utterance; and men, aye, and all other 
beings, if such beings there are, capable of watching our humanity, see what God is, 
in gazing at the man whom He has kindled—then is not the figure plain? It is a 
wondrous thought, but it is clear enough. Here is the universe, full of the diffused 
fire of divinity. Men feel it in the air, as they feel an intense heat which has not 
broken into a blaze. That is the meaning of a great deal of the unexplained, myster- 
ious awfulness of life, of which they who are very much in its power are often only 
half aware. It is the sense of God, felt but unseen, like an atmosphere burdened with 
heat that does not burst out into fire. Now in the midst of this solemn, burdened 
world there stands up a man, pure, God-like, and perfectly obedient to God. In an 
instant it is as if the heated room had found some sensitive, inflammable point where it 
could kindle to a blaze. The vague oppressiveness of God's felt presence becomes 
clear and definite. The fitfulness of the impression of divinity is steadied into perma- 
nence. The mystery changes its character, and is a mystery of light and not of dark- 
ness. The fire of the Lord has found the candle of the Lord, and burns clear and 
steady, guiding and cheering instead of bewildering and frightening us, just so soon 
as a man who is obedient to God has begun to catch and manifest His nature. 

I hope that we shall find that this truth comes very close to our personal, separate 
lives; but, before we come to that, let me remind you first with what a central dignity 
it clothes the life of man in the great world. Certain philosophies, which belong to 
our time, would depreciate the importance of man in the world, and rob him of his 
centralness. Man’s instinct and man’s pride rebel against them, but he is puzzled by 
their speciousness. Is it indeed true, as it seems, that the world is made for man, and 
that from man, standing in the center, all things besides which the world contains get 
their true value and receive the verdict of their destiny? That was the old story that 
the Bible told. The book of Genesis with its Garden of Eden, and its obedient beasts 
waiting until the man should tell them what they should be called, struck firmly, at 
the beginning of the anthem of the world’s history, the great note of the centralness 


The Candle of the Lord—Brooks. 39 


of man. And the Garden of Eden, in this its first idea, repeats itself in every cabin 
of the western forests or the southern jungles, where a new Adam and a new Eve, a 
solitary settler and his wife, begin as it were the human history anew. There once 
again the note of Genesis is struck, and man asserts his centralness. The forest waits 
to catch the color of his life. The beasts hesitate in fear or anger till he shall tame 
them to his service or bid them depart. The earth under his feet holds its fertility at 
his command, and answers the summons of his grain or flower-seeds. The very sky 
over his head regards him, and what he does upon the earth is echoed in the changes 
of the climate and the haste or slowness of the storms. This is the great impression 
which all the simplest life of man is’ ever creating, and with which the philosophies, 
which would make little of the separateness and centralness of the life of man, must 
always have to fight. And this is the impression which is taken up and strengthened 
and made clear, and turned from a petty pride to a lofty dignity and a solemn respon- 
sibility, when there comes such a message as this of Solomon’s. He says that the 
true separateness and superiority and centralness of man is in that likeness of nature 
to God, and that capacity of spiritual obedience to Him, in virtue of which man may 
be the declaration and manifestation of God to all the world. So long as that truth 
stands, the centralness of man is sure. ‘The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” 


This is the truth of which I wish to speak to you today, the perpetual revelation 
of God by human life. You must ask yourself first, what God is. You must see how 
at the very bottom of His existence, as you conceive of it, lie these two thoughts— 
purpose and righteousness; how absolutely impossible it is to give God any person- 
ality except as the fulfilment of these two qualities—the intelligence that plans in love, 
and the righteousness that lives in duty. Then ask yourself how any knowledge of 
these qualities—of what they are, of what kind of being they will make in their perfect 
combination—could exist upon the earth if there were not a human nature here ir 
which they could be uttered, from which they could shine. Only a person can truly 
utter a person. Only from a character can a character be echoed. You might 
write it all over the skies that God was just, but it would not burn there. It 
would be, at best, only a bit of knowledge; never a Gospel; never something which 
it would gladden the hearts of men to know. That comes only when a human life, 
capable of a justice like God’s, made just by God, glows with His justice in the eyes 
of men, a candle of the Lord. 


I have just intimated one thing which we need to observe. Man’s utterance of 
God is purely an utterance of quality. It can tell me nothing of the quantities which 
make up His perfect life. That God is just, and what it is to be just—those things I 
can learn from the just lives of the just men about me; but how just God is, to whar 
unconceived perfection, to what unexpected developments of itself, that majestic 
quality of justice may extend in Him—of that I can form no judgment, that is worth 
anything, from the justice that I see in fellow-man. This seems to me to widen at once 
the range of the truth which I am stating. If it be the quality of God which man is 
capable of uttering, then it must be the quality of manhood that is necessary for the 
utterance; the quality of manhood, but not any specific quantity, not any assignable 
degree of human greatness. Whoever has in him the human quality, whoever really 
has the spirit of man, may be a candle of the Lord. A larger measure of that spirit 
may make a brighter light; but there must be a light wherever any human being, in 
virtue of his humanness, by obedience becomes luminous with God. There are the men 
of lofty spiritual genius, the leaders of our race. How they stand out through 
history! How all men feel as they pass into their presence that they are passing into 
the light of God! They are puzzled when they try to explain it. There is nothing 
more instructive and suggestive than the bewilderment which men feel when they try 
to tell what inspiration is—how men become inspired. The lines which they draw 


40 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


through the continual communication between God and man are always becoming 
unsteady and confused. But in general, he who comes into the presence of any power- 
ful nature, whose power is at all of a spiritual sort, feels sure that in some way he is 
coming into the presence of God. But it would be melancholy if only the great men 
could give us this conviction. The world would be darker than it is if every human 

spirit, so soon as it became obedient, did not become the Lord’s candle. A poor, 
_ meagre, starved, bruised life, if only it keeps the true human quality and does not 
become inhuman, and if it is obedient to God in its blind, dull, half-conscious way, 
becomes a light. Lives yet more dark than it is, become dimly aware of God through 
it. A mere child, in his pure humanity, and with his easy and instinctive turning of his 
life toward the God from whom he came—it is one of the commonplaces of your 
homes how often he may burn with some suggestion of divinity, and cast illumination 
upon problems and mysteries whose difficulty he himself has never felt. There are 
great lamps and little lamps burning everywhere. The world is bright with them. 
You shut your book in which you have been holding communion with one of the 
great souls of all time; and while you are standing in the light which he has shed 
about him, your child beside you says some simple, childlike thing, and a new thread 
of shining wisdom runs through the sweet and subtle thoughts that the great thinker 
gave you, as the light of a little taper sends its special needle of brightness through 
the pervasive splendor of a sunlit world. It is not strange. The fire is the same, 
whatever be the human lamp that gives it its expression. There is no life so humble 
that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed 
some of His light. There is no life so meagre that the greatest and wisest of us can 
afford to despise it. We cannot know at all at what sudden moment it may flash 
forth with the life of God. 


And in this truth of ours we have certainly the key to another mystery which 
sometimes puzzles us. What shall we make of some man rich in attainments and in 
generous desires, well educated, well behaved, who has trained himself to be a liglit 
and help to other men, and who, now that his training is complete, stands in the midst 
of his fellow-men completely dark and helpless? There are plenty of such men. We 
have all known them who have seen how men grow up. Their brethren stand around 
them expecting light from them, but no light comes. They themselves are full of 
amazement at themselves. They built themselves for influence, but no one feels them. 
They kindled themselves to give light, but no one shines a grateful answer back to 
them. Perhaps they blame their fellow-men, who are too dull to see their radiance. 
Perhaps they only wonder what is the matter, and wait, with a hope that never quite 
dies out into despair, for the long-delayed recognition and gratitude. At last they die, 
and the men who stand about their graves feel that the saddest thing about their 
death is that the world is not perceptibly the darker for their dying. What does it 
mean? If we let the truth of Solomon's figure play upon it, is not the meaning of the 
familiar failure simply this: These men are unlighted candles; they are the spirit of 
man, elaborated, cultivated, finished to its very finest, but lacking the last touch of 
God. As dark as a row of silver lamps, all chased and wrought with wondrous skill, 
all filled with rarest oil, but all untouched with fire—so dark in this world is a long 
row of cultivated men, set up along the corridors of some age of history, around the 
halls of some wise university, or in the pulpits of some stately church, to ‘whom there 
has come no fire of devotion, who stand in awe and reverence before no wisdom greater 
than their own, who are proud and selfish, who do not know what it is to obey. There 
is the explanation of your wonder when you cling close to some man whom the world 
calls bright, and find that you get no brightness from him. There is the explanation 
of yourself, O puzzled man, who never can make out why the world does not 
turn to you for help. The poor blind world cannot tell its need, nor analyze 


The Candle of the Lord—Brooks. 41 


its instinct, nor say why it seeks one man and leaves another; but through 
its blind eyes it knows when the fire of God has fallen on a human life. This 
is the meaning of the strange helpfulness which comes into a man when he truly is 
converted. It is not new truth that he knows, not knew wonders that he can do, but 
it is that the unlighted nature, in the utter obedience and self-surrender of that great 
hour, has been lifted up and lighted at the life of God, and now burns with Him. 


But it is not the worst thing in life for a man to be powerless or uninfluential. 
There are men enough for whom we would thank God if they did no harm, even if 
they did no good. I will not stop now to question whether there be such a thing 
possible as a life totally without influence of any kind, whether perhaps the men of 
whom I have been speaking do not also belong to the class of whom I want next to 
speak. However that may bé, I am sure you will recognize the fact that there is a 
multitude of men whose lamps are certainly not dark, and yet who certainly are not 
the candles of the Lord. A nature furnished richly to the very brim, a man of 
knowledge, of wit, of skill, of thought, with the very graces of the body perfect, and 
yet profane, impure, worldly, and scattering scepticism of all good and truth about 
him wherever he may go. He is no unlighted candle. He burns so bright and lurid 
that often the purer lights grow dim in the glare. But if it be possible for the human 
candle, when it is all made, when the subtle components of a human nature are ali 
mingled most carefully—if it be possible that then, instead of being lifted up to heaven 
and kindled at the pure being of Him who is eternally and absolutely good, it should 
be plunged down into hell and lighted at the yellow flames that burn out of the 
dreadful brimstone of the pit, then we can understand the sight of a man who is rich 
in every brilliant human quality, cursing the world with the continual exhibition of 
the devilish instead of the godlike in his life. When the power of pure love appears 
as a capacity of brutal lust; when the holy ingenuity with which man may search 
the character of a fellow-man, that he may help him to be his best, is turned into the 
unholy skill with which the bad man studies his victim, that he may know how te 
make his damnation most complete; when the almost divine magnetism, which is 
given to a man in order that he may instil his faith and hope into some soul that trusts 
him, is used to breathe doubt and despair through all the substance of a friend’s reliant 
soul; when wit, which ought to make truth beautiful, is deliberately prostituted to the 
service of a lie; when earnestness is degraded to be the slave of blasphemy, and the 
slave’s reputation is made the cloak for the master’s shame—in all these cases, and 
how frequent they are no man among us fails to know, you have simply the spirit 
of man kindled from below, not from above, the candle of the Lord burning with the 
fire of the devil. Still it will burn; still the native inflammableness of humanity will 
show itself. There will be light; there will be power; and men who want nothing but 
light and power will come to it. It is wonderful how mere power, or mere brightness, 
apart altogether from the work that the power is doing and the story that the bright- 
ness has to tell, will win the confidence and admiration of men from whom we might 
have expected better things. A bright book or a bright play will draw the crowd, 
although its meaning be detestable. A clever man will make a host of boys and men 
stand like charmed birds while he draws their principles quietly out of them and leaves 
them moral idiots. A whole great majority of a community will rush like foolish 
sheep to the polls and vote for a man who they know is false and brutal, because they 
have learned to say that he is strong. All this is true enough; and yet while men do 
these wild and foolish things, they know the difference between the illumination of a 
human life that is kindled from above and that which is kindled from below. They 
know the pure flames of one and the lurid glare of the other; and however they may 
praise and follow wit and power, as if to be witty or powerful were an end sufficient 


42 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


in itself, they will always keep their sacredest respect and confidence for that power 
or wit which is inspired by God, and works for righteousness. 


There is still another way, more subtle and sometimes more dangerous than these, 
in which the spirit of man may fail of its completest function as the candle of the 
Lord. The lamp may be lighted, and the fire at which it is lighted may be indeed 
the fire of God, and yet it may not be God alone who shines forth upon the world. I 
can picture to myself a candle which should in some way mingle a peculiarity of its 
own substance with the light it shed, giving to that light a hue which did not belong 
essentially to the fire at which it was lighted. Men who saw it would see not oniy 
the brightness of the fire. They would see also the tone and color of the lamp. And 
so it is, I think, with the way in which some good men manifest God. They have 
really kindled their lives at Him. It is His fire that burns in them. They are obedi- 
ent, and so He can make them His points of exhibition; but they cannot get rid of 
themselves. They are mixed with the God they show. They show themselves as well 
as Him. It is as when a mirror mingles its own shape with the reflections of the 
things that are reflected from it, and gives them a curious convexity because it is itself 
convex. This is the secret of all pious bigotry, of all holy prejudice. It is the candle, 
putting its own color into the flame which it has borrowed from the fire of God. The 
violent man makes God seem violent. The feeble man makes God seem feeble. The 
speculative man makes God look like a beautiful dream. The legal man makes God 
look like a hard and steel-like law. Here is where all the harsh and narrow part of 
sectarianism comes from. The narrow Presbyterian or Methodist, or Episcopalian or 
Quaker, full of devoutness, really afire with God—what is he but a candle which is 
always giving the flame its color, and which, by a disposition which many men haye 
to value the little parts of their life more than the greater, makes less of the essential 
brightness of the flame than of the special color which it lends to it? It seems, 
perhaps, as if, in saying this, I threw some slight or doubt upon that individual and 
separate element in every man’s religion, on which, upon the contrary, I place the very 
highest value. Every man who is a Christian must live a Christian life that is 
peculiarly his own. Every candle of the Lord must utter its peculiar light; only the 
true individuality of faith is marked by these characteristics which rescue it from 
bigotry; first, that it does not add something to the universal light, but only brings 
out most strongly some aspect of it which is specially its own; second, that it always 
cares more about the essential light than about the peculiar way in which it utters it; 
and third, that it easily blends with other special utterances of the universal light, in 
cordial sympathy and recognition of the value which it finds in them. Let these char- 
acteristics be in every man’s religion, and then the individuality of faith is an 
inestimable gain. Then the different candles of the Lord burn in long rows down His 
great palace-halls of the world; and all together, each complementing all the rest, they 
light the whole vast space with Him. 


I have tried to depict some of the difficulties which beset the full exhibition in the 
world of this great truth of Solomon, that “the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” 
Man is selfish and disobedient, and will not let his life burn at all. Man is wilful and 
passionate, and kindles his life with ungodly fire. Man is narrow and bigoted, and 
makes the light of God shine with his own special color. But all these are accidents. 
All these are distortions of the true idea of man. How can we know that? Here is 
the perfect man, Christ Jesus! What a man He is! How nobly, beautifully, perfectly 
human! What hands, what feet, what an eye, what a heart! How genuinely, unmis- 
takably a man! I bring the men of my experience or of my imagination into His 
presence, and behold, just when the worst or best of them falls short of Him, my 
human consciousness assures me that they fall short also of thebest idea of what it 
is to bea man. Here is the spirit of man in its perfection. And what then? Is it not 


The Candle of the Lord—Brooks. 43 


also the candle of the Lord? “I am come a light into the world,” said Jesus. “He 
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” “In Him was life and the life was the light 
of men.” So wrote the man of all men who knew Him best. And in Him where are 
the difficulties that we saw? where for one moment is the dimness of selfishness? O, 
it seems to me a wonderful thing that the supremely rich human nature of Jesus never 
for an instant turned with self-indulgence in on its own richness, or was beguiled by 
that besetting danger of all opulent souls, the wish, in the deepest sense, just to enjoy 
himself. How fascinating that desire is. How it keeps many and many of the most 
abundant natures in the world from usefulness. Just to handle over and over their 
hidden treasures, and with a spiritual miserliness to think their thought for the pure 
joy of thinking, and turn emotion into the soft atmosphere of a life of gardened selfish- 
ness. Not one instant of that in Jesus. All the vast richness of His human nature 
only meant for Him more power to utter God to man. 

And yet how pure His rich life was. How it abhorred to burn with any fire that 
was not divine. Such abundant life, and yet such.utter incapacity of any living but 
the holiest; such power of burning, and yet such utter incapacity of being kindled by any 
torch but God’s; such fulness with such purity was never seen besides upon the earth; 
and yet we know as we behold it that it is no monster; but only the type of what all 
men must be, although all men but Him as yet have failed to be it. 

And yet again there was intense personality in Him without a moment's bigotry. 
A special life, a life that stands distinct and self-defined among all the lives of men, and 
yet a life making the universal God all the more universally manifest by its distinct- 
ness, appealing to all lives just in proportion to the intensity of the individuality that 
filled His own. O, I think I need only bid you look at Him, and you must see what 
it is to which our feeble lights are struggling. There is the true spiritual man who is 
the candle of the Lord, the light that lighteth every man. 


It is distinctly a new idea of life, new to the standards of all our ordinary living, 
which this truth reveals. All our ordinary appeals to men to be up and doing, and 
make themselves shining lights, fade away and become insignificant before this higher 
message which comes in the words of Solomon and in the life of Jesus. What does 
the higher message say? “You are a part of God! You have no place or meaning 
in this.world but in relationship to Him. The full relationship can only be realized 
by obedience. Be obedient to Him, and you shall shine by His light, not your own. 
Then you cannot be dark, for He shall kindle you. Then you shall be as incapable 
of burning with false passion as you shall be quick to answer with the true. Then the 
devil may hold his torch to you, as he held it to the heart of Jesus in the desert, and 
your heart shall be as uninflammable as His. But as soon as God touches you, you 
shall burn with a light so truly your own, that you shall reverence your own mys- 
terious life, and yet so truly His that pride shall be impossible.” What a philosophy 
of human life is that. “O, to be nothing, nothing!” cries the mystic singer in his 
revival hymn, desiring to lose himself in God. “Nay not that; O to be something, 
something,” remonstrates the unmystical man, longing for work, ardent for personal 
life and character. Where is the meeting of the two? How shall self-surrender meet 
that high self-value without which no man can justify his living and honor himself in 
his humanity? Where can they meet but in this truth? Man must be something that 
he may be nothing. The something which he must be must consist in simple fitness 
to utter the divine life which is the only original power in the universe. And then 
man must be nothing that he may be something. He must submit himself in obedi- 
ence to God, that so God may use him, in some way in which his special nature only 
could be used, to illuminate and help the world. Tell me, do not the two cries meet 
in that one aspiration of the Christian man to find his life by losing it in God, to be 
himself by being not his own but Christ’s? 


44 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


In certain lands, for certain holy ceremonies, they prepare the candles with most 
anxious care. The very bees which distil the wax are sacred. They range in gardens 
planted with sweet flowers for their use alone. The wax is gathered by consecrated 
hands; and then the shaping of the candles is a holy task, performed in holy places, 
to the sound of hymns, and in the atmosphere of prayers. All this is done because 
the candles are to burn in the most lofty ceremonies on most sacred days. With what 
care must the man be made whose spirit is to be the candle of the Lord! It is his 
spirit which God is to kindle with Himself. Therefore the spirit must be the precious 
part of him. The body must be valued only for the protection and the education 
which the soul may gain by it. And the power by which his spirit shall become a 
candle in obedience. Therefore obedience must be the struggle and desire of his life; 
obedience, not hard and forced, but ready, loving, and spontaneous; the obedience ot 
the child to the father, of the candle to the flame; the doing of duty not merely that the 
duty may be done, but that the soul in doing it may become capable of receiving and 
uttering God; the bearing of pain not merely because the pain must be borne, but that 
the bearing of it may make the soul able to burn with the divine fire which found it in 
the furnace; the repentance of sin and acceptance of forgiveness, not merely that the 
soul may be saved from the fire of hell, but that it may be touched with the fire of 
heaven, and shine with the love of God, as the stars, forever. 

Above all the pictures of life—of what it means, of what may be made out of it— 
there stands out this picture of a human spirit burning with the light of the God whom 
it obeys, and showing Him to other men. O, my young friends, the old men will tell 
you that the lower pictures of life and its purposes turn out to be cheats and mistakes. 

- But this picture can never cheat the soul that tries to realize it. The man whose life 
is a struggle after such obedience, when at last his earthly task is over, may look 
forward from the borders of this life into the other, and humbly say, as his history of 
the life that is ended, and his prayer for the life that is to come, the words that Jesus 
said—‘‘I have glorified Thee on the earth; now, O Father, glorify Me with Thyseli 
forever.” 


[When this sermon was preached in Westminster Abbey, on the evening of 
Sunday, the Fourth of July, 1880, the following sentences were added:—] 


My Friends:—May I ask you to linger while I say to you a few words more, 
which shall not be unsuited to what I have been saying, and which shall, for just a 
moment, recall to you the sacredness which this day—the Fourth of July, the anni- 
versary of American Independence—has in the hearts of us Americans. If I dare— 
generously permitted as I am to stand this evening in the venerable Abbey, so full of 
our history, as well as yours—to claim that our festival shall have some sacredness for 
you as well as us, my claim rests on the simple truth that to.all true men the birthday 
of a nation must always be a sacred thing. For in our modern thought the nation 
is the making-place of men. Not by the traditions of its history, nor by the splendor 
of its corporate achievements, nor by the abstract excellencies of its constitution, but 
by its fitness to make men, to beget and educate human character, to contribute to the 
complete humanity, the “perfect man” that is to be—by this alone each nation must 
be judged today. The nations are the golden candlesticks which hold aloft the candles 
of the Lord. No candlestick can be so rich or venerable that men shall honor it if it 
holds no candle. “Show us your man,” land cries to land. 

In such days any nation, out of the midst of which God has led another nation 
as He led ours out of the midst of yours, must surely watch with anxiety and prayer 
the peculiar development of our common humanity of which that new nation is made 
the home, the special burning of the human candle in that new candlestick; and if she 
sees a hope and promise that God means to build in that new land some strong and 


The Candle of the Lord—Brooks. 45 


free and characteristic manhood which shall help the world to its completeness, the 
mother-land will surely lose the thought and memory of whatever anguish accom- 
panied the birth, for gratitude over the gain which humanity has made, “for joy that 
a man is born into the world.” 

It is not for me to glorify tonight the country which I love with all my heart and 
soul. I may not ask your praise for anything admirable which the United States has 
been or done. But on my country’s birthday I may do something far more solemn 
and more worthy of the hour. I may ask you for your prayer in her behalf. That on 
the manifold and wondrous chance which God is giving her—on her freedom (for she 
is free, since the old stain of slavery was washed out in blood); on her unconstrained 
religious life; on her passion for education, and her eager search for truth; on her 
jealous care for the poor man’s rights and opportunities; on her countless quiet homes 
where the future generations of her,men are growing; on her manufactures and her 
commerce; on her wide gates open to the east and to the west; on her strange meetings 
of the races out of which a new race is slowly being born; on her vast enterprise and 
her illimitable hopefulness—on all these materials and machineries of manhood, on 
all that the life of my country must mean for humanity, I may ask you to pray that the 
blessing of God the Father of man, and Christ the Son of man, may rest forever. 

Because you are Englishmen and I am an American; also because here, under this 
high and hospitable roof of God, we are all more than Englishmen and more than 
Americans; because we are all men, children of God, waiting for the full coming of 
our Father’s kingdom, I ask you for that prayer. 


[Phillips Brooks was born at Boston, December 13, 1835, and died there January 
23, 18938. He graduated at Harvard in 1855, and at the Episcopal Seminary at 
Alexandria, Va., in 1859, and was rector of Philadelphia churches for eleven years, and 
of Trinity church, Boston, in 1870. He was elected bishop of the Episcopal diocese 
of Massachusetts in 1891. He was the author of a number of books, his published 
sermons numbering four volumes. He was one of the leading pulpit orators of the 
country. 

This sermon is from the volume of sermons of Phillips Brooks, published 
by E. P. Dutton & Co., and is reproduced here by their permission, as well as that of 
William G, Brooks, executor.]} 


46 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. - 


THE STAR IN THE EASi 


CLAUDIUS BUCHANAN, LL. D. 


Preached Sunday, Feb. 26, 1809. 


“For we have seen His Star in the East, and are come to worship Him.’’—Matt. 2: 2. 


When, in the fulness of time, the Son of God came down from heaven to take 
our nature upon Him, many circumstances concurred to celebrate the event, and to 
render it an illustrious epoch in the history of the world. It pleased the Divine 
Wisdom that the manifestation of the deity should be distinguished by a suitable 
glory: and this was done by the ministry of angels, by the ministry of men, and by 
the ministry of nature itself. 

First, this was done by the ministry of angels; for an angel announced to the 
shepherds “the glad tidings of great joy which should be to all people;” and a multi- 
tude of the heavenly host sang ‘Glory to God in the highest, on earth, peace, good- 
will toward men.” 

Secondly, it was done by the ministry of men; for illustrious persons, divinely 
directed, came from a far country, to offer gifts and to do honor to the new-born King, 

Thirdly, it was done by the ministry of nature. Nature herself was commanded 
to bear witness to the presence of the God of nature. A star or divine light pointed 
out significantly from heaven the spot upon earth where the Savior was born. 

Thus, I say, it pleased the Divine Wisdom by an assemblage of heavenly testi- 
monies to glorify the incarnation of the Son of God. 

All these testimones were appropriate; but the journey of the eastern sages had 
in it a peculiar fitness. We can hardly imagine a more natural mode of honoring 
the event than this, that illustrious persons should proceed from a far country to 
visit the child which was born Savior of the world. They came, as it were, in the 
name of the Gentiles, to acknowledge the heavenly gift, and to bear their testimony 
against the nation which rejected it. They came as the representatives of the whole 
“.eathen world; not only of the heathens of the east, but also of the heathens of the 
west, from whom we are descended. In the name of the whole world, lying “in 
darkness, and in the shadow of death,” they came inquiring for that light which they 
had heard was to visit them in the fulness of time. ‘And the star which they saw 
in the east went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was. 
And when they were come into the house, they fell down and worshipped Him; and 
when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto Him gifts, gold, and 
frankincense, and myrrh;” and they departed into their own country. 

Do you ask how the star of Christ was understood in the east? Or why Provi- 
dence ordained that peculiar mode of intimation? 

Christ was foretold in old prophecy, under the name of the “star that should 
arise out of Jacob;” and the rise of the star of Jacob was notified to the world by 
the appearance of an actual star. 

We learn from authentic Roman history, that there prevailed “in the east,” a 
constant expectation of a prince, who should rise out of Judea and rule the world. 


The Star in the East—Buchanan. 47 


That such an expectation did exist, has been confirmed by the ancient writings of 
India. Whence, then, arose this extraordinary expectation, for it was found also in 
the Sybiline books of Rome? 

The Jewish expectation of the Messiah had pervaded the east long before the 
period of His appearance. The Jews are called by their own prophet the ‘expecting 
people,’ (as it may be translated, and as some of the Jews of the east translate it) 
the “people jooking for and expecting One to come.” Wherever, then, the ten 
tribes were carried throughout the east, they carried with them their expectation. 
And they carried also the prophecies on which their expectation was founded. Now 
one of the clearest of these prophesies runs in these words: “There shall come a 
star out of Jacob.” And as in the whole dispensation concerning the Messiah, there 
is a wonderful fitness between the words of prophecy and the person spoken of, so 
it pleased the Divine Wisdom that the rise of the star in Jacob should be announced 
to the world by the appearance of an actual star (for by what other means could the 
great event be more significantly communicated to the remote parts of the earth?), 
and this actual star, in itself a proper emblem of that ‘Light which was to lighten 
the Gentiles,’ conducted them to Him who was called in a figure the star of Jacob, 
and the “glory of His people Israel; and who hath said of Himself (Rev. 22:16), 
“I, Jesus, am the bright and morning star.” 

But, again, why was the east thus honored? Why was the east, and not the west, 
the scene of these transactions? The east was the scene of the first revelation of 
God. The fountains of inspiration were first opened in the east. And, after the flood, 
the first family of the new world was planted in the east; I mean the east, in relation 
to Judea. Besides, millions of the human race inhabit that portion of the globe. 
The chief population of the world is in these regions. And in the middle of them 
the star of Christ first appeared. And, led by it, the wise men passed through many 
nations, tongues and kindreds, before they arrived at Judea in the west; bearing 
tidings to the world that the Light was come, that the “Desire of all Nations” was 
come. Even to Jerusalem herself they brought the first intimation that her long- 
expected Messiah was come. 

Now, my brethren, as the east was honored in the first age, in thus pointing out 
the Messiah to the world, so now again, after a long interval of darkness, it is bearing 
witness to the truth of His religion; not indeed by the shining of a star, but by 
affording luminous evidence of the divine origin of the Christian faith. It affords 
evidence, not only of the general truth of its history, but of its peculiar doctrines; 
and not of its doctrines merely, but of the divine power of these doctrines in con- 
vincing the understandings and converting the hearts of men. And in this sense it 
is that ‘“‘we have seen His star in the east, and are come to worship Him.” 

And when these evidences shall have been laid before you, you will see that the 
time is come for diffusing His religion throughout the world: you will ‘‘offer gifts” 
in His name for the promotion of the work; and you will offer up prayers in its 
behalf, “that God would be pleased to make His ways known, His saving health unto 
all nations.” 


In this discourse we propose to lay before you, 

First. Evidences of the general truth of the Christian religion existing in the east. 

Secondly. Evidences of the divine power of that religion, exemplified in the east. 

I. The general truth of the Christian religion is illustrated by certain evidences 
in the east. Of these we shall mention the following: 

1. Ancient writings of India, containing particulars of the history of Christ. 


2. Certain doctrines of the east, shadowing forth the peculiar doctrines of Chris- 
tianity, and manifestly derived from a common origin, 


48 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


3. The state of the Jews in the east, confirming the truth of ancient prophecy. 
4. The state of the Syrian Christians in the east, subsisting for many ages a 
separate and distinct people in the midst of the heathen world. 


These subjects, however, we must notice very briefly. 


1. Hindoo history illustrates the history of the gospel. There have lately been 
discovered in India certain Sanscrit writings containing testimonies of Christ. They 
relate to a Prince who reigned about the period of the Christian era, and whose 
history, though mixed with fable, contains particulars which correspond in a surprising 
manner with the advent, birth, miracles, death and resurrection of our Savior. The 
event mentioned in the words of the text is exactly recorded, namely, that certain 
holy men, directed by a star, journeyed toward the west, where they beheld the — 
incarnation of the deity. 

These important records have been translated by a learned orientalist, and he has 
deposited the originals among the archives of the Asiatic Society. From these, and 
from other documents he has compiled a work entitled “The History of the Intro- 
duction of the Christian Religion into India; Its Progress and Decline;” and at the 
conclusion of the work he thus expresses himself: “I have written this account of 
Christianity in India with the impartiality of an historian; fully persuaded that our 
holy religion cannot receive any additional luster from it.” 


Thus far of the history of the gospel. 


2. We are now to notice certain doctrines of the east, shadowing forth the doc- 
trines of Christianity. 


The peculiar doctrines of the Christian religion are so strongly represented in 
certain systems of the east, that we cannot doubt the source whence they have been 
derived. We find in them the doctrines of the Trinity, of the incarnation of the 
Deity, of the atonement for sin, and of the influence of the Divine Spirit. 


First, the doctrine of the Trinity. The Hindoos believe in one God, Brahma, 
the creator of all things; and yet they represent him as subsisting in three persons, 
and they worship one or other of these persons throughout every part of India. 
And what proves that they hold this doctrine distinctly is, that their most ancient 
representation of the Deity is formed of one body and three faces. Nor are these 
representations confined to India alone, but they are to be found in other parts of 
the east. 

Whence, then, my brethren, has been derived this idea of a Triune God? If, as 
some allege, the doctrine of the Trinity among Christians be of recent origin, whence 
have the Hindoos derived it? When you shall have read all the volumes of philosophy 
on the subject you will not have obtained a satisfactory answer to this question. 


Secondly, the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Deity. The Hindoos believe 
that one of the persons in their Trinity (and that, too, the second person), was 
“manifested in the flesh.” Hence their fables of the incarnations of Vishnoo, of which 
you may have heard. And this doctrine of the incarnation of the Deity is found 
over almost the whole of Asia. : 

Whence, then, originated this idea that “God should become man, and take our 
nature upon Him?” The Hindoos do not consider that it: was an angel merely that 
became man, but God himself. The incarnation of God is a frequent theme of their 
discourse. We cannot doubt whence this peculiar tenet of religion has been derived. 
We must believe that all the fabulous incarnations of the eastern mythology are 
derived from the real incarnation of the Son of God or from the prophecies which 
went before it. 


Thirdly, the doctrine of Atonement for Sin, by the shedding of blood. To this 


The Star in the East—Buchanan. 49 


day in Hindostan, the people bring the goat or kid to the temple, and the priest sheds 
the blood of the innocent victim. Nor is this peculiar to Hindostan. Throughout 
the whole east the doctrine of a sacrifice for sin seems to exist in one form or other. 

How is it then, that some of you in this country say that there is no atonement? 
For ever since ‘Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain;’ ever 
since Noah, the father of the new world, “offered burnt offerings on the altar,”’ sacri- 
_fices have been offered up in almost every nation, as if for a constant memorial 


before the world that ‘without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” 


Fourthly, the doctrine of the influence of the Spirit of God. In the most ancient 
writings of the Hindoos, some of which have been lately published, it is asserted 
that the ‘divine Spirit, or light of knowledge” influences the minds of men. And the 
man who is the subject of such influence is called the “man twice born.” Many 
chapters are devoted to the duties, character and virtues of ‘the rman twice born.” 

If, then, in the very systems of the heathen world, this exalted idea should have 
a place, how much more might we expect to find it in the revelation of the true God! 

We could illustrate other doctrines by similar analogies, did time permit. If 
these analogies were merely partial or accidental they would be less important. But 
they are not casual, as every man who is versed in holy scriptures and in oriental 
mythology well knows. They are general and systematic. Was it ever alleged that 
the light of nature could teach such doctrines as these? They are all contrary to 
the light of nature. 

These, my brethren, are the doctrines which exist at’ this day in the midst-of the 
idolatry and moral corruption of the heathen world. Everywhere there appears to 
be a counterfeit of the true doctrine. The inhabitants have lost sight of the only true 
God, and they apply these doctrines to their false gods. For these doctrines are 
relics of the first faith of the earth. They are, as you see, the strong characters of 
God’s primary revelation to man, which neither the power of man nor time itself 
hath been able to destroy, but which have endured from age to age like the works of 
nature, the moon and stars, which God hath created incorruptible. 

3. Another circumstance, illustrating the truth of the Christian religion in the 
east, is the state of the Jews. The Jews are scattered over the whole face of the east 
and the fulfilment of the prophecies concerning them is far more evident in these 
regions than it is here among Christian nations. 

The last great punishment of the Jewish people was inflicted for their last great 
crime—their shedding the blood of the Son of God! And this instance of divine 
indignation has been exhibited to all nations, and all nations seem to have been 
employed by the ordinance of God in inflicting the punishment. 

By express prophecy the Jews were sentenced to become “the scorn and reproach 
of all people;” and “a proverb and by-word among all nations.” Now, that their 
stubborn unbelief should be a reproach to them among Christian nations here in 
the west, is not so strange; that they should be a proverb and a by-word among 
those who had heard the prophecy concerning them is not so remarkable. But to 
have seen them (as I have seen them) insulted and persecuted by the ignorant nations 
in the east; in the very words of the prophecy, “trodden down of the heathen;” 
trodden down by a people who never heard the name of Christ, who never heard that 
the Jews had rejected Christ, and who, in fact, punished the Jews without knowing 
their crime; this, I say, hath appeared to me an awful completion of the divine 
sentence. 

4. Another monument of the Christian religion in the east is the state of the 
Syrian Christians, subsisting for many ages a separate and distinct people in the 
_ midst of the corruption and idolatry of the heathen world. They exist in the very 


50 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


midst of India like the bush of Moses, burning and not consumed; surrounded by 
the enemies of their faith and subject to their power and yet not destroyed. There« 
they exist, having the pure word of God in their hands and speaking in their churches 
that same language which our Savior Himself spake in the streets of Jerusalem. 


We may contemplate the history of this people, existing so long in that dark 
region, as a type of the inextinguishable light of Christ’s religion; and in this sens 
it may be truly said, ““We have seen His star in the east.” 


The probable design of the Divine Providence in preserving this people, appear: 
to be this: That they should be a seed of the church in Asia; that they should be 
special instrument for the conversion of the surrounding heathen when God's ap 
pointed time is come; a people prepared for His service, as fellow laborers with us 
a people, in short, in the midst of Asia to whom we can point as an evidence to the 
test, of the truth and antiquity of the Christian faith. 


And this shall suffice as to the testimonies of the general truth of Christianit; 
existing in the east. 


II. We proposed in the second branch of the discourse to lay before you some 
evidences of the divine power of the Christian religion exemplified in the east. 

To say that Christianity has been propagated in the east, as other religions hav 
been propagated, is to say nothing. It is little to say that thousands have adoptec 
the name, and that it pervades populous provinces. For three centuries past th 
Romish church has diffused the name of Christianity throughout the east; and thi 
success demonstrates how practicable it is to “propagate our religion,” (in the com 
mon sense of that expression) throughout all nations of the world. Providence: 
seems to have ordained this previous labor of the Romish church to facilitate th 
preaching of the true gospel at the appointed time; for Christianity is found, even ii 
its worst form, to possess a moral and civilizing efficiency. 

But it is in the east as it is in the west—all are not Christians who are callec 
Christians. “He is not a Christian who is one outwardly; neither is that baptisn 
which is outward in the flesh.” The fact was, the Romish church preached Chris 
tianity in the east without the Bible. 

Let us now inquire what has been the consequence of sending the Bible to th 
east. It is nearly one hundred yearsysince the Bible was sent to the Hindoos; but no 
by our country. This honor was given to the Protestant churches of Denmark am 
Germany. It was sent to a certain nation in the south of India, for there are many 
nations in Hindostan. What, then, was the effect of giving them the Bible? It wa: 
the same as that which followed the giving the Bible to us, while we lay in almos 
Hindoo darkness, buried in the ignorance and superstition of the church of Rome 
It gave light and knowledge; God blessed His own word to the conversion of th: 
heart, and men began to worship Him in sincerity and truth. 

That province in India which was blessed with the Bible hath since “seen a grea 
light.” During nearly the whole of the last century multitudes of Hindoos (bot 
heathens and Roman Catholics) became members of the Protestant church, one 
generation after another; and amongst them there has ever been found, according 
to the records of the mission, such a proportion of serious piety as you might expec 
to find when the gospel is preached with faithfulness and zeal. 

During the whole of the last century Providence favored them with a successiot 
of holy and learned men, educated at the universities of Germany, among whom wa: 
the venerable Swartz, called the Apostle of the East, and others not much inferio: 
to him—men whose names are scarcely known in this country, but who are a: 
famous among the Hindoos as Wickliffe and Luther are amongst us. The ministry} 
of these good men was blessed in many provinces in the south of India, and th 


The Star in the East—Buchanan. 51 


bounds of their churches are extending unto this day. The language of the country 
is called Tamul, and the first translation of the Bible in that language was made, as 
we said, about a hundred years ago. Like Wickliffe’s Bible with us, it became the 
father of many versions, and, after a succession of improved editions, it is now con- 
sidered by the Bramins themselves (like Luther's Bible in German) as the classical 
standard of the Tamul tongue. 

A jubilee has lately been celebrated in India in honor of the gospel. In the monti 
of July, 1806, a jubilee was observed by these Hindoo churches in commemoration of 
the arrival of the two first Protestant missionaries on the 9th of July, 1706. The year 
1806 being the hundredth year (or the second fiftieth) since the gospel first visited 
their land, was to them “the year of jubilee.” The happy occasion had been long 
anticipated and was marked with demonstrations of joy and gladness. The people, as 
we were informed, walked in procession to their churches, carrying palms in their 
hands and singing the 98th Psalm; and, after offering up praises and thanksgivings to 
the Most High, they heard a sermon suitable to the day. The sermon at the jubilee 
of Tritchinopoly was preached by their aged minister, the Rev. Mr. Pohle, from these 
words: “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations; baptising them in the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” 

These were the effects of sending the Bible to the east. Men were “brought to 
a knowledge of the truth;’’ and at the end of a hundred years the natives kept the 
jubilee of the Bible. 

Such, my brethren, was the light in the south of India. And now a light has 


. sprung up in the north, of which you have heard. Our own country hath begun, 


though late, to dispense ‘the Word of Life.” And although the time has been short, 
the success has been great. In the north, in the west, and in Ceylon, translations of 
the Scriptures are going on in almost all the languages of oriental India. 

Our own country hath at length assumed an interest in diffusing the gospel. 

“In the fulness of time,’ we trust, her different societies have come forth as with one 
consent, to begin the work of evangelizing the east. ‘In the fulness of time,” we 
trust, hath this country begun, by these instruments, to employ her great power and 
her enlightened zeal in extending the knowledge of the true God throughout the 
world. 
We ought not to regret that the work is carried on by Christians of different 
denominations; for if they teach the religion of the Bible, their labor will be blessed. 
We have no contentions in India like those in Britain between Protestants and 
different names. There they are all friends. The strife there is between light and 
darkness, between the true God and an idol. So liberal and catholic is the Christian 
in Asia (while he looks over the map of the world, and can scarcely find where the 
isle of Britain lies), that he considers even the term ‘Protestant’ as being in a 
certain degree exclusive or sectarian. “The religion of the Bible,” or “the religion 
of Christ,” is the name by which he would describe his creed. For when the idolater 
once abjures his own cast for the gospel, he considers the differences of Protestants 
(if he ever hear of them) as being very insignificant. Indeed he cannot well under- 
stand them. In the great revolution that takes place in his mind (if his conversion 
be real) he cannot contemplate these minute objects. We ought not, then, I say, 
to regret that different classes of Christians are employed in the work. For the case 
is an exact parallel of that recorded in the Gospel (Mark 9: 38), “And John answer- 
ing said, Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and he followeth not 
us; and we forbade him, because he followeth not us. And Jesus said, Forbid him 
not.” 

On my arrival from India, a few months ago, I learned that a controversy had 
engaged the attention of the public, for some time, on the question of sending missions 


52 : Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


to the east. In the future history of our country it will scarcely be believed, that in the 
present age an attempt should haye been made to prevent the diffusion of the blessed 
principles of the Christian religion. It will not be believed that an attempt should 
have been made to prove, by argument, that it was wrong to make known the revela- 
tion of the true God to our fellow men; or if, in some instances, it might be permitted 
(as in the case of remote nations) that we ought not to instruct that people who were 
affirmed to be the most superstitious, and most prejudiced; and who were our own 
subjects. We scarcely believe ourselves that, twenty years ago, an attempt was made 
to defend the traffic in slaves, and that books were written to show that it was humane 
in its character, just in its principle, and honorable to our nation. The discussion, 
therefore, that has taken place on the civilization of the east, has been of important 
use. Men in general were not informed. The scene of action was remote, and the 
subject was new in almost all its relations. Even to some of those persons who had 
been in India, the subject was new. Just as in this country, if you were to ask certain 
persons whether they had any acquaintance with the religious world, they would say 
they had never heard there was such a world; so some from India hazarded an opinion 
concerning the “inveterate prejudices” of certain tribes in the east, who scarcely 
knew the geography of the country where they lived; what their religion was, or 
whether they had any religion at all. They had seen no star in the east; they had 
heard of no jubilee for the Bible. Like the spies of Israel, who brought back an “evil 
report” from Canaan, they reported that India was no “land of promise” for the Gos- 
pel; that the land was barren, and that the men were Anakims. But the faithfui 
Swartz gave another testimony. He affirmed that it is “exceedingly good land;” and 
his ‘record is true.” He who was best qualified to give an opinion on the subject, 
who preached among the Hindoos for nearly fifty years, founded churches among 
them in different provinces, established schools for their children, disseminated reli- 
gious tracts in their own tongue, and intimately knew their language, manners, pre- 
judices and superstitions; he who restored the Christian character to respect, after it 
had fallen into contempt; who was-selected by the natives as an-arbiter of their dif- 
ferences with the English, and whom both Hindoos and English loved and feared 
in his life and honored in his death; this good man, I say, differed in opinion from 
some, who have lately ventured to give a judgment in this matter; he affirmed that it 
was England’s duty to make known the revelation of the true God to her Indian 
subjects. 


In the meantime, while men hold different opinions on the subject here, the great 
work goes on in the east. The Christians there will probably never hear of our dis- 
sensions; nor, if they should hear of them, would they be much interested about them. 
And on this point I judge it right to notice a very singular mistake, which appears to 
have existed on both sides of the question. It seems to have been understood that we 
have it in our power to prevent the progress of Christianity in India, if we wish to do 
so; if such a measure should be recommended by what is called ‘ta wise policy.” But 
we have no power to prevent the extension of the Christian religion in India. We 
have it in our power, indeed, greatly to promote it, but we have no power to destroy it. 
It would be as easy to extinguish Christianity in Great Britain as in India. There are 
thousands of Christians in India—hundreds of thousands of Christians. And while we 
are contending here, whether it be a proper thing to convert the Hindoos, they will 
go on extending the bounds of their churches, keeping their jubilees, and enjoying 
the blessings of the Gospel, regardless of our opinions or authority. 

The dispute in this country relative to the efficiency of preaching the faith of 
Christ to the heathen world, is not unlike the dispute of the Jewish doctors in the 
Gospel, concerning our Savior’s power “to forgive sins.” We read that our Lord 
had healed a woman, who was a sinner. And he said unto her, “Daughter, thy sins 


The Star in the East—Buchanan. 53 


are forgiven; thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” Then began the Pharisees to 
say within themselves, “Who is this that forgiveth sins also?” But she felt in herself 
that she was. healed, and, leaving the doctors to dispute whether “her faith could save 
her or not,” she departed in peace and joy. 
So, while we are disputing here, whether the faith of Christ can save the heathens, 
‘tthe Gospel hath gone forth “for the healing of the nations.” A congregation of 
Hindoos will assemble on the morning of the Sabbath, under the shade of a Banian 
tree, not one of whom, perhaps, ever heard of Great Britain by name. There the 
_ Holy Bible is opened; the word of Christ is preached with eloquence and zeal; the 
affections are excited; the voice of prayer and praise is lifted up; and He who hath 
promised His presence “‘when two or three are gathered together in His name, 1s 
there in the midst of them to bless them, according to His word.’’ These scenes [ 
myself have. witnessed; and it is in this sense in particular I can say, “We have seen 
His star in the east, and are come to worship Him.” 
f Thus far we have spoken of the success of the Gospel in Asia, by means of Euro- 
pean preachers. But we shall now exhibit to you evidence from another source, from 
% a new and unexpected quarter. We are now to declare what has been done, inde- 
_ pendently of our exertions, and in regions where we have no laborers and no access. 
_ And this I do to show you that whether we assist in the work or not, it is God's will 
i. that it should begin. You have hitherto been contemplating the light in India. We 


are now to announce to you that a light hath appeared in Arabia and dawned, as it 

were, on the Temple of Mecca itself. 
e- Two Mahometans of Arabia, persons of consideration in their own country, have 

been lately converted to the Christian faith. One of them has already suffered martyr- 
_ dom, and the other is now engaged in translating the Scriptures, and in concerting 
{ plans for the conversion of his countrymen. The name of the martyr was Abdallah; 
_ and the name of the other, who is now translating the Scriptures, is Sabat, or, as he 

y, is called since his Christian baptism, Nathaneal Sabai. Sabat resided in my house 
Ny some time before I left India, and I had from his own mouth the chief part of the 

account which I shall now give to you. Some particulars I had from others. His 
__ conversion took place after the martyrdom of Abdallah, “to whose death he was con- 
_ senting,” and he related the circumstances to me with many tears. 
Abdallah and Sabat were intimate friends, and being young men of family in 
Arabia, they agreed to travel together, and to visit foreign countries. They were both 
zealous Mahometans. Sabat ‘s the son of Ibrahim Sabat, a noble family of the line 
of Beni-Sabat, who trace their pedigree to Mahomet. The two friends left Arabia, 
_ after paying their adorations at the tomb of their prophet at Mecca, and travelled 
_ through Persia, and thence to Cabul. Abdallah was appointed to an office of state 
_ under Zemaun Shah, King of Cabul; and Sabat left him there, and proceeded on a 
tour through Tartary. 7 
While Abdallah remained at Cabul, he was converted to the Christian faith by the 
_ perusal of a Bible (as is supposed) belonging to a Christian from Armenis, then resid- 
ing at Cabul. In the Mahometan States, it is death for a man of rank to become a 
_ Christian. Abdallah endeavored for a time to conceal his conversion, but finding it no 
longer possible, he determined to flee to some of the Christian churches near the 
Caspian sea. F 
He accordingly left Cabul in disguise, and had gained the great city of Bochara, 
in Tartary, when he was met in the streets of that city by his friend Sabat, who im- 
_ mediately recognized him. Sabat had heard of his conversion and flight, and was 
filled with indignation at his condugt. Abdallah knew his danger, and threw himself 
at the feet of Sabat. He confessed that he was a Christian and implored him by the 
sacred tie of their former friendship to let him escape with his life. “But, sir,’”’ said 


54 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Sabat, when relating the story himself, “I had no pity. I caused my servants to seize 
him, and I delivered him up to Morad Shah, King of Bochara. He was sentenced to 
die, and a herald went through the city of Bochara announcing the time of his execu- 
tion. An immense multitude attended, and the chief men of the city. I also went and 
stood near to Abdallah. He was offered his life if he would abjure Christ, the execu- 
tioner standing by him with his sword in his hand. ‘No,’ said he (as if the proposi- 
tion were impossible to be complied with), ‘I cannot abjure Christ.’ Then one of his 
hands were cut off at the wrist. He stood firm, his arm hanging by his side with but 
little motion. A physician, by desire of the king, offered to heal the wound if he 
would recant. He made no answer, but.looked up steadfastly towards heaven, like 
Stephen, the first martyr, his eyes streaming with tears. He did not look with anger 
towards me. He looked at me, but it was benignly, and with the countenance of for- 
giveness. His other hand was then cut off. ‘But, sir,’ said Sabat, in imperfect Eng- 
lish, ‘he neyer changed, he never changed.’ And when he bowed his head to receive 
the blow of death, all Bochara seemed to say, ‘What new thing is this?’ ”’ 


Sabat had indulged the hope that Abdallah would have recanted when he was 
offered his life, but when he saw that his friend was dead, he resigned himself to grief 
and remorse. He travelled from place to place, seeking rest and finding none. At 
last he thought that he would visit India. He accordingly came to Madras about five 
years ago. Soon after his arrival he was appointed by the English government a 
Muiti, or expounder of Mahometan law; his great learning, and respectable station in 
his own country, rendering him eminently qualified for that office. And now the 
period of his own conversion drew near. While he was at Visagapatam, in the north- 
ern Cirears, exercising his professional duties, Providence brought in his way a New 
Testament in Arabic. He read it with deep thought, the Koran lying before him. He 
compared them together, and at length the truth of the Word of God fell on his mind, 
as he expressed it, like a flood of light. Soon afterwards he proceeded to Madras, a 
journey of 300 miles, to seek Christian baptism; and having made a public confession 
of his faith, he was baptized by the Rev. Dr. Kerr, in the English church at that place, 
by the name of Nathaneal, in the twenty-seventh year of his age. 

Being now desirous to devote his future life to the glory_of God, he resigned his 
secular employ, and came by invitation to Bengal, where he is now engaged in trans- 
lating the Scriptures into the Persian language. This work hath not hitherto been 
executed for want of a translator of sufficient ability. The Persian is an important 
language in the east, being the general language of western Asia, particularly among 
the higher classes, and is understood from Calcutta to Damascus. But the great work 
which occupies the attention of this noble Arabian is the promulgation of the Gospel 
among his countrymen; and from the present fluctuations of religious opinion in 
Arabia, he is sanguine in his hopes of success. His first work is entitled (Neama 
Besharatin lil Arabi), “Happy News for Arabia,’’ written in the Nabuttee, or common 
dialect of the country. It contains an eloquent and argumentative elucidation of the 
truth of the Gospel, with copious authorities admitted by the Mahometans themselves, 
and particularly by the Wahabians. And prefixed to it, is an account of the conversion 
of the author, and an appeal to the members of his well-known family in Arabia, for 
the truth of the facts. 

The following circumstance in the history of Sabat ought not to have been 
omitted. When his family in Arabia had heard that he had followed the example of 
Abdullah and become a Christian they dispatched his brother to India (a voyage of 
two months) to assassinate him. While Sabat was sitting in his house at Visagapatam 
his brother presented himself in the disguise of a faqueer, or beggar, having a dagger 
concealed under his mantle. He rushed on Sabat, and wounded him. But Sabat 
seized his arm, and servants came to his assistance. He then recognized his brother. 


Bt The Star in the East—Buchanan. 55 


q 


The as$assin would have become the victim of public justice, but Sabat interceded for 
“his brother, and sent him home in peace, with letters and presents to his mother’s 
house in Arabia. 
And these, my brethren, are the instances I wished to lay before you, of the 
divine power of the Christian religion recently exemplified in the east. The conver- 
‘sion of Abdallah and Sabat seem to have been as evidently produced by the Spirit of 
‘God, as any conversion in the primitive church. Other instances have occurred in 
Arabia of a similar kind, and on the very borders of Palestine itself. These are like 
“the solitary notices which, in other nations, have announced the approach of general 
‘illumination. John Huss, and Jerom of Prague, were not, perhaps, more talked of in 
“Europe than Abdallah and Sabat are at this day in Bucharia and Arabia. 


What conclusion, then, shall we draw from these facts? It is this: That the time 
for difiusing our religion in the east is come. We shall notice some other particulars 
which encourage us to think that the time is come. 

‘ 1. The minds of men seem everywhere to be impressed with the duty of making 
the attempt. Nearly fifteen years have elapsed since it began, and their ardor is not 
abated. On the contrary, they gather strength as they proceed; new instruments are 
found, and liberal contributions are made by the people. Indeed, the consciences of 
“men seem to bear witness that the work is of God. 
| The rapid success of this undertaking must appear almost incredible to those who 
are not acquainted with the fact. Translations of the Scriptures are carried on, nor 
only in the languages of India, Persia and Arabia, but in those also of Burmah and 
China. Mount Caucasus, in the interior of Asia, is another center of translation for 
the east, particularly for the numerous nations of the Tartar race. The Scriptures are 
"preparing for the Malayan isles, and for the isles of the Pacific sea. The great con- 
tinent of Africa has become the scene of different missions and translations. North 
and South America are sending forth the Scriptures. They are sent to the uttermost 
"parts of the earth. They have been sent to Greenland, Labrador and Australasia. We 
might almost say, “There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.” 
And this spirit, for the diffusion of the truth, is not confined to Britain. It is 
found among good men of every Christian nation. Perhaps on this day prayers are 
“offered up in behalf of the work, in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. We are 
| encouraged then to believe that the time is come, in the first place, by the consent of 
good men. When I say good men, I mean religious and devout men, whose minds are 
‘not entirely occupied with the politics and affairs of this world, but who are “looking 
for the consolation of Israel’—as it is expressed in these words, “Thy kingdom come.” 


2. Another circumstance indicating that the time is at hand, is the general con- 
templation of the prophecies. The prophecies of Scripture are at this time pondered 
as seriously in Asia as in Europe. Even the Jews in the east begin to study the 
“oracles of their prophet Isaiah. And what is more important, the prophesies begin to 
be published among heathen nations; and we may expect that every nation will soon 
be able to read the divine decree concerning itself. 


7 8. The Holy Scriptures are translating into various languages. When the Gospel 
was first to be preached to all nations it was necessary to give a diversity of tongues; 
a tongue for each nation; and this was done by the divine power. But in this second 

omulgation, as it were, of the Gospel, the work will probably be carried on by a 
diversity of translations, a diversity of Scriptures; a translation for each nation. Instead 
of the gift of tongues’ God by His Providence, is giving to mankind a gift of Scrip- 
tures. 

_ 4, Another circumstance, which seems to testify that this work is of God, is the 
| commotion in the bands of infidelity against it. ‘Herod is troubled, and all Jerusalem 


56 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


with him.” A spirit hath issued from the mouth of infidelity, which rageth against 
Him whose star appeared in the east, and would destroy the work in its infancy. It 
rageth not against the Romish church in the east, though that be Christian; nor 
against the Armenian church in the east, though that be Christian; nor against the 
Greek church in the east, though that be Christian; but it rageth against the religion 
of the New Testament, that vital religion which aims at the conversion of the hearts 
of men. 4 

Our Savior hath said, ‘The Gospel shall be published among all nations.” But 
these resist the Divine Word and say it cannot be published in all nations. Our Lord 
hath said, ‘‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.” But 
these allege that the Gospel cannot be preached to every creature, for that “the bond 
of superstition is too strong, or that the influence of Christianity is too weak.” 

These are unguarded words, and ought not to be heard in a Christian country. 
These are presumptuous words, arraigning the dispensation of the Most High. Suen 
words as these were once spoken by the philosophy of Greece and Rome, but the 
Gospel prevailed, and first erected its dominion among them. In process of time the 
barbarous nations of Europe yielded to its sway, of which we are evidences at this 
day. And the nations of Asia will yield to the same power, and the truth will prevail, 
and the Gospel shall be preached over the whole world. 


5. The last circumstance which we shall mention, as indicating that the period 
is come for diffusing the light of revelation, is the revolution of nations, and ‘“‘the 
signs of the times.” 

Men of serious minds, who are erudite in Holy Scripture, and in the history of the 
world, look forward to great events. They judge of the future from the past. They 
have seen great events; events which twenty years ago, would have appeared as 
incredible as the conversion of the whole world to Christianity. 

At no former period have the judgments of heaven been so evidently directed 
against the nations which are called Christian at this day. It is manifest that God 
hath a controversy with His people, whatever be the cause. The heathen world enjoys 
a comparative tranquility. But Christian nations are visited in quick succession by 
His awful judgments. What, then, is the cause of the judgments of God on His 
Christian people? - 

If we believe the declarations of God, in His Holy Word, we shall ascribe the 
judgment of Christian nations, at this day, to their rejecting so generally the testimony 
of Christ. That nation which first ‘“‘denied His name before men” was first given up 
to suffer terrible judgments itself, and is now permitted to become the instrument of 
inflicting judgments on others. And this is agreeable to the ordinary course of God’s 
just and retribute Providence. That kingdom which first seduced others by its 
infidelity is now become the instrument of their punishment. The same retributive 
Providence is ‘making inquisition for the blood of the saints.” The massacres, fires 
and anathemas of a former day filled the minds of men with dismay. We forget these 
scenes, but all things are present with God. And as a nation cannot be punished as 
a nation in the next world for its iniquity, it must be punished in this world; and its 
“sins will be visited to the third and fourth generation.” For a long time (as men 
count time) God kept silence; but the day of retribution is come at last, and the seats 
of the inquisition must be purged with blood. 

From the fury of these desolating judgments we have hitherto been preserved. 
“Righteousness exalteth a nation.”—Prov. 16:24, It would appear as if God would 
thus do honor to a church holding pure doctrine, and to a state united to that church 
which hath defended the true faith amidst the superstitions and corruptions which have 
so long reigned in the Christian world. Latterly, indeed, it should seem as if God had 
selected this nation as formerly His chosen people of Israel to preserve among men a 


. 


The Star in the East—Buchanan. 57 


knowledge of the true religion; for we have been called to stand up, as it were, 
“between the living and the dead,” in defence of Christian principles. And although 
it be true that we have fought rather for our country than for our religion, yet it 
is also true that religion is, in present circumstances, identified, in a certain degree, 
with the existence of our country. And we trust that it is in the purpose of Provi- 
dence, by saving the one to save the other also. 

Let this nation, then, weigh well what it is, in God’s moral administration of the 
world, which saves her at this period. Let her beware of infidelity, and of that moral 
taint which ever accompanies it. Is it true that any of our chief men begin to “laugh 
at vice,” like Voltaire. Let us recall to view the experience of France. We beheld 
infidelity gradually infecting the nation, even as poison passeth through the human 
frame, till the whole body of the great was saturated. Then was their iniquity full, 
and God’s judgment began. Now, though it be true that the faith of our church is 
pure, that ‘she holdeth the head,” that she is founded on the prophets, evangelists and 
apostles; though it be true, that there is in the midst of her a large body of righteous 
persons, men possessing sound learning, enlightened zeal and pure charity; men who 
are called by our Savior “the light of the world,” and ‘the salt of the earth,” yet it 
is equally certain that the greater part of her members are not of that description. It 
is certain that the spot of moral disease begins to be visible at a distance. And we 
know not but that the true state of the nation may be this, that there is just “salt” 
enough, to use the figure of the Gospel, to preserve the body from corruption. 

Let us then weigh well what it is which, in the present circumstances of the world, 
saves this nation. If it be the divine pleasure to save us, while other nations are 
destroyed, it cannot be on account of the greatness of our empire, or of our dominion 
by sea, or of our extended commerce. For why should the moral Governor of the 
world respect such circumstances as these? But if we are spared it will be, we believe, 
on account of our maintaining the pure religion of Christ as the religion of our land, 
and of our promoting the knowledge of that religion, and of the blessed principles 
which accompany it throughout the rest of the world. This may be a consideration 
worthy of divine regard. And this, though it be no pledge of our duration, is the 
chief assurance of our perpetuity. On this chiefly (viz., our being an instrument of 
good to the world) must depend our hope of surviving the shocks and convulsions 
which are now overwhelming the other nations of Europe. 

Let us now recapitulate the evidences, noticed in this discourse, which encourage 
us to believe that the time is come for disseminating the knowledge of Christianity in 
the heathen world. 

1. The facility with which Christianity is propagated generally in Asia, wherever 
the attempt has been made. 

2. The peculiar success that has attended our own endeavors to promote the 
Teligion of the Bible. 

3. The conversion of illustrious persons in Asia, by means of the Bible alone. 

4. The translation of the Bible into almost all the languages of Asia, promising 
as it were a second promulgation of Christianity to the east. 

5. The general contemplation of the prophecies in Europe and Asia. 

6. The general commotion among the bands of infidelity, who are hostile to the 
design both in Europe and Asia. 

7. The consent of good men, in all Christian nations, to promote the design. 

8. The preservation of our own country, to carry on the work, amidst the ruin 
or infidelity of other nations. 


Behold, then, my brethren, the great undertaking for the promotion of which you 


e : 


58 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


are now assembled. If it were in the power of this assembly to diffuse the blessings 
of religion over the whole world, would it not be done? Would not all nations: be 
blessed? You perceive that some take a lively interest in this subject, while others 
are less concerned. What is the reason of this difference? It is this: Every man who 
hath felt the influence of religion on his own heart will desire to extend the blessings 
to the rest of mankind; and no one who hath lived without a concern about religion 
will be solicitous to communicate to others a gift which he values not himself. At the 
same time, perhaps, he is not willing to be thought hostile to the work. But there is 
no neutrality here. ‘“‘He that is not with Christ” in maintaining His kingdom on 
earth “is against Him.” And so it appeareth to “God, who searcheth the heart.” 
Every one of us is now acting a part in regard to this matter, for which we must give 
an account hereafter. There is no one, however peculiar he may reckon his situation 
or circumstances, who is exempted from this responsibility. For this is the criterion 
of obedience in the sight of God, even our conduct in receiving or rejecting the “rec- 
ord which God hath given of His Son.” And no man “receiveth this record” in sin- 
cerity and truth, who will not desire to make it known to others. You have heard 
of the conversion of Mahometans and Hindoos. Yes, our Lord hath said, “Many 
shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down with Abraham and 
Isaac and Jacob, in the Kingdom of Heaven; but the children of the kingdom shall be 
cast out.” 

Begin, then, at this time, the solemn inquiry, not merely into the general truth 
of Christ’s religion, but into its divine and converting power. You observe that in 
this discourse I have distinguished between the name of Christianity and the thing. 
For it seems there are some who have departed from the ancient principles of our 
reformation, who admit the existence of the Spirit of God, but deny His influence; 
who agree not with the Apostle Paul that the “Gospel cometh to some in word only,” 
and to others in power, and in the Holy Ghost and in much assurance, and 
who seem to forget what our Savior hath said of the “broad road” and the 
“narrow way.” Begin then, the important inquiry; for “the time is short,’ and this 
question will soon be brought to issue before an assembled world. In the meantime 
I shall offer to you my testimony on this subject. 


The operation of the grace of God, in “renewing a right spirit within us” (Ps. 51) 
is a doctrine professed by the whole faithful Church of Christ militant here on earth. 
The great author of our religion hath Himself delivered the doctrine in the most 
solemn manner to the world. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a man be born 
again, he carnot see the kingdom of God.” Verily, verily, it is an undoubted truth, 
an unchangeable principle of the heavenly dispensation, that except a man be renewed 
in mind by the Spirit of God, he shall not have power even to see or behold the 
Kingdom of God. What though many in our day deny this doctrine? A whole nation 
denied a doctrine greater if possible than this. The very name and religion of Christ 
have been denied in our time. But if our Savior hath declared any one doctrine of the 
Gospel more clearly than another, it is this of a spiritual conversion; and the demon- 
stration of its truth is found in all lands where His Gospel is known. Christians, 
differing in almost everything else, agree in this. Differing in language, customs, 
color and in country; differing in forms of worship and church government, in exter- 
nal rights and internal order, they yet agree in the doctrine of a change of heart, 
through faith in Christ; for this hath been the grand characteristic of Christ’s religion 
among all nations, tongues and kindreds, where the Gospel hath been preached 
through all ages down to this day. This is, in fact, that which distinguishes the 
religion of God in Asia, from the religions of men. In every part of the earth where 
I myself have been this doctrine is proclaimed, as the hope of the sinner and the glory 
of the Savior. And again, in every place it is opposed, in a greater or less degree, by 


The Star in the East—Buchanan. 56 


the same evil passions of the human heart. In rude nations, the same arguments are 
brought against it, in substance, which are used here in a learned country. Among 
ignorant nations a term of reproach is attached to serious piety, even as it is here 
among a refined people; thereby proving what our Lord hath taught—that the supe- 
rior goodness inculcated by His Gospel would not be agreeable to all men; and that 
some “would revile and speak evil of His disciples, for righteousness’ sake’’—thereby 
proving what the Apostle Paul hath taught, that “the Cross of Christ is an offence” to 
the natural pride of the human heart; that “the carnal mind is enmity against God;” 
and that “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, because they 
are spiritually discerned.” 

I have thought it right, my brethren, to deliver to you my testimony at this time; 
to assure you that the Gospel which begins to enlighten the east, is not “another 
Gospel,” as the Apostle speaks, but the same as your own. There is one sun; there is 
‘one Gospel. “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and there is one judg- 
‘ment. May we be all prepared to give our answer on that day! 

_ My brethren, you are now invited to contribute some aid toward the extension of 
the religion of Christ. You are now called on to give your testimony to its truth. You 
are now, as it were, to present “your gifts’ before Him who was born Savior of the 

‘world; and to send back those “glad tidings” to the east, which the east once sent 
to you, namely, that the light is come, that “the desire of all nations is come.” Let 
everyone who prays with his lips, “Thy kingdom come,” prove to himself at this time 
his own sincerity, that he really desires in his heart that the Kingdom of Christ should 

‘come. Blessed is the man who accounts it not only a duty, but a privilege, to dispense 
“the word of life’ amongst his fellowmen. It is, indeed, a privilege, and so you will 

account it hereafter, when you shall behold all nations assembled before the judgment 

‘Seat of Christ. You will then reflect with joy that you are enabled, at this time, ‘to 
confess His name before men,” and to afford some aid for the “increase of His gov- 
ernment” and glory upon earth. And let everyone who lends this aid accompany it 
with prayer, that the act may be blessed to himself in awakening his mind more fully 
to the unutterable importance of the everlasting Gospel. 


| [Concerning this sermon, which is taken from the works of Rev. Claudius 
‘Buchanan, LL. D., published by Samuel Armstrong in 1812, D. L. Leonard says in 
‘Missionary Annals of the Nineteenth Century: “Just in nick of time Claudius 
Buchanan’s star in the east appeared from the press, and produced a surprising sen- 
sation. Missionary sermons were now preached in numbers and with unction hitherto 
unknown.” It may be considered an inspirer of missionary sermons. 

. Claudius Buchanan, a Scottish divine, vice-provost of the College of Fort William 
‘in Bengal, distinguished by his zeal for the propagation of the Gospel in India, was 
born near Glasgow in 1766; died in 1815. He wrote Christian Researches in Asia.] 


é 


: 
f" ‘ 


60 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS 


INADEQUATE TO. MEET THE WORLD'S) NEED OR) Dae 
SUPREMACY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 


REV. DAVID J. BURRELL, D. D. 


I am so profoundly impressed with the thought of the possibility of power in this 
great convention that I find it difficult to immediately approach my theme. Who will 
undertake to estimate the vast potencies that are in the clear eyes and the warm hearts 
of the young men and young women in this convention here? I am reminded of one 
of the Roman poets, who tells of a wounded soldier bleeding to death upon his couch, 
who heard afar off by the Alban hills the hurtling of great stones from the catapult, 
and the sound of clashing steel; and, though his eye was filming with death, he stag- 
gered from his couch and tottered on his staff along the way to the Alban hills, pray- 
ing only that the gods would spare him long enough to lend a hand in yon great battle 
for the golden eagle. Christian friends, there are great things before us. We are on the 
verge of mighty happenings. 


“God works in all things; all obey 

His first propulsion from the night; 
Wake thou and watch— 

The world is gray with morning light!” 


It is right that I should be asked to address you on the first night of this mar- 
‘velous assemblage, for my theme lies at the basis of all Christian endeavor and of all 
missionary enterprise. I am told that one-half of this audience will presently enter on 
foreign missionary work, and the other half on the kindred work of home evangeliza- 
tion. But what is the use? Why enlist as missionaries at all? If one religion is as 
good as another, you had better go to shoemaking or any other honest handicraft 
rather than to spend an earnest life in trying to displace influences that have power 
to save. Do you believe this: “‘There is none other name given under heaven among 
men whereby we must be saved but the name of the Lord Jesus Christ?” There is 
your only franchise for missionary service. If one-religion is as good as another you 
have no business here. But if the Gospel is spes unica, then in God’s name make 
all possible haste to tell the world of it. 

The constant factor, the one constant factor, in the problem of human life and 
experience and destiny is sin. There are variable quantities in the problem and all 
sorts of equations along the way, but the one constant factor is sin. “All have sinned 
and come short of the glory of God.” There is no difference; “all are concluded under 
sin.” The word “concluded,” there means shut up as in a dungeon; we are all im- 
prisoned under sin. And, by the same token, everybody knows that the penalty of 
sin is death. Don’t try to prove that; it is carrying coals to Newcastle. A man has 
the guoad erat demonstrandum in his own conscience. “The soul that: sinneth, it shall 
die.” And everybody knows that there is no such thing as self-deliverance. So all 


Non-Christian ‘Religions Inadequate—Burrell. 61 


the people are asking, “Men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?”"—that is, 
from the shame and the penalty and the bondage of sin. You can always count on this 
—the deepest want of the average man, the world over, is a spiritual want; and the 
question that throbs in the bosom of every son and daughter of the race is the old 
question, “What shall I do to be saved?” 

We ministers are inquiring how we may get hold of “the lapsed masses,” the 
unchurched multitudes who have a quarrel with the church, and, alas! a quarrel with 
God. There is only one way to win them; that is to answer the question of their 
deepest hearts. When we preachers get down to bed-rock and give the people what 
they expect to get in the Church of Jesus Christ they will come again. The Lord 
Jesus said: “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.” He is the great lode- 
stone. He alone can draw the people to truth and righteousness and eternal life. This 
is the touchstone that I wish to apply here. For I am going to try to show that all 
other religions fail; and that the religion of Jesus Christ is adequate to meet this deep, 
earnest, consuming need of the immortal soul. 

The word “religion” I suppose is from veligare, meaning to bind back. Religion 
is the thing that finds a man, when he is torn loose, alienated, and binds him back to 
God. The true religion is the power which is destined ultimately to realize the 
Platonic dream of which Tennyson sang; when “the whole round world” shall be 
“bound with gold chains about the feet of God.” 

I want to make a brief survey of the more important of the false religions, and 
I select those that have been brought into closest contact or collision with prophetic 
or historic Christianity. It would be impossible to canvass all, for the religions of the 
world have been many and diverse. There is nothing more melancholy to contemplate 
than a dead or moribund religion. It is worse than a shipwreck; it is worse than a 
battlefield the night after the conflict, with the faces of the dead looking up toward 
the sky; it is worse than the tottering of thrones and the crumbling of dynasties. The 
death of a religion means death to a multitude of souls; it means the crushing of 
unspeakable, innumerable, illimitable hopes. 


I. We begin with the religion of Egypt, the oldest of all. Our knowledge of it 
is chiefly derived from the papyrus and byssus bands which are unrolled from the 
mummies. We are enabled thus to form a somewhat clear conception of the sacred 
book known as “The Book of the Dead.” 

The god of this religion was Ammon-Ra; that is, the sun, as center and source 
of life. He is represented as a hawk-headed man, his forehead encircled with the 
solar disk. He was worshiped by the priests in “mysteries,” but to the people all 
forms of life were objects of devotion. The ibis, the crocodile, the scarabaeus, the 
lizard and the snake—all these were worshiped as proceeding from Ammon-Ra, the 
mystic origin of life. 

The Egyptians believed in immortality. They carved upon their mummy crypts 
the image of the Phoenix rising from its ashes, and the lotus flower opening with the 
early sun. The dead were embalmed in the hope that, in the fulness of time, Ammon- 
Ra would revive them. The coffin itself was Called “the chest of life.” 

They also believed in a final judgment. On many of their tombs the god 
Anubis is represented with balances in hand; a human heart in one scale, a feather 
in the other. Alas! the heart is lighter than a feather! The teaching of the “Book 
of the Dead” is as clear with respect to final retribution as that of our own Scriptures: 
“We must all appear before the judgment seat of God, that every one may receive 
according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.” 

But what has the religion of Egypt to say in answer to the crucial question, “What 
shall I do to be saved?” ‘The only preparation for judgment was obedience to the 


62 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Maat, or rule of right living. It cannot be determined with precision what were the 
precepts in this elaborate code. This, however, is clear: In case of failure to obey 
the Maat there was no remedy for sin. It is this that stamps the Egyptian system as 
“the religion of despair.” It contains no suggestion oi forgiveness. Thus, while the 
Egyptians were the most mirthful people on earth, they were the saddest of wor- 
shipers. It is written, “They offered tears upon the altars of their gods.” An illus- 
trious lady, the wife of Pasherenptah, is represented as thus addressing her husband 
from the grave: ‘O my beloved, forbear not to eat and drink and drain the cup oj 
pleasure while you live; for here is the land of slumber and darkness. We weep for 
the pleasures that have passed by.” 


II. The religion of the Greeks. They were, as Paul said, “exceedingly devout.” 
In their pantheon we observe the exaltation of nature. Zeus, the all-father, was the 
deification of ether. He reigned on the heights of Olympus; the lightning was ‘the 
flash of his eye; and with his javelin, the thunderbolt, he hurled his foes down the 
mountain side. The minor gods and goddesses who assembled about him were per- 
sonifications of natural forces. Apollo curbed “the fierce, flame-breathing steeds of! 
day.”” Athene was the spirit of the morning, rising from the brow of the sky. A god 
was here for every river, a nymph for every brooklet. Troops of sirens came from 
the mossy clefts, and Oreads from the hills to claim their tribute of devotion; while 
dryads brought with them oracular secrets from the rustling oaks. It was a beautiful 
system, and should have been quite satisfactory and ultimate if it were possible for 
natural theology to satisfy the cravings of the immortal soul. 

But the Greek deities, though made after a large pattern and endowed with 
extraordinary gifts, were only mortals projected on the skies. In their Olympiar 
life they ate and drank, made war and love, quarreled and sinned, reveled and slept. 
Hermes, was a thief; Aphrodite, a drab; Athene, an adept at billingsgate; Hera, ne 
better than she ought to be; and Zeus, their worthy sire, a base deceiver who ofttime:s 
drank too deeply of the mirth-inspiring nectar and was faithless to his wife, whom 
he “hung up in midheaven with anvils tied to her heels.” 

The festivals in honor of these gods were a magnificent display of utter sensua 
abandon. There were dances, tourneys, athletic sports, processions and chariot races 
There were dramatic representations of the adventures of the Olympian gods in whick 
lewd dancers, flushed with wine, ministered to the basest passions of men. 

The failure of such a religion was a mere question of time. Doubt and inquiry 
arose. Lucian and the other satirists began to write ruthlessly against the gods. Or 
went the unmasking of the tricksters. The shrines were abandoned; the altar-fire: 
were extinguished; and from the deep recesses of the forests the winds came wailing 
“Eleleu! Eleleu!—Great Pan is dead!” 

Then came the philosophers, lovers of wisdom. They were the Protestants o 
their time, who fearlessly approached the stalking ghosts and specters of the nationa 
religion and laughed them out of court. Plato founded the Academy and discourse 
on virtue as the most desirable thing. Epicurus in his garden exalted the emotions 
above the intellect; leaving to posterity the strange maxim, “Let us eat and drink, fo: 
tomorrow we die.’’ Zeno, in his painted porch, founded the school of the Stoics 
making expediency the highest rule of action. The Cynics, led by Diogenes, taught < 
philosophy steeped in gall. The skeptics glorified doubt; they were the ancestors o 
our modern agnostics, their chief dictum being, ““We assert nothing; no, not ever 
that we assert nothing.” The peripatetics, with Aristotle as their illustrious tutor 
originated the inductive method of reasoning; and, drifting into practical materialism 
rejected as unsubstantial all the great verities of the eternal life. 

It will be observed that the philosophers failed, as utterly as the priests, to answe: 


_ Non-Christian Religions Inadequate—Burrcll. 63 


the great question, ‘““What shall I do to be saved?” The earnest youths who walked 
amid the palm trees by the Ilissus had much to say of the cardinal virtues and the 
symmetry of a noble life; but they suggested no escape from the mislived past and 
left the doorway of the tomb shrouded in unbroken night. Socrates, the noblest of 
them all, with the fatal hemlock at his lips, could only say, “I take comfort in the 
hope that something may remain of man after his death.” The priests and the phil- 
osophers gave no real comfort or positive assurance to those who longed for the 
endless life. Ixion was left bound to the wheel. The vultures still gnawed at the 
vitals of Prometheus, the prisoner of death and despair. Tantalus still abode in hell 
with the ever-receding waters close to his thirsty lips. 


III. Brahmanism. An army of pilgrims coming from the great table-lands of 
the Caspian—so long ago that in our endeavor to trace them we lose ourselves in 
prehistoric mists—crossed the Hindu-Kush Mountains and took forcible possession 
of the banks of the Indus, announcing themselves as the superior race. In order to 
sustain this assumption they invented the fable of Brahm issuing from the primeval 
egg, and creating from his head the Brahmans; from his breast the soldiers; from his 
loins the merchants; and from his feet the laboring class. Here was the beginning 
of that iron-banded system of caste which has prevailed in India for thirty centuries, 
crushing its best energies like the mountain resting on Typhon’s heart. 

The sacred book of the Brahmans is the Rig-Veda. As to its character we may 
safely accept the judgment of Max Muller, who apologizes for the deficiencies of his 
own translation by saying that a complete rendering would have made him liable to 
prosecution under the English law against the publication of obscene literature. The 
three fundamental doctrines of the Veda are as follows: 


1. Brahm, the inconceivable One. He is so far removed from all human under- 
standing that “it cannot be asserted that he is known nor yet that he is unknown.” 


2. Hence the doctrine of Maya, or illusion. Nothing really exists except Brahm. 
Men are merely sparks from the central fire, separated for a time, to be absorbed at 
last. Our life with all its varied experiences is but “an illusory phantom such as a 
conjurer calls up.” 


3. Apavarga, the supreme good. This is to lose self-consciousness, in being 
finally merged into the ineffable one. The soul is like a drop of water, exhaled by 
the sun, floating for a time in vapor, at length falling into the sea. 


What, then, shall the Brahman do to be saved? His only salvation is extinction. 
This is to be reached “by faith;” that is, by an unreserved yielding up of self to the 
contemplation of Brahm. If you would find a Hindu saint, search for him by the 
roadside. You will find him there crouching upon his knees, naked, with hair un- 
combed, the Vedas before him. His body is smeared with ashes and dung. His 
countenance wears a look of utter stupidity. He is intently contemplating one of 
his long finger-nails. This is “the twice-born Yogi,’ the consummate fruit of 
Brahmanism. And this is the answer the Vedas give to the question, “What shall [ 
do to be saved?” The twice-born Yogi is losing himself in the Soul of the Universe. 
He has no longer any consciousness of guilt, no passion nor appetite. He moves 
not, speaks not, except when, with a spiritual pride which would be grotesque were 
it not so unspeakably pathetic, he lifts his dreamy eyes, and mutters, “I am God! I 
am God!” 


IV. Buddhism. A child was born about 500 B. C. in the royal city of Oude, who, 
as the oracles say, was destined for great things. At the moment of his birth he 
walked three paces and in a voice like thunder proclaimed himself the Fulfillment of 
Hope. The air was instantly filled with perfume, songs were heard in the distance, 


64 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and lotus flowers dropped from the sky. The life of this wonderful child was thence- 
forth a continuous tale of marvels, until at length, in early manhood, he found himself 
under the sacred bo-tree. While meditating there, the great truth—which indeed no 
living man can define—came to him like a sunburst; and he went forth to work 
deliverance. At Benares he gathered a company of disciples about him, and, with 
their aid, compiled the sacred book known as Tripitika, or “The Three Baskets.” 
It contains an amount of literature almost bewildering—about three hundred volumes 
folio. It is chiefly devoted to the importance of self-culture, or the development of 
the intellectual as distinguished from the carnal life. Its three fundamental doctrines 
are as follows: 5 


1. Buddh; that is, the all-pervading Mind. 
“An immense solitary Specter stands, 
It hath no shape, it hath no sound, 
It hath no place, it hath no time. 
It is, and was, and will be; 
It is never more nor less, nor glad, nor sad; 
Its name is Nothingness. 
Power walketh high, and Misery doth crawl, 
And the clepsydron drips, 
And the sands fall down in the hour-glass; 
Men live and strive, regret, forget, 
And love, and hate, and know it. 
The Specter saith, ‘I wait!’ 
And at last it beckons, and they pass; 
And still the red sands fall within the glass, 
And still the water-clock doth drip and weep; 
And that is all!” 


The God of the Buddhists is indeed a specter; he has no eyes to see, no heart to 
pity, no arms to save. He is represented as sitting aloft in an imperturbable calm, 
unmoved by the pain and struggle of mankind—an inactive, impersonal, valueless 
ghost of a god. 


2. Karma, or the Law of Consequences. As a mat soweth, so shall he also 
reap. There is no escape. There is no pardon, no averting the doom. The law 
is automatic, administering itself; constant as one’s shadow. 

The mills grind slow, 
But they grind woe. 


3. Nirvana. This is the Buddhist’s only heaven. It is defined as “the harbor of 
never-ending rest.” It is indeed but another term for total annihilation. The path 
of Nirvana is through endless transmigrations. The Buddhist’s noblest wish is to 
shorten the period of these successive cycles of existences, and lose his personality at 
last. To accomplish this he must conquer all feeling and attain to a sublime indif- 
ference to everything in life. 

The moral code of Buddhism is contained in the Noble Eight-fold Path, which is: 
Right belief, right feelings, right speech, right action, right means of livelihood, right 
endeavor, right memory and right meditation. To observe this Eight-fold Path will 
bring one to a final absorption of self in the soul of the universe. This is the answer 
which the Buddhist gives to the great question. His only conception of salvation is 
an utter loss of personal being, and even this is to be reached only by an absolute 
observance of law. In default of obedience, he must continue on the weary pilgrim- 
age. The best that he can hope for is to breathe at last the odor of the lotus flower, 
and sink into oblivion like a raindrop in the sea, 


Non-Christian Religions Inadequate—Burrell. 65 


V. Confucianism. Just outside the capital city of China stands an image, with 
a memorial tablet bearing this inscription, “Kung-foo-Tse, A king without a kingdom, 
yet reigning in hearts innumerable.” The religion of the Chinese Empire, with its 
five hundred millions of people, is little more than a personal reverence for this illus- 
trious man. He was superintendent of parks in the province of Lu, and, being 
brought into contact with much official corruption, was, as his biographer says, 
“frightened at what he saw.”’ The times were out of joint; the empire seemed hasten- 
ing to its fall. Kung Fu-tse, or Confucius, stood forth, saying: “I show you a more 
excellent way. It is foolish to speak of God and heaven and incomprehensible things. 
One thing we know; that is, present life and present duty. There is a region lying 
at our doors, where each may put forth his best energies for the public good.” It 
will be seen that his purpose was not to originate a religious system, but to reform 
the present order. The sacred book is ‘the “Analects of Confucius.” Its central 
thought is the kingdom. Christ also spoke of a kingdom; by which He meant the 
kingdom of truth and righteousness, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God. 
But the kingdom of which Confucius dreamed was of a far more material sort; it was 
the Chinese Empire. His “religion” is merely a system of civil economics. The 
Confucianist looks forward to no heaven; he dreams of no tabernacle descending from 
above in millennial glory. His Celestial Empire is China here and now. The three 
duties pre-eminently set forth in the Analects are as follows: 


1. Filial Piety. The kingdom is regarded as a large family in which the Em- © 
peror is father of all. The prime duty of every citizen is reverence for his political 
father; after that for civil functionaries; then for his father in the flesh; finally for all 
his ancestors. In no other country are the obligations that flow from the filial relation 
more thoroughly respected than in China. There is no sentiment in this, however; its 
object is the conservation of the state. 


2. Veneration for Learning. The scriptures of the Celestial Empire are a com- 
pilation of the wise sayings of the sages. These are purely secular. “When we know 
so little about life and its duties,” said the great teacher, “how can we be expected 
to say anything about death or what comes after it?” 


8. Reverence for the Past. China has been at a standstill for twenty centuries. 
The older order changeth not. The ideas of the Chinese are musty and mildewed 
and—like their faces, their houses and their junks—all made after one pattern. As 
to the question, “What shall I do to be saved?” there is no voice nor answer nor any 
that regardeth. The word “Salvation” was rubbed out of their vocabulary by Con- 
fucius. They are a race of materialists, dull, plodding, heedless of eternity as moles. 


“To be content’s their natural desire; 
They ask no angel’s wings nor seraph’s fire.” 


VI. Islam. The camel-driver of Mecca seems to have been at the outset a pure- 
minded and kindly-disposed dreamer of dreams; but in the year of the Hejira, A. D. 
622, when he was driven out of his native city, his spirit was changed. As he issued 
from the gates of Mecca he unsheathed his sword and became a red-handed sensualist. 
The call to prayer was mingled with the summons to the Holy War. No quarter 
must be given to unbelievers. “Fight against them,” said the prophet, “until not one 
shall be left to oppose us and the only religion shall be that of Allah the true God.” 

He gathered his disciples about him and produced the Koran. It is regarded as 
more than an inspired book, being “the uncreated Word of God.” The angel Gabriel 
brought him the silken scro!l on which it was inscribed, commanding him to read. 


~ He said, “I cannot read.’”’ Thereupon the angel shook him thrice and lo! the inscrip- 


tion became as clear as light. He forthwith caused it to be transcribed on white 


66 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


stones, leather, palin leaves, the shoulder blades of camels and the breasts of men. 
The Koran consists of one hundred and fourteen surahs or chapters, each of which 
begins with the words, “In the name of the merciful and compassionate God.” 

The most succinct statement of Mohammedan belief is found in the Kalima, or 
creed; which is as follows: La-tlaha-tl-Allah,; wa Mohammed er rasool Allah— ‘There 
is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” The two propositions of this 
creed are called by Gibbon “‘The eternal truth and the eternal lie.” 

The eternal truth is this, “There is no god but God.” It must be explained, how- 
ever, that the God of Islam is the apotheosis of pure will. There is no love, mercy or 
sympathy in him. He is called by ninety-nine names in the Koran, but ‘‘Father” is 
not among them. The closest relation which a believer can sustain to this god is 
expressed in Islam; that is, submission to the supreme will. Out of this conception 
grows the Moslem’s belief in fate, or Kismet. All things being controlled by an 
infinite will, what is to be must be, and there is no resisting it. Hence the desperate 
valor of the Moslems in battle. The day of a man’s death is inscribed on his fore- 
head and he can do nothing to avert it. The creation of the race is described as fol- 
lows: Allah took into his hands a mass of clay, and dividing it in two equal portions, 
he threw one-half into hell saying, ‘“These to eternal fire and I care not!” and, tossing 
the other upward, he added, ‘‘These to Paradise and I care not!” This is predestina- 
tion with a vengeance. 

The eternal lie is this, “And Mohammed is his prophet.” The camel-driver of 
Mecca has come down through the centuries grasping a sword crimson with blood; 
he is atterided on one side by the master of the harem, on the other by the Arab slave- 
driver. Thus in spirit he leads the Moslem host today as they push their conquests 
downward from the northern coasts of Africa among the barbaric tribes. In this 
Holy War the three historic evils of savagery are perpetuated—war, polygamy and 
slavery. Put over against this figure of the false prophet, the Christ of Calvary lead- 
ing on His militant church with no weapon save the sword of the Spirit which is the 
Word of God; and His word is ever, ‘“‘Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest.” : 

We have finished our survey of the six greatest of the false religions. There are 
some conclusions which we must have reached: First, there is a measure of truth 
in each of the false religions. How could it be otherwise? God never has left Him- 
self without 2 witness in any generation or in any land. But, unfortunately, the truth 
is like gold. There is gold in quartz, in old red sandstone, in the granite of the moun- 
tains, in auriferous sand, in every wave that rolls along the shore; but the trouble is to 
get it out. The question is whether it is in paying quantities and can it be separated 
from the dross? 

And, second, there is somewhat of sound morality in each of the false systems. 
How could it be otherwise? It is a mistake to suppose that the Decalogue was orig- 
inally written in the Bible. It was first written in the constitution of the race. It is 
interwoven 4vith the nerves and sinews of our human nature; and every man is con- 
scious of right and wrong by reason of the conscience within him. But there is no 
religion that has such an ethical system as Christianity. It is absolutely perfect. Did 
ever a thinking man find fault with the Decalogue? Did ever an infidel venture to 
criticise the morality of the Sermon on the Mount? These two are the great mono- 
graphs of Christian ethics and in between them stands Jesus, a perfect illustration 
of both and the only man that ever lived who was as good as the law. For this 
reason He stands forth solitary and pre-eminent as our example of right living, the 
Ideal Man. Thus it appears that the moral code of Christianity is perfect; there is 
.nothing to be added to or taken from it. 

Our third conclusion is this: The false religions give no answer to the question, 


Non-Christian Religions Inadequate—Burrell. 67 


“What must I do to be saved?” Here is the glorious pre-eminence of Christianity; it 
points out the way of escape from a mislived past. There is not another religion on 
earth, and never has been one, that has proposed any rational plan of justification. 
“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scar-- 
let, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as 
wool.” Find me anything like the cross in any other religion. Find me an answer 
to the question, ‘How can a man be just before God?” or ‘“‘How shall God be just 
and yet the justifier of the ungodly?’ Here is the word of the gospel: “God so loved 
the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life.” 

My friend, Dr. Chamberlain, who has just returned to his beloved India to spend 
the remainder of his life, told me recently of a strange thing that happened while he 
was once preaching at Benares. Among the devotees who came to bathe in the sacred 
river was a man who journeyed wearily on his knees and elbows from a great dis- 
tance, with the pain of conviction at his heart. He hoped, by washing in the Ganges, 
to be relieved of his “looking for of judgment.’’ Poor soul! he dragged himself to the 
river's edge, made his prayer to Gunga and crept in. A moment later he emerged, 
with the old pain still tugging at his heart. He lay prostrate on the bank in his 
despair, and heard the voice of the missionary who was preaching nearby under a 
banyan tree. He raised himself and crawled a little nearer. He listened to the simple 
story of the cross; he was hungry and thirsty for it. He rose upon his knees and 
hearkened; then upon his feet; then clapped his hands and cried, “That’s what I want! 
That’s what I want!” 

It is what we all want. Oh, young man and young woman, it is what the world 
wants. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now for this word of 
everlasting life: ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” to 
die for it. It is spes unica. I maintain that in this exclusive and dogmatic claim of 
Christianity you have your only sanction as missionaries of Christ. If other religions 
are true there is no room for our religion on the earth. If there are other plans of 
salvation then the death of Christ was an awful waste of divine resource. But, indeed, 
there is none other name given under heaven or among men whereby we must be 
Saved. Here, then, is our commission. Here is the franchise of our ministry. Let us 
preach Christ; let us live Christ; let us know nothing but Christ and Him crucified; 
let us make Christ first, last, midst, and all in all. 

It is because we believe in the saving power of this gospel and of this alone that 
we have faith in its ultimate triumph. Jesus shall reign from the rivers unto the ends 
of the earth. 

The words yonder, on the front of the gallery, are the most preposterous that 
ever were written: ‘The Evangelization of the World in this Generation.” I think 
them the most preposterous until I turn to the other inscription yonder: “Thy People 
Shall Be Willing in the Day of Thy Power.’ Then I remember how it is written: 
“All things are possible with God.” “Nothing is too hard for Him.” If a man had 
said to Peter, as he came down the outer stairway with the eleven, that night before 
the crucifixion, ““What do you propose to do?” and if Peter had replied, “We are 
going to the conquest of the world,” how he would have laughed at him. But that 

was the.truth. We haven't come to the end of the nineteenth century yet, and the 
eleven are nearly 500,000,000 who revere the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, 
young men and young women, believe in the triumphing Christ. Let Him be alpha 
and omega, the beginning and the end, of every noble purpose and aspiration. Believe 
the word that is written, “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take 

counsel together, against the Lord, and against His anointed, saying, ‘Let us break 
His bands asunder and cast away His cords from us;’ He that sitteth in the heavens 


é 


68 Pulpit Power and Eloquence: 


shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision!’ Nothing can withstand the divine 
purpose. ‘Ask of Me,” said the Father to the Son, “‘and I will give Thee the heathen 
for Thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession,” Did 
' Jesus ever ask? Behold Him on the cross, with His hands stretched out! This is 
His great prayer: ‘Give Me the heathen for My inheritance and the uttermost parts 
of the earth for My possession!” And his great manifesto is like unto it: “Look unto 
Me all ye ends of the earth and be ye saved!” 


Jesus shall reign where’er the sun 
Doth his successive journeys run; 
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, 
Till moons shall wax and wane no more. 


[This address was taken from “The Student Missionary Appeal,” which is the 
“report of the International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement for For- 
eign Missions, held in Cleveland in 1898. As the author of “The Religions of the 
World,” he speaks with authority and ability. The introduction has not been changed, 
but remains as delivered to that great convention. 

David James Burrell was born at Mt. Pleasant, Pa., in 1849, and graduated from 
Yale and from Union Theological Seminary. He engaged in four years mission work 
in Chicago, and filled pastorates in Dubuque, Ia., and Minneapolis. In 1891 he was 
called to the Marble Collegiate Church (the oldest church on the continent, founded 
in 1628). He is the author of The Gospel of Gladness, The Religion of the Future, 
The Early Church, and several volumes of sermons.] 


(69) 


UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE. 


HORACE BUSHNELL. 


John 20: 8—“Then went in also that other disciple.” 


Tn this slight touch or turn of history, is opened to us, if we scan it closely, one 
of the most serious and fruitful chapters of Christian doctrine. Thus it is that men 
are ever touching unconsciously the springs of motion in each other; thus it is that 
one man, without thought or intention, or even a consciousness of the fact, is ever 
leading some other after him. Little does Peter think, as he comes up where. his 
doubting brother is looking into the sepulchre, and goes straight in, after his peculiar 
manner, that he is drawing in his brother apostle after him. As little does John think, 
when he loses his misgivings, and goes into the sepulchre after Peter, that he is 
following his brother. And just so, unaware to himself, is every man, the whole race 
through, laying hold of his fellow-man, to lead him where otherwise he would not go. 
We overrun the boundaries of our personality—we flow together. A Peter leads 2 
John, a John goes after a Peter, both of them unconscious of any influence exerted or = 
received. And thus our life and conduct are ever propagating themselves, by a law of 
social contagion, throughout the circles and times in which we live. 

There are, then, you will perceive, two sorts of influence belonging to man; that 
which is active or voluntary, and that which is unconscious—that which we exert ° 
purposely or in the endeavor to sway another, as by teaching, by argument, by persua- 
sion, by threatenings, by offers and promises—and that whi ws out from us, 
unaware to ourselves, the same which Peter had over John when he led him into the 

-sepulchre. The importance of our efforts to do good, that is of our voluntary 
influence, and the sacred obligation we are under to exert ourselves in this way, are 
often and seriously insisted on. It is thus that Christianity has become, in the present 

age, a principle of so much greater activity than it has been for many centuries before; 
and we fervently hope that it will yet become far more active than it now is, nor 
cease to multiply its industry, till it is seen by all mankind to embody the beneficence 
and the living energy of Christ himself. 

But there needs to be reproduced, at the same time, and partly for this object, a 
more thorough appreciation of the relative importance of that kind of influence, or 
beneficence which is insensibly exerted. The tremendous weight and efficacy of this, | 
compared with the other, and the sacred responsibility laid upon us in regard to this, 
are felt in no such degree or proportion as they should be; and the consequent loss we 
suffer in character, as well as that which the church suffers in beauty and strength, 
is incalculable. The more stress, too, needs to be laid on this subject of insensible 
influence, because it is insensible; because it is out of mind, and, when we seek to trace 
it, beyond a full discovery. 

If the doubt occur to any of you, in the announcement of this subject, whether we 
are properly responsible for an influence which we exert insensibly; we are not, I 
reply, except so far as this influence flows directly from our character and conduct. \ 
And this it does, even much more uniformly than our active influence. In the latter + 
we may fail of our end by a want of wisdom or skill, in which case we are still as 
meritorious, in God’s sight, as if we succeeded. So, again, we may really succeed, 


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46 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and do great good by our active endeavors, from motives altogether base and 
hypocritical, in which case we are as evil, in God’s sight, as if we had failed. But the 
influences we exert unconsciously will almost never disagree withour_real character. 
They are honest influences, following our character, as the shadow follows the sur. 
And, therefore, we are much more certainly responsible for them, and their effects on 
the world. They go streaming from us in all directions, though in channels that we 
do not see, poisoning or healing around the roots of society, and among the hidden 
wells of character. If good ourselves, they are good; if bad, they are bad. And, since 
they reflect so exactly our character, it is impossible to doubt our responsibility for 
their effects on the world. We must answer not only for what we do with a purpose, 
but for the influence we exert insensibly. To give you any just impressions of the 
breadth and seriousness of such a reckoning I know to be impossible. No mind can 
trace it. But it will be something gained if I am able to awaken only a suspicion of 
the vast extent and power of those influences, which are ever flowing out unbidden 
upon society, from your life and character. 


In the prosecution of my design, let me ask of you, first of all, to expel the common 
prejudice that there can be nothing of consequence in unconscious influences, because 
they make no report, and fall on the world unobserved. Histories and biographies 
make little account of the power men exert insensibly over each other. They tell how 
men have led armies, established empires, enacted laws, gained causes, sung, reasoned, 
and taught—always occupied in setting forth what they do with a purpose. But what 
they do without a purpose, the streams of influence that flow out from their persons 
unbidden on the world, they can not trace or compute, and seldom eyen mention. So 
also the public laws make men responsible only for what they do with a positive 
purpose, and take no account of the mischiefs or benefits that are communicated by 
their noxious or healthful example. The same is true in the discipline of families, 
churches, and schools; they make no account of the things we do, except we will 
them. What we do insensibly passes for nothing, because no human government can 
trace such influences with sufficient certainty to make their authors responsible. 


But you must not conclude that influences of this kind are insignificant, because 
they are unnoticed and noiseless. How is it in the natural world? Behind the mere 
show, the outward noise and stir of the world, nature always conceals her hand of 
control, and the laws by which she rules. Who ever saw with the eye, for example, 
or heard with the ear, the exertions of that tremendous astronomic force, which every 
moment holds the compact of the physical universe together? The lightning is, in 
fact, but a mere fire-fly spark in comparison; but, because it glares on the clouds, and 
thunders so terribly in the ear, and rives the tree or the rock where it falls, many 
will be ready to think that it is a vastly more potent agent than gravity. 

The Bible calls the good man’s life a light, and it is the nature of light to flow 
out spontaneously in all directions, and fill the world unconsciously with its beams. 
So the Christian shines, it would say, not so much because he will, as because he is a 
luminous object. Not that the active influence of Christians is made of no account in 
the figure, but only that this symbol of light has its propriety in the fact that their 
unconscious influence is the chief influence, and has the precedence in its power over 
the world. And yet, there are many who will be ready to think that light is a very 
tame and feeble instrument, because it is noiseless, An earthquake, for example, is 
to them a much more vigorous and effective agency. Hear how it comes thundering 
through the solid foundations of nature. It rocks a whole continent. The noblest 
works of man—cities, monuments, and temples—are in a moment leveled to the 
ground, or swallowed down the opening gulfs of fire. Little do they think that the 
light of every morning, the soft, and genial, and silent light, is an agent many times 
more powerful. But let the light of the morning cease and return no more, let the 


Unconscious Influence—Bushnell. ™t 


‘hour of morning come, and bring with it no dawn; the outcries of a horror-stricken 
world fill the air, and make, as it were, the darkness audible. The beasts go wild and 
frantic at the loss of the sun. The vegetable growths turn pale and die. A chill 
creeps on, and frosty winds begin to howl across the freezing earth. Colder, and yet 
colder, is the night. The vital blood, at length, of all creatures, stops congealed. 


Down goes the frost toward the earth’s center. The heart of the sea is frozen; nay, Fire 
the earthquakes are themselves frozen in, under their fiery caverns. The very globe(-35 tory 


itself, too, and all the fellow planets that have lost their sun, are become mere balls of 
ice, swinging silent in the darkness. Such is the light, which revisits us in the silence 
of the morning. It makes no shock or scar. It would not wake an infant in his 
cradle. And yet it perpetually new creates the world, rescuing it, each morning as a 
prey, from night and chaos. So the Christian is a light, even “the light of the world,” 
and we must not think that, because he shines insensibly or silently, as a mere lumin- 
ous object, he is therefore powerless. The greatest powers are ever those which lie 
back of the little stirs and commotion of nature; and I verily believe that the insen 


v 
sible influences of good men are much more.potent than what I have called their \\ Ve 


voluntary, or active, as the great silent powers of nature are of greater consequence 
than her little disturbances and tumults. The law of human influences is deeper than 
many suspect, and they lose sight of it altogether. The outward endeavors made by 
good men or bad to sway others, they call their influence; whereas, it is, in fact, but a 
fraction, and, in most cases, but a very small fraction, of the good or evil that flows 
out of their lives. Nay, I will even go further. How many persons do you meet, the 
insensible influence of whose manners and character is so decided as often to thwart 


y 


Gmarsehn 
whaf te 


their voluntary influence; so that, whatever they attempt to do, in the way of controll- ~™“:* “y 


ing others, they are sure to carry the exact opposite of what they intend! And it will 
generally be found that, where men undertake by argument or persuasion to exert a 
power, in the fact of qualities that make them odious or detestable, or only not 


entitled to respect, their insensible influence will be too strong for them. The total ° 


effect of the life is then of a kind directly opposite to the voluntary endeavor, which, 
of course, does not add so much as a fraction to it. 


I call your attention, next, to the twofold powers of effect and expression by 
which man connects with his fellow man. If we distinguish man as a creature of 
language, and thus qualified to communicate himself to others, there are in him two 
sets or kinds of language, one which is voluntary in the use, and one that is involun- 
tary; that of speech in the literal sense, and that expression of the eye, the face, the 
look, the gait, the motion, the tone or cadence, which is sometimes called the natural 
language of the sentiments. This natural language, too, is greatly enlarged by the 
conduct of life, that which, in business and society, reveals the principles and spirit of 
men. Speech, or voluntary language, is a door to the soul, that we may open or shut 


at will; the other is a door that stands open evermore, and reveals to others constantly, . 


and often very clearly, the tempers, tastes, and motives of their hearts...Within, as 
we may représent, is character, charging the common reservoir of influence, and 
through these twofold gates of the soul pouring itself out on the world. Out of one 


it flows at choice, and whensoever we purpose to do good or evil to men. Out of the . 


other it flows each moment, as light from the sun, and propagates itself in all. 
beholders. ‘ 


Then if we go to others, that is, to the subjects of influence, we find every man 


/hlals of 


endowed with two inlets of impression; the ear and the understanding for the reception iUnpresta' 


of speech, and the sympathetic powers, the sensibilities or affections, for tinder to 
those sparks of emotion revealed by looks, tones, manners, and general conduct. 
And these sympathetic powers, though not immediately rational, are yet inlets, open 
on all sides, to the understanding and character, They have a certain wonderful 


72 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


capacity to receive impressions, and catch the meaning of signs, and propagate in us 
whatsoever falls into their passive molds from others. The impressions they receive 
do not come through verbal propositions, and are never received into verbal pro- 
positions, it may be, in the mind, and therefore many think nothing of them. But pre- 
cisely on this account are they the more powerful, because it is as if one heart were thus 
going directly into another, and carrying in its feelings with it, Beholding, as ina na glass, 
the ‘feelings of « our ‘neighbor, we are changed into the same image, by the assimilating 
power of “sensibility and fellow-feeling. Many have gone so far, and not without 
show, at least, of reason, as to maintain that the look or expression, and even the 
very features of children, are often changed by exclusive intercourse with nurses and 
attendants. Furthermore, if we carefully consider, we shall find it scarcely possible 
to doubt, that simply to look on bad and malignant faces, or those whose expressions 
have become infected by vice, to be with them and become familiarized to them, is 
enough permanently to affect.the character of persons of mature age. I do not say 
that it must of necessity subvert their character, for the evil looked upon may never 
be loved or welcomed in practice; but it is something to have these bad images in the 
soul, giving out their expressions there, and diffusing their odor among the thoughts, 
as long as we live. How dangerous a thing is it, for example, for a man to become 
accustomed to sights of cruelty? What man, valuing the honor of his soul, would 
not shrink from yielding himself to such an influence? No more is it a thing of 
indifference to become accustomed to look on the manners, and receive the bad 
expression of any kind of sin. 


The door of involuntary communication, I have said, is always open, Of course 
we are communicating ourselves in this way ‘to others at ev ery moment of our inter- 
course or presence with them. But how very seldom, in comparison, do we under- 
take by means of speech to influence others! Even the best Christian, one who most 
improves his opportunities to do good, attempts but seldom to sway another by volun- 
tary influence, whereas he is all the while shining as a luminous object unawares, and 
communicating of his heart to the world. 


But there is yet another view of this double line of communication which man 
has with his fellow-men, which is more general, and displays the import of the truth 
yet more convincingly. It is by one of these modes of communication that we are 
constituted members of voluntary society, and by the other, parts of a general mass, 
or members of involuntary society. You are all, in a certain view, individuals, and 
separate as persons from each other; you are also, in a certain other view, parts of a 

} common body, as truly as the parts of a stone. Thus if you ask how it is that you and 


Jndivitde/ an men came without your consent to exist in society, to be within its power, to be 
and 3 FOUP under its laws, the answer is, that while you are a man, you are also a fractional 


Spirit 


element of a larger and more comprehensive being, called society—be it the family, the 
church, the state. In a certain department of your nature, it is open; its sympathies 
and feelings are open. On this open side you will adhere together, as parts of a larger 
nature, in which there is a common circulation of want, impulse, and law. Being thus 
made common to each other voluntarily, you become one mass, one consolidated 
social body, animated by one life. And observe how far this involuntary communica- 
tion and sympathy between the members of a state or family is sovereign over their 
character. It always results in what we call the national or family spirit; for there is 
a spirit peculiar to every state and family in the world. Sometimes, too, this national 
or family spirit takes a religious or an irreligious character, and appears almost to 
absorb the religious self-government of individuals. What was the national spirit oi 
France, for example, at a certain time, but a spirit of infidelity? What is the religious 
spirit of Spain at this moment, but a spirit of bigotry, quite as wide of Christianity and 
destructive to character as the spirit of falsehood? What is the family spirit in many 


Unconscious Influence—Bushnell. 73 


a house, but the spirit of gain, or pleasure, or appetite, in which every thing that is 
warm, dignified, genial, and good in religion, is visibly absent? Sometimes you wili 
almost fancy that you see the shapes of money in the eyes of the children. So it is 
that we are led on by nations, as it were, to good or bad immortality. Far down ir 
the secret foundations of life and society there lie concealed great laws and channels 
of influence, which make the race common to each other in ail the main departments 
or divisions of the social mass—laws which often escape our notice altogether, but 
which are to society as gravity to the general system of God’s works. 

But these are general considerations, and more fit, perhaps, to give you a rational 
conception of the modes of influence and their relative power, than to verify that 
conception, or establish its truth. I now proceed to add, therefore, some miscellane- 
ous proofs of a more particular nature. 


And I mention, first of all, the instinct of imitation in children. We begin our 
mortal experience, not with acts grounded in judgment or reason, or with ideas 
received through language, but by simple imitation, and, under the guidance of this, 
we lay our foundations. The child looks and listens, and whatsoever tone of feeling 


or manner of conduct is displayed around him, sinks into his plastic, passive soul, and 777/72 torr 


becomes a mold of his being ever after. The very handling of the nursery is signifi- He Children : 


cant, and the petulance, the passion, the gentleness, the tranquility indicated by it, are 
all reproduced in the child. His soul is a purely receptive nature, and that, for a 
considerable period, without choice or selection. A little further on, he begins 
voluntarily to copy every thing he sees. Voice, manner, gait, every thing which the 
eye sees, the mimic instinct delights to act over. And thus we have a whole genera- 
tion of future men, receiving from us their beginnings, and the deepest impulses of 
their life and immortality. They watch us every moment, in the family, before the 
hearth, and at the table; and when we are meaning them no good or evil, when we are 
conscious of exerting no influence over them, they are drawing from us impressions 
and molds of habit, which, if wrong, no heavenly discipline can wholly remove; or, if 
right, no bad associations utterly dissipate. Now it may be doubted, I think, whether, 
in allthe active influence of our lives, we do as much to shape the destiny of our fellow- 
men as we do in this single article of unconscious influence over children. 

Still further on, respect for others takes the place of imitation. We naturally 
desire the approbation of good opinion of others. You see the strength of this feeling 


in the article of fashion. How few persons have the nerve to resist a fashion! We yc,pz, ee 
: have fashions, too, in literature, and in worship, and in moral and religious doctrine, Nhie- foe: 
almost equally powerful. How many will violate the best rules of society, because it 27// 


12 


is the practice of their circle! How many reject Christ because of friends or acquaint- -7U.L vate 


ance, who have no suspicion of the influence they exert, and will not have, till the last 

| day shows them what they have done! Every good man has thus a power in his 

| person, more mighty than his words and arguments, and which others feel when he 
little suspects it. Every bad man, too, has a fund of poison in his character, which-is 

tainting those around him, when it is not in his thoughts to do them an injury. He 
is read_and understood. His. sensual tastes and habits, his unbelieving spirit, his 
Suppressed leer at religions, have all a power, and take hold of the hearts of others, 
whether he will have it so or not. 

Again, how well understood is it that the most active feelings and impulses of 
mankind are contagious. How quick enthusiasm of any sort is to kindle, and how 
-Tapidly it catches from one to another, till a nation blazes in the flame! In the case of 
the crusades you have an example where the personal enthusiasm of one man put all 
the states of Europe in motion. Fanaticism is almost equally contagious. Fear and 
“superstition always infect the mind of the circle in which they are manifested. The 
spirit of war generally becomes an epidemic of madness, when once it has got 


—— 


CONTAALO A 


| 


YA. Voy ” Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


_ possession of a few minds. The spirit of party is propagated in a similar manner, 


Pe 


/ 


How any slight operation in the market may spread, like a fire, if successful, till trade 
runs wild in a general infatuation, is well known. Now, in all these examples, the 
effect is produced, not by active endeavor to carry influence, but mostly by that 
insensible propagation which follows, when a flame of any kind is once kindled. 


Is it also true, you may ask, that the religious spirit J propagates i itself_or tends to 
propagate itself in the same way? I see no reason to question that it does. Nor does 
anything in the doctrine of spiritual influences, when rightly understood, forbid the 
supposition. For spiritual influences are never separated from the laws of thought in 
the individual, and the laws of feeling and influence in society. If, too, every disciple 
is to be an “‘epistle known and read of all men,” what shall we expect, but that all men 
will be somehow affected by the reading? Or if he is to be a light in the world, what 
shall we look for, but that others, seeing his good works, shall glorify God on his 
account? How often is it seen, too, as a fact of observation, that one or a few good 
men kindle at length a holy een in the community in which they live, and become the the 
leaven of a general reformation! Such men give a more vivid proof in their persons 
of the reality of religious faith than any words or arguments could yield. They are 
active; they endeavor, of course, to exert a good voluntary influence; but still their 
chief power lies in their holiness, and the sense they produce in others of their close 
relation to God. 


It now remains to exhibit the very important fact, that where the direct or active 
influence of men is supposed to be great, even this is due, in a principle degree, to 
that insensible influence by which their arguments, reproofs, and persuasions are 
secretly invigorated. It is not mere words which turn men; it is the heart mounting. 
uncalled, into the expression of the features; it is the eye illuminated by reason, the 
look beaming with goodness; it is the tone of the voice, that instrument of the soul, 
which changes quality with such amazing facility, and gives out in the soft, the tender, 
the tremulous, the firm, every shade of emotion and character. And so much is there 
in this, that the moral stature and character of the man that speaks are likely to be 
well represented in his manner. If he is a stranger, his way will inspire confidence 
and attract good will. His virtues will be seen, as it were, gathering round him to 
minister words and forms of thought, and their voices will be heard in the fall of his 
cadences. And the same is true of bad men, or men who have nothing in their 
character corresponding to what they attempt to do. If without heart or interest you 
attempt to move another, the involuntary man tells what you are doing in a hundred 
ways at once. A hypocrite, endeavoring to exert a good influence, only tries to convey 
by words what the lying look, and the faithless affectation, or dry exaggeration of 
his manner perpetually resists. We have it for a fashion to attribute great or even 
prodigious results to the voluntary effects and labors of men. Whatever they effect is 
commonly referred to nothing but the immediate power of what they do. Let us take 
an example, like that of Paul, and analyze it. Paul was a man of great fervor and 
enthusiasm. He combined, withal, more of what is lofty and morally commanding 
in his character, than most of the very distinguished men of the world. Having this 
for his natural character, and his natural character exalted and made luminous by 
Christian faith, and the manifest indwelling of God, he had of course an almost 
superhuman sway over others. Doubtless he was intelligent, strong in argument, 
eloquent, active, to the utmost of his powers, but still he moved the world. more_by. 
ter were ever adding to his a RS efforts an element of silent power, which was the 
real and chief cause of their efficacy. He convinced, subdued, inspired, and led, 
because of the half divine authority which appeared in his conduct, and his glowing 


ll 


_ wield with the most persuasive and subduing effect. It is the grandeur of his charac-__ 


Unconscious Influence—Bushnell. "5 


spirit. He fought the good fight, because he kept the faith, and filled his powerful 
nature with influences drawn from higher worlds. 


‘And here I must conduct you to a yet higher example, even that of the Son of \o 


God, the light of the world. Men dislike to be swayed by direct, voluntary influence. 


They are jealous of such control, and are therefore best approached by conduct and. 


feeling, and the authority of simple worth, which seem to make no purposed onset. 
If goodness appears, they welcome its celestial smile; if heaven descends to encircle 
them, they yield to its sweetness; if truth appears in the life, they honor it with a 
secret homage; if personal majesty and glory appear, they bow with reverence, and 
acknowledge with shame their own vileness. Now it is on this side of human nature 
that Christ visits us, preparing just that kind of influence which the spirit of truth may 


_ ter which constitutes the chief power of his ministry, not his miracles or teachings 


apart from his. character, Miraclés were useful, at the time, to arrest attention, and 


His doctrine is useful at all times as the highest revelation of truth possible in speech; 
but the greatest truth of the Gospel, notwithstanding, is Christ himself—a human body 


becomes the organ of the divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an 


earthly life, the glory of God! The Scripture writers have much to say, in this connec- 


tion, of the image of God; and an image, you know, is that which simply represents, 
not that which acts, or reasons, or persuades. Now it is this image of God which 
makes the center, the sun itself, of the Gospel. The journeyings, teachings, miracles, 
and sufferings of Christ, all had their use in bringing out this image, or what is the 
same, in making conspicuous the character and feelings of God, both toward sinners 
and toward sin. And here is the power of Christ—it is what of God’s beauty, love, 
truth, and justice shines through Him. It is the influence which flows unconsciously 
and spontaneously out of Christ, as the friend of man, the light of the world, the glory 
of the Father, made visible. And some have gone so far as to conjecture that God 


made the human person, originally, with a view to its becoming the organ or vehicle 


by which He might reveal His communicable attributes to other worlds. Christ, they 
believe, came to inhabit this organ, that He might execute a purpose so sublime. 
The human person is constituted, they say, to be a mirror of God; and God, being 
imaged in that mirror, as in Christ, is held up to the view of this and other worlds. 
It certainly is to the view of this; and if the Divine nature can use th organ so 
effectively to express itself unto us, if it can bring itself through the looks, tones, 
motions, and conduct of a human person, more close to our sympathies than by any 
other means, how can we think that an organ so communicative, inhabited by us, is 
not always breathing our spirit and transferring our image insensibly to others? 

I have protracted the argument on this subject beyond what I could have wished, 
but I cannot dismiss it without suggesting a few thoughts necessary to its complete 
practical effect. 

One very obvious and serious inference from it, and the first which I will name, is, 


that it is impossible to live in this world and escape responsibility. It is not they 
alone, as you have seen, who are trying purposely to convert or corrupt others, who 


exert an influence; you cannot live without exerting influence. The doors of your 


soul are open on others, and theirs on you. You inhabit a house which is well nigh 
transparent; and what you are within, you are ever showing yourself to be without, by 
Signs that have no ambiguous expression. If you had the seeds of a pestilence in 
your body, you would not have a more active contagion than you have in your 
tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to 
exert an influence—an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persua- 
Sion are feeble. You say that you mean well; at least, you think you mean to injure 
no one. Do you injure no one? Is your example harmless? Is it ever on the side 


Pa 


ad 
y 


Any ss 


76 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


of God and duty? You can not reasonably doubt that others are continually receiving 
impressions from your character. As little can you doubt that you must answer for 
_ these impressions... If the influence you exert is unconsciously exerted, then it is only 
the most sincere, the truest expression of your character. And for what can you be 
“held responsible, -if not for this? Do not deceive yourselves in the thought that you 
““f are at least doing no injury, and are, therefore, living without responsibility; first, 
/make it sure that you are not every hour infusing moral death insensibly into your 
children, wives, husbands, friends, and acquaintances. By a mere look or glance, not 
unlikely, you are conveying the influence that shall turn the scale of some one’s immor- 
tality. Dismiss, therefore, the thought that you are living without responsibility; that 
is impossible. Better is it frankly to admit the truth; and if you will risk the influence 
of a character unsanctified by duty and religion, prepare to meet your reckoning 
manfully, and receive the just recompense of reward. 


The true philosophy or method of doing good is also here explained. It is, first 
of all and principally, to be good—to have a character that will of itself communicate 
good._ There must and will be active effort where there is goodness of principle; but 
the latter we should hold to be the principal thing, the root and life of all. Whether it is a 
mistake more sad or more ridiculous, to make mere stir synonymous with doing good, 
we need not inquire; enough, to be sure that one who has taken up such a notion of 
doing good, is for that reason a nuisance to the church. The Christian is called a 
light, not lightning. In order to act with effect on others, he must walk in the Spirit, 
and thus become the image of goodness; he must be so akin to God, and so filled 
with His dispositions, that he shall seem to surround himself with a hallowed atmos- 

“phere. It is folly to endeavor to make ourselves shine before we are luminous, If 
the sun without his beams should talk to the planets, and argue with them till the 
final day, it would not make them shine; there must be light in the sun itself; and then 
they will shine, of course. And this, my brethren, is what God intends for you all. It 
is the great idea of His gospel, and the work of His spirit, to make you lights in the 
world. His greatest joy is to give you character, to beautify your example, to exalt 
your principles, and. make you each the depository of His own almighty grace. But 
in order to do this, something is necessary on your part—a full surrender of your mind 
to duty and to God, and a perpetual desire of this spiritual intimacy; having this, 
having a participation thus of the goodness of God, you will as naturally communicate 


good as the sun communicates his beams. 4 


Our doctrine of unconscious and undesigning influence shows-how it is, also, 
that the preaching of Christ is often so unfruitful, and especially in times of spiritual 
coldness. It is not because truth ceases to be truth, nor, of necessity, because it is 
preached in a less vivid manner, but because there are so many influences preaching 
against the preacher. He is one, the people are many; his attempt to convince and 
persuade is a voluntary influence; their lives, on the other hand, and especially the 
lives of those who profess what is better, are so many tnconscious influences ever 
streaming forth upon the people, and back and forth between each other. He preaches 
the truth, and they, with one consent, are preaching the truth down; and how can he 
prevail against so many, and by a kind of influence so unequal? When the people oi 
God are glowing with spiritual devotion to Him, and love to men, the case is different; 
then they are all preaching with the preacher, and making an atmosphere of warmth 
for his words to fall in; great is the company of them that publish the truth, and 
proportionally great its power. Shall I say more? Have you not already felt, my 
brethren, the application to which I would bring you? We do not exonerate our- 
selves; we do not claim to be nearer to God or holier than you; but, ah! you know 
how easy it is to make a winter about us, or how cold it feels! Our endeavor is to 
preach the truth of Christ and His cross as clearly and as forcibly as we can. Some- 


Unceiiscious Influence—Bushnell. 77 


times it has a visible effect, and we are filled with joy; sometimes it has no effect, and 

then we struggle on, as we must, but under great oppression. Have we none among 
you that preach against us in your lives? If we show you the light of God’s truth, 
does it never fall on banks of ice; which if the light shows through, the crystal 
masses are yet as cold as before? We do not accuse you; that we leave to God, and 
to those who may rise up in the last day to testify against you. If they shall come out 

of your own families; if they are the children that wear your names, the husband or 
wife of your affections; if they declare that you, by your example, kept them away 
from Christ’s truth and mercy, we may have accusations to meet of our own and we 

“leave you to acquit yourselves as best you may. I only warn you, here, of the guilt 
which our Lord Jesus Christ will impute to them that hinder His gospel. 


[Horace Bushnell was born at Litchfield, Conn., April 14, 1802, and died at Hart- 
ford, Conn., February 17, 1876. He served as minister of a Congregational church 
at Hartford from 1833 to 1859. Among his literary works are God in Christ, Nature 
and Supernatural and Vicarious Sacrifice. 

We are indebted to the publishers of the volume of “Sermons on the New Life” 
for this sermon by Bushnell. It is, no doubt, his best known sermon. President 

McClure, Professor Currier and Addison Foster each included it in their list of the 
ten best sermons of the century.] 


> 


I a 


=< <<< =< ———. ee. 


72 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. — 


ST. PAUL’S APOLOGY FOR HIS MINISTRY. 


S. PARKES CADMAN, D.D. 


“For the love of Christ constraineth us.”—II Cor. 5: 14. 


This letter to the Corinthian Church was written by St. Paul after an almost 
miraculous escape from deadly peril. His deliverance causes him to break forth into 
a strain of thanksgiving; a solemn joy descends upon his heart, and he sets himself, in 
his imagination, before the judgment seat of Christ. In this light, the light of the 
unerring throne, he exercises his high office as one who must give an account, and in 
this spirit, “knowing the fear of the Lord,” he persuades men. A motive so high, so 
stern in its purifying power, cannot be dispensed with by any minister of Christ. It 
prevents immoral compromises and superficial estimates. 

The reckonings of his hearers are here revised by St. Paul. Some are quite 
irrelevant to character, and for these he cared nothing; whether they liked his voice, 
his gestures, his manners, or even his message. What he did yearn for in the solici- 
tude of his Master was to be able to appeal to their consciences so that he could later 
appeal to God, to whom all things were open, that in the discharge of his duty he had 
been simple and sincere. 

A number of his converts were disposed to be factitious, and to these he addresses 
himself in words of tenderness and beauty. He shows them the difficulty and danger, 
the rapture and the sanctity of the life he lived. But behind its joy and sorrow, its 
glory and offense, its heights and depths, abides its motive power—the love of Christ. 
So forcibly are these things set forth and after the lapse of nineteen centuries we can 
hear the beating of St. Paul’s heart on:every page. An unearthly flame burned in his 
bosom, and he refers to those ecstasies on the Damascus road and in the Arabian 
deserts, which his foes sought to discredit, as tokens of the truest wisdom. 

Small wonder is it that he was misunderstood, for he lived a life of fastidious 
purity in an age of riotous excess; the truths he held held him in a passionate grip, and 
the maxims of an ethical selfishness were rebuked by his abandonment to the service 
of his Master. The contemptuous leer of the fleshly vision glanced harmlessly upon 
this veteran of the cross, this man of mysterious moods, transcendent ideas, and utter 
scorn of consequence. What his critics deemed the babblings of a distressed mind 
were in reality the words of truth, the pledges of a life of honor and immortality, which 
Nero and his satellites could not destroy. This habitual attitude was a startling 
rebuke to men whose eyes had not seen “‘the orb of glory,’’ whose hands clutched, 
with feverish intensity, the fleeting treasures of a passing world, but it revolutionized 
St. Paul’s view of the proportion of life, it reformed his character, and reinvested his 
influence. And though enthusiasm and sobriety varied in him, today a paradisicai 
vision, tomorrow a mighty argument, the one thing that never intrudes or troubles 
his single-eyed endeavor is the thought of private ends. 


THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE. 


It is hazardous to give definitions here, to shut within the boundaries of human 
conception that love of Christ which passeth knowledge. But in the fifteenth verse 
of this chapter is the Christian interpretation of life. The apostle tells us that his Lord 


St. Paul’s Apology for His Ministry—Cadman. 716 


both died and rose again in order that our living may be subordinated to the sacrifice 
of the cross and its infinite meanings. 


7 


Gone forever are the ruling ideas men hitherto had held concerning the race. The 
lust of blood, the thirst for power, the savage ferocities, the undue estimates of mere 
intellectualism and of mammon, all the despotism of the fleshly vision, alike died at 
Calvary. These delusions were potentially destroyed by our victor-victim, and when 
His sacrifice hath power, as it hath authority, it will banish them from the world. 

Henceforth we know no man after the flesh. Even the Incarnated God has dis- 


appeared that the earthly life might be replaced by the heavenly reign. We adore the 
universal risen Lord, and are not to be misled (though ancient churches have been and 


are) into a sensuous worship. 


A FITTING WORD. 


This marvelous language is difficult for us to appreciate, leave alone understand, in 
its fullness and depth. But I have brought this message to you today, my beloved 
people, because I find no better word in this blessed book bearing upon our new 
relationships. It bespeaks the ultimate law of our being, it is the secret of a greatly 
noble and useful life for this church and pastorate, it throws the light of another world 
upon the dreariest duties of tomorrow. 


There are several chosen and effectual methods of presenting the claims of our 
religion, but I count this the premier. It justifies itself again and yet again, for it is 
the heart and center of the Gospel of God, its genius and its all. I need not remind 
you that love and faith depend upon their object for their value. 


To whom we devote ourselves, to whom we are united in the hidden depths of 
the spirit, by them are we determined, after them are we patterned. Now Christ was, 
to Paul the center of his growing love. One word from him became a universal law. 
His very life in mysterious and far-reaching senses was in the life of Paul, a vital 
union reigning through the Blessed Spirit. If there was aught of purity and sweetness, 
strength and serviceableness, it was due to the indwelling Christ. Even society, as 
the apostle views it, through the individual and his consecration, is to be constrained 
by omnipotent grace, until it is the domain of the Lord, and the Kingdom of Heaven, 
as effectual in the divine program as is your right arm to your body. 


PERSONALITY. 

Let us deal for a space with the love of Christ in its relation to personality. How 
it has enlarged and ennobled the ideas we have of God and of ourselves! It is not 
too much to say that very man of very man in all selfless devotion and highest aban- 
donment to good has been the outflow of the Christ’s historic position in the race. 


His universal person has given us universality. He has discovered God to man 
as the Father of all, and He transferred to himself by one vast act of clemency the 
endless expiations and sacrifices of men. In his death, God and not man made a 
perfect offering. These are the organic truths which in Him awoke, to perish never, 
and which have won His widening way upon the earth. 


They have set a surpassing value upon human life, they have placed its destiny 
upon an enduring foundation. Now this enforces the very center of being, where 
help is most needed. For as persons, we are identical in the midst of change, and this 
identity gives us a practical infinity, for in our progress all things and all influences are 
appreciated and absorbed by us, and our limitations, through this absorption, become 
transformations, yea, even manifestations of ourselves. Man may conquer alien forms 
and forces as also those in sympathy with himself. He thus gradually makes the world 
his own, and the real center of its movement is within us. 

If this interpretation be correct, then what a kingdom the Christian mind 


. 


80 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


becomes; over how great an empire does regenerated man reign! If our moral im- 
press determines nature’s course, if she hopes and waits in piteous helplessness for the 
fullness of the sons of God that her redemption may be accomplished, then in enabling 
men to be morally free God keeps the most ancient star from wrong and takes away 
cruelty from the earth. The Redeemer himself knew this was the pivotal strategy of 
his enterprise, and he laid his claim at the root when he cried out, in full view of the 
cross, ‘All souls are Mine.” 


He taught us to call upon God as our Holy Father, and in that common father- 
hood we are the vital products of God’s own being. Our reason, our freedom, our 
responsive capacities have their origin and sequel in the Blessed One. They are the 
adumbrations of the central sun whose light enwraps us all. His relation to us is 
not social nor legal, but first and last a natural one; it cannot be broken. 


The cross was a necessary process of this unfaltering fatherly affection. Such an 
offering can never be accounted for by purely intellectual estimates. Sacrifice is 
always the highest proof of love, and, more, it is the one, the only, the indisputable 
method by which any beneficent passion works among the ruined and sinful conditions 
of human life. 


THE TESTIMONY OF THE APOSTLE. 


The practical outcome of these revelations of love is best seen in St. Paul, the 
writer of this text. Jesus created a new type of man, and the apostle is the highest 
example of that creation. The contrast between the two natures in the one man is so 
great as to be startling. His conversion ranks as an apologetic for the faith. In 
the Ephesian letter he tells us how he reached the goal of enlarged personality, and 
that our souls may be amplified, rooted and grounded in the same love. The bigoted 
zealot was later the generous apostle, the persecutor of the saints became their spirit- 
ual parent, the hard, steely temper of religious frenzy gave place to womanly tender- 
ness, the encircled purblind view of life was lifted and there came a width of outlook 
commensurate with God’s universal purpose. 


THE APOSTLE’S FIRST VISION OF JESUS. 


Christ’s love thus constrained Paul’s life. His first glimpse of Jesus was not as 
the Son of God, but as the Son of Man. He beheld him as the Lamb in the midst 
of the throne. In Arabia’s desert solitudes the apostle was permitted for a moment to 
gaze through the uplifted veil, and he heard the voice which will one day shake the 
heaven and the earth. He thus reversed the order of Christian experience; we rise 
from earth, he descended from heaven. By successive stages, in strict obedience to the 
heavenly vision, he came down and found the deepest ground of sympathy and toil. 
And he grew as he descended, he grew in apostolic breadth and proportion as he cov- 
ered all the space between the throne on its glistening mount of light and the dark 
dungeon under Nero’s sated and lustful palace. 


Each stage was an expansion, the tragedy was lost in the triumph, and St. Paul 
was never so great, so blessed, so instrumental as when, at the eventide of life and in 
the declining light, with the axe waiting at the door, he bore his last testimony. He 
knew by divine instinct that the heart of paganism was shattered; that Christ, not the 
Roman Emperor, had won the fight for supremacy. And in such an hour with 
clamant joy he declared he was ready to be offered up and the time of his departure 
was at hand. Thus he fell, smitten unto victory, and in his death he was glorified. 


ENLARGEMENT. 
Brethren, the secret of such a conquest as that is worthy of our effort. One 
man’s career became the history of the commonwealth of God among the Gentiles for 
the first hundred years of its existence. And I am speaking to those in whose lives 


St. Paul's Apology for His Ministry—Cadman. 81 


there are undiscovered provinces of power. They may be known and made to rejoice 
“and blossom as the rose. Jean Paul tells us how the conscious self passes and repasses 
into the unconscious, that further country which enables you to enlarge your boun- 
daries and thus your influence. The dignity, the order, the triumph of life is in the 
constraint of this divine love. For nearly twenty centuries it has filled the bead roll 
of apostles, martyrs, prophets and saints who got the start of ihis majestic world and 
bore the palm alone. Some one has said of Mr. Giadsione that his magnificent char- 
acter would outlive his services, that he was first and last, and in the core of his being, 
an evangelical, clinging with the strong and simple assurance of a childlike faith to the 
central realities of personal sinfulness and personal salvation through the cross of 
Christ. In this trust he lived for nearly eighty years, a career Spent in the most en- 
grossing and distracting of secular occupations. This remarkable testimony needs no 
enforcement. You know that life is to us what we are ito life, it reflects faithfully, as 
in a mirfror, the image of ourselves. The enterprises of men in any sphere hang upon 
the worth of character, the disinterestedness of aim, the purity of motive, without which 
there is no value and no permanency. 


There came to St. Peter this blessing of enlargement upon the shores of the 


ee Se See lL, Ul 


Lake of Galilee. While the dawn was yet gray, Christ drew near as His disciple 

plunged into the sea to meet the Master, and lay at His feet in seli-abasement and 
" tears. His follies and caprices were cleansed away, and the sorry sf denial and 
dl curses was followed by the sermon at Pentecost. So may we be readjusted and 


inspired, filled with spiritual insight and att ess, not by might, nor power of 
man, but by yielding ourselves unto the obedience of Christ, as they that are alive 
from the dead. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST HAS DOMINATED THE HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 


men. The persuasive words of His affection have outrun the deductions of earthly 
#3 Wisdom, and nowhere so conspicuously as in the doctrine of God. I am glad to say 
4 that this conception has grown in influence and become richer in meaning during . 
Merecent years. Men are nearer to God, as Christ revealed Him, than ever before, and 


H because nearer to God, they are nearer to each other. Whom do we name when we 
i Mame God? 


‘3 It had and continues to have a most significant hold upon the reasoned beliefs of 


The answer is in the words of the ercatest Congregatio nalist England had in the 
e Mater Victorian reign, Dr. R. W. Dale of Birmingham: “That name stands for One 

of whose greatness it seems presumptuous to speak and in whose presence silence 
# Seems the truest w Mace t He lives from eternity to eternity. He is here; He is 
Meeverywhere; there is no rem: 


otest region where He is not. To say that He created all 
things, and that, after sustaining all things through co oe Ree s ages, He fainteth not, 
Weneither is weary, is to say nothing concerning His infinite strength. He lives, has 
fever lived and will live forever in the power of His own life. He dwells in light that 
MO man can approach unto. Clouds and darkness are round about Him. God is great 
and we know Him not.” How can this awful God be our’s, our Father and our 
Friend? How can He so temper the light of His radiance that we may meet it and 
not die? 

We need a God who meets us heart to heart, who is nigh at hand and not afar 
off. Legendary incarnations are rude, but sure, witnesses to this craving. A remote 
God of inaccessible majesty and glory does not satisfy us. Here is the most wonder- 
ful and glorious revelation of God. Christ shows His infinitudes by accepting our 
limitations. He came once in the flesh, He comes forever in the spirit, daily, every- 
where, into human life, penetrating the abysmal depths of personality, and forever 


~~ 


a ee eS ee Eee eC ee eemcleremclerelhleeereleeeeeee 


82 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


determines our questionings and solves our problems. Under the forms of humar 
righteousness appeared a divine perfection; through sharpest pain and deepest joy 
bitter suffering and cruel death, Christ’s love took our life into the everlasting life o| 
God, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and thus, so strangely and yet 
so really, did we behold His glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father, 
He showed us that Father, afar off, yet ever nigh, overwhelming and yet comforting 
us, just and still our justifier. His absolute holiness and restless power were indelibl; 
stamped upon our minds. But the voice from out of this glory was a human voice 
articulate with our highest good, crying out to struggling, sinful men: 


“O heart I made, a heart beats here, 

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself. 

Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of Mine, 
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love, . 
And thou must love Me who have died for thee.” 


THE THOUGHT OF GOD IS THE BASIS OF RELIGION. 


Now your thought of God makes or unmakes you as men. It controls every 
feature of your intellectual and religious life. When the writers of the New Testamen 
had grasped this revelation from Christ, they became the literary masters and spirit- 
ual sovereigns of the ages. Even so devoted a medievalist as Cardinal Newman con 
fesses that the chief characteristic of the apostolic era was not churchly allegiance 
but love for the Master. In their efforts to interpret Him they caused an outbreak 
which, led by the Spirit of God, ameliorated brutal conditions and emancipated man 
Think of their organic ideas of sin and retribution, of the duties and privileges o 
the new city of God, of St. Paul’s kindling rapture, St. John’s depth of simplicity, anc 
St. James’ practical ethics. The unique contribution centered in Christ, and ever 
and anon the flow of an argument is checked, the story or the prophecy laid aside 
that they may pour at the feet of Jesus a pent-up flood of praise, gratitude, ascriptior 
and homage. 

THE ATTITUDE OF MODERN THOUGHT. 


We have seen a return to God in these last years. Theologians have become mort 
obedient to the constraint of the text, and have rendered great service to the truth: 
which make men free. When, under overwhelming traditionalism, they wanderec 
from it, their contributions were distractions from the heart of the Gospel. Ane 
throughout the realms of thought today there has come a felt and deep need of God 
and an answering sense of His presence, which, rebuking the more militant form: 
of agnosticism, has moved forward to help and enfranchise human life and to correc’ 
the materialistic bias which predominated a few years ago. 

As the slow process of the ages moves forward, this sense of God’s presence, anc 
the need of it, will grow, in spiritual essence and in range of influence. Periods o} 
doubt are Saharas of useless struggle, and the chief service of much which is wrong 
in metaphysics is to provoke us afresh to seek God. Let us cling to the weapon forget 
in love; there is none like unto it. We shall conquer by these great ideas, whicl 
are the peculiar property of the Christian revelation. They will rob no system of any 
real merit, but rather sanction it, and the overlordship of that persuasive thought o 
God, which is our chief glory, is due to the love of Christ which revealed the Father 
The love of Christ has constrained men toward the behests of conscience; it has made 
them obedient to the call of duty, For it is a benevolent affection, ever seeking the 
highest good of its object. Christ went forth from the arms of Mary to the arms 
of death, and he did this voluntarily, save that He was carried forward to the crimsor 
height by His own great love. Herein is ethical compulsion. for us, and when we aré 
led on to suffer and to die with Him, there falls upon mankind the awe of silent tribute 


St. Paul’s Apology for His Ministry—Cadman. 83 


and the power of the world to come. Such constraint is the apologetic which cannot 
be denied. Livingstone bowed in agony in the African jungle, the tumult of fever 
running high in his wasted body, writing his last word, and determined not to die 


_ until he could plead Ethiopia’s cause once more, is one of those living epistles read 


* 


eh 


and known of all men, whose value to the Christian church is beyond comparison. 
The age is ethical or it is nothing; it demands proof of sacrifice at our hands. How 
can we be capable of response except in our hearts there is shed abroad the all-victor- 
ious love of God? 


THE FIGHT WITH DEATH. 


George Eliot cried out to Mr. F. W. Myers in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity 
College, Cambridge: “Three great words are in our language—God, immortality and 
duty,” and then she added, pathetically, “How inconceivable the first, how unbeliev- 
able the second, yet how peremptory and absolute the third.” We must meet such 
statements on their positive side. The fight with death must be waged through the 
latter trumpet call. 

Men scorn our theology and reject our message, but they cannot dispute the 
value of a noble life, full of gravity and virtue, lived to the last in the right and for 
it, always and at any hazard. For that kind of living our scanty veins do pant, and 
if we would renew the faith of alienated men in the supernatural, we must show more 
of the supernatural in our lives. 

In the life of today political propagandism of virtue is a signal failure, and the 
churches of the earlier times which attempted to control men’s souls through state 
influence must revoke their policy or perish. Democracy will not and should not 
submit to such legislation; it is foreign to the liberty which is in Christ. The only 
way to avoid these difficulties is by a complete submission to the love of our Elder 
Brother, who was obedient as a Son unto his Father. In His life there is a com- 
plete translation of the rule of absolute right out of the abstract into the concrete. 
It is the objective standard of God's will for our guidance, and it is the cleansing 
and guiding power for our life. 

St. Paul went beyond the plane of reason and philosophy, beyond relations and 
the moral order, that he might sit in willing bondage at the feet of Jesus and learn 
of Him. Let us, my brethren, accept this precious gift of God in Christ, heeding no 
false standards nor perplexing counsels. Here is our form, in motive and in action, 
supplied by Him who 

“Wrought 
With human hands the crest of creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought.” 


A FINAL WORD. 


I have come, in obedience to the call of God and of this church, to stand in this 
holy place and give utterance to such truths as our Heavenly Father shall deem me 
worthy to impart to you. The master in Israel who preceded me here was for many 
years a great light in this city, shedding grateful radiance upon darkened hearts and 
troubled minds, giving comfort and strength to sad and weary spirits. Could he but 


_ speak again, and he is very near us this morning, his message from that Sabbath 


a 


keeping of inviolable peace in which he is forever established would be a confirmation 
of the everlasting Gospel it was his joy to proclaim while he was yet with us. 
But we turn our wistful eyes away from the reward given to those saints of God 


_ who rest from their labors, and whose works do follow them. This reward must come 


to us when God willeth; it is coming continually to the worn and the aged who fall 
in the fight. For us there is a future in which disasters must be avoided, wrongs 


84 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


righted, and achievements won. Our work is for the defense and enlargement of 
the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The wages of virtue are not in quiet isles of 
indisturbance, in golden groves and summer skies. Give her endurance by fight, by 
travail, by conscious indestructibility. 


“Give her the wages of going on and not to die.” 


To this end Christ both died and rose again, and to this end we live. For being 
made free from sin, and become servants unto God, we have our fruit unto holiness 
and in the end everlasting life. 


[This is one of Dr. Cadman’s most powerful sermons. It was preached in the 
Central Congregational Church, Brooklyn, March 3, 1901. It is reproduced as revised 
by the author for The Christian Work. 

S. Parkes Cadman was born in England in 1865, graduating from Richmond 
College of London University, taking a post-graduate course in philosophy. Coming 
to America he was assigned to the Central Methodist Church, Yonkers, N. Y., thence 
to the Metropolitan Temple, New York, the membership increasing in six years from 
sixty to over 1,300. In 1900 he accepted a call to the Central Congregational Church, 
Brooklyn, succeeding the late A. J. F. Behrends, Henry Martyn Scudder and others. ] 


RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE. 


JOHN CAIRD, M. A. 


“Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.’’—Romans, 12: 11. 


To combine business with religion, to keep up a spirit of serious piety amid the 
stir and distraction of a busy and active life—this is one of the most difficult parts of a 
Christian’s trial in this world. It is comparatively easy to be religious in the church— 
to collect our thoughts, and compose our feelings, and enter, with an appearance of 
propriety and decorum, into the offices of religious worship, amid the quietude of the 


_ Sabbath, and within the still and sacred precincts of the house of prayer. But to be 


religious in the world—to be pious, and holy, and earnest-minded in the counting- 
room, the manufactory, the market-place, the field, the farm—to carry out our good 
and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life— 
this is the great difficulty of our Christian calling. No man not lost to all moral in- 
fluence can help feeling his worldly passions calmed, and some measure of seriousness 
stealing over his mind, when engaged in the performance of the more awful and sacred 
rites of religion; but the atmosphere of the domestic circle, the exchange, the street, 
the city’s throng, amid coarse work and cankering cares and toils, is a very different 
atmosphere from that of a communion-table. Passing from the one to the other has 
often seemed as if the sudden transition from a tropical to a polar climate—from balmy 
warmth and sunshine to murky mist and freezing cold. And it appears sometimes as 
difficult to maintain the strength and steadfastness of religious principle and feeling, 
when we go forth from the church into the world, as it would be to preserve an exotic 
alive in the open air in winter, or to keep the lamp that burns steadily within doors 
from being blown out if you take it abroad unsheltered from the wind. 

So great, so all but insuperable, has this difficulty ever appeared to men, that it is 
but few who set themselves honestly and resolutely to the effort to overcome it. The 
great majority, by various shifts or expedients, evade the hard task of beir g good and 
holy, at once in the church and in the world. 

In ancient times, for instance, it was, as we all know, the not uncommon expedient 
among devout persons—men deeply impressed with the thought of an eternal world, 
and the necessity of preparing for it, but distracted by the effort to attend to the duties 
of religion amid the business and temptations of secular life—to fly the world alto- 
gether, and, abandoning society and all social claims, to betake themselves to some 
hermit solitude, some quiet and cloistered retreat, where, as they fondly deemed, “the 
world forgetting by the world forgot,” their work would become worship, and life be 
uninterruptedly devoted to the cultivation of religion in the soul. In our own day the 
more common device, where religion and the world conflict, is not that of the super- 
Stitious recluse, but one even much less safe and venial. Keen for this world, yet not 
willing to lose all hold on the next—eager for the advantages of time, yet not prepared 
to abandon all religion and stand by the consequences, there is a very numerous class 
who attempt to compromise the matter—to treat religion and the world like two 
creditors whose claims can not both be liquidated—by compounding with each for a 
share—though in this case a most disproportionate share—of their time and thought. 
“Everything in its own place!” is the tacit reflection of such men. “Prayers, sermons, 


{ 
{ 
y 
t 


tart 


86 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


holy reading”—they will scarcely venture to add, ‘““God’’—“are for Sundays; but week- 
_days are for the sober business, the real, practical affairs of life. Enough if we give the 
} Sunday to our religious duties; we cannot be always praying and reading the Bible. 
| Well enough for clergymen and good persons who have nothing else to do, to attend 
| to religion through the week: but for us, we have other and more practical matters to 
mind.’ And so the result is, that religion is made altogether a Sunday thing—a robe 
too fine for common wear, but taken out solemnly on state occasions, and solemnly 
put past when the state occasion is over. Like an idler in a crowded thoroughfare, 
religion is jostled aside in the daily throng of life, as if it had no business there. Like 
} a needful, yet disagreeable medicine, men will be content to take it now and then for 
their souls’ health; but they can not, and will not, make it their daily fare—the sub- 
stantial and staple nutriment of their life and being. 

Now, you will observe that the idea of religion which is set forth in the text, as 
elsewhere in Scripture, is quite different from any of these notions. The text speaks 
as if the most diligent attention to our worldly business were not by any means incom- 
patible with spirituality of mind and serious devotion to the service of God. It seems 
to imply that religion is not so much a duty, as a something that has to do with all ’ 
duties—not a tax to be paid periodically and got rid of at other times, but a ceaseless, 
all-pervading, inexhaustible tribute to Him, who is not only the object of religious. 
worship, but the end of our very life and being. It suggests to us the idea that piety” 
is not for Sundays only, but for all days; that spirituality of mind is not appropriate 
to one set of actions and an impertinence and intrusion with reference to others, but 
like the act of breathing, like the circulation of the blood, like the silent growth of the | 

, Stature, a process that may be going on simultaneously with all our actions—when we 

- are busiest as when we are idlest; in the church, in the world, in solitude, in society; 

'in our grief and in our gladness; in our toil and in our rest; sleeping, waking; by day, 

| by night—amid all the engagements and exigencies of life. For you perceive that in 
one breath—as duties not only not incompatible, but necessarily and inseparably 
blended with each other—the text exhorts us to be at once ‘‘not slothful in business,” 
and “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” I shall now attempt to prove and illustrate 

| the idea thus suggested to us—the compatibility of Religion with the business of Com-_ 
mon Life. : 

We have, then, Scripture authority for asserting that it is not impossible to live a 
| life of fervent piety amid the most engrossing pursuits and engagements of the world. 
We are to make good this conception of life—that the hardest-wrought man of trade, 
) or commerce, or handicraft, who spends his days “’mid dusky lane or wrangling marl,” 
may yet be the most holy and spiritually-minded. We need not quit the world and 
abandon its busy pursuits in order to live near to God— 


“We need not bid, for cloistered cell, 


Our neighbor and our work farewell: 
| The trivial round, the common task, 
| 
’ 
: 


* ams 


May furnish all we ought to ask— 
Room to deny ourselves, a road 
To bring us, daily, nearer God.” 


It is true indeed that, if in no other way could we prepare for an eternal world 
than by retiring from the business and cares of this world, so momentous are the 
| interests involved in religion, that no wise man should hesitate to submit to the sacri- 
fice. Life here is but a span. Life hereafter is forever. A lifetime of solitude, hard- 
| ship, penury, were all too slight a price to pay, if need be, for an eternity of bliss: and 

the results of our most incessant toil and application to the world’s business, could 
they secure for us the highest prizes of earthly ambition, would be purchased at a 
| tremendous cost, if they stole away from us the only time in which we could prepare 
\ id . 


CC 


Religion in Common Life—Caird. 87 
to meet our God—if they left us at last rich, gay, honored, possessed of every thing 
the world holds dear, but to face an eternity undone. If, therefore, in no way could 
you combine business and religion, it would indeed be, not fanaticism, but most sober 
wisdom and prudence, to let the world’s business come to a stand. It would be the 
duty of the mechanic, the man of business, the statesman, the scholar—men of every 
secular calling—without a moment’s delay to leave vacant and silent the familiar scenes 
of their toils—to turn life into a perpetual Sabbath, and betake themselves, one and all, 
to an existence of ceaseless prayer, and unbroken contemplation, and devout care of 
the soul. 
: But the very impossibility of such a sacrifice proves that no such sacrifice is de- 
manded. He who rules the world is no arbitrary tyrant prescribing impracticable 
bors. In the material world there are no conflicting laws; and no more, we may rest 
ssured, are there established in the moral world, any two laws, one or the other of 
which must needs be disobeyed. Now one thing is certain, that there is in the moral 
world a law of labor. Secular work, in all cases a duty, is, in most cases, a necessity. 
God might have made us independent of work. He might have nourished us like “the 
fowls of the air-and the lilies of the field,” which “toil not, neither do they spin.” He 
might have rained down our daily food, like the manna of old, from heaven, or caused 
nature to yield it in unsolicited profusion to all, and so set us free to a life of devotion. 
But, forasmuch as He has not done so—forasmuch as He has so constituted us that 
without work we cannot eat, that if men ceased for a single day to labor, the machinery 
of life would come to a stand, and arrest be laid on science, civilization and progress— 
on every thing that is conducive to the’welfare of man in the present life—we may 
safely conclude that religion, which is also good for man, which is, indeed, the supreme 
good of man, is not inconsistent with hard work, It must undoubtedly be the design 
of our gracious God that all this toil for the supply of our physical necessities—this 
incessant occupation amid the things that perish, shall be no obstruction, but rather a 
help to our spiritual life. The weight of a clock seems a heavy drag on the delicate 
movements of its machinery; but so far from arresting or impeding those movements, 
it is indispensable to their steadiness, balance, accuracy: there must be some analogous 
action of what seems the clog and drag-weight of worldly work on the finer move- 
ments of man’s spiritual being. The planets in the heavens have a two-fold motion, 
in their orbits and on their axes—the one motion not interfering, but carried on simul- 
taneously, and in perfect harmony, with the other: so must it be that man’s two-fold 
activities—round the heavenly and the earthly center, disturb not, nor jar with, each 
other. He who diligently discharges the duties of the earthly, may not less sedulously 
—nay, at the same moment—fulfill those of the heavenly sphere; at once “diligent in 
business” and “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” 


And that this is so—that this blending of religion with the work of common life 
is not impossible, you will readily perceive, if you consider for a moment what, accord- 
ing to the right and proper notion of it, Religion is. What do we mean by “Religion?” 


Religion may be viewed in two aspects. It is a Science, and it is an Art; in other 
words, a system of doctrines to be believed, and a system of duties to be done. View 
it in either light, and the point we are insisting on may, without difficulty, be made 
good. View it as a Science—as truth to be understood and believed. If religious 
truth were, like many kinds of secular truth, hard, intricate, abstruse, demanding for its 
study not only the highest order of intellect, but all the resources of education, books, 
learned leisure, then indeed to most men the blending of religion with the necessary 
avocations of life would be an impossibility. In that case it would be sufficient excuse 
for irreligion to plead, “My lot in life is inevitably one of incessant care and toil, of 
busy, anxious thought, and wearing work. Inextricably involved, every day and hour 
as I am, in the world’s business, how is it possible for me to devote myself to this high 


\ 


88 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and abstract science?” If religion were thus, like the hizher mathematics of meta- 
physics, a science based on the most recondite and elaborate reasonings, capable of 
being mastered only by te acutest minds, after years of study and laborious investiga- 
tion, then might it well be urged by many an unleitered man of toil, “I am no scholar 
—I have no head to comprehend these hard dogmas and doctrines. Learn:== and 
religion are, no doubt, fine things, but they are not for humble and hard-wrought folk 
like me!” In this case. indeed, the gcspel would be no gespel at all—no good news of 
heavenly love and mercy to the whole sin-ruined race of man, but only a gospel for 
scholars—a religion, like the ancient philosophies, for a scanty minority, clever enough 
to grasp its principles, and set free from active business to devote themselves to the 
development and discussion of its doctrines. 


But the gospel is no such system of high and abstract truth. The salvation it 
offers is not the prize of a lofty intellect, but of a lowly heart. The mirror in which its 
grand truths are reflected is not a mind of calm and philosophic abstraction, but a 
heart of earnest purity. Its light shines best and fullest, not on a life undisturbed by 
business, but on a soul unstained by sin. /The religion of Christ, while it affords scope 
for the loftiest intellect in the contemplation and development of its glorious truths, is 
yet, in the exquisite simplicity of its essential facts and principles, patent to the 
simplest mind. Rude, untutored, toil-worn you may be, but if you have wit enough to 
guide you in the commonest round of daily toil, you have wit enough to learn to be 
saved. The truth as it is in Jesus, while, in one view of it, so profound that the highest 
archangel’s intellect may be lost in the contemplation of its mysterious depths, is yet, 
in another, so simple that the lisping babe at a mother’s knee may learn its meaning. 

Again: view religion as an Art, and in this light, too, its compatibility with a 
busy and active life in the world, it will not be difficult to perceive. For religion as an 
art differs from secular arts in this respect, that it may be practiced simultaneously 
with other arts—with all other work and occupation in which we may be engaged. 
A man can not be studying architecture and law at the same time. The medical prac- 
titioner can not be engaged with his patients, and at the same time planning houses 
or building bridges—practicing, in other words, both medicine and engineering at 
one and the same moment. The practice of one secular art excludes for the time the 
practice of other secular arts. But not so with the art of religion. This is the universal ! 
art, the common, all-embracing profession. It belongs to no one set of functionaries, 
to no special class of men. Statesman, soldier, lawyer, physician, poet, painter, trades- 
man, farmer—men oi every craft and calling in life—may, while in the actual discharge 


of the duties of their varied avocations, be yet, at the same moment, discharging the 


duties of a higher and nobler vocation—practicing the art of a Christian. Secular arts, 
in most cases, demand of him, who would attain to eminence in any one of them, an 
almost exclusive devotion of time, and thought, and toil. The most versatile genius 
can seldom be master of more than one art; and for the great majority the only 
calling must be that by which they can earn their daily bread. Demand of the poor 
tradesman or peasant, whose every hour is absorbed in the struggle to earn a com- 
petency for himself and his family, that he shall be also a thorough proficient in the 
art of the physician, or lawyer, or sculptor, and you demand an impossibility. If 
religion were an art such as these, few indeed could learn it. The two admonitions, 
“Be diligent in business,” and “Be fervent in spirit, serving the Lord,” would be 
reciprocally destructive. 


But religion is no such art, for it is the art of being, and of doing, good: to be an 
adept in it, is to become just, truthful, sincere, self-denied, gentle, forbearing, pure in 
word and thought and deed. And the school for learning this art is not the closet, But 
the world—not some hallowed spot where religion is taught, and proficients, when 
duly trained, are sent forth into the world—but the world itself—the coarse, profane, 


Religion in Common Life—Caird. 89 


common world, with its cares and temptations, its rivalries and competitions, its 
hourly, ever-recurring trials of temper and character. This is, therefore, an art which 
all can practice, and for which every profession and calling, the busiest and most 
absorbing, afford scope and discipline. When a child is learning to write, it matters 
not of what words the copy set to him is composed, the thing desired being that what- 
ever he writes, he learn to write well. When a man is learning to be a Christian, it 
matters not what his particular work in life may be; the work he does is but the copy- 
line set to him; the main thing to be considered is that he learn to live well. The 
form is nothing, the execution is everything. \It is true indeed that prayer, holy 
reading, meditation, the solemnities and services cf the Church are necessary to— 
religion, and that these can be practiced only apart from the work of secular life. But 
it is to be remembered that all such holy exercises do not tefminate in themselves. 
They are but steps in the ladder of heaven, good only as they help us to climb. They 
are the irrigation and enriching of the spiritual soil—worse than useless if the crop be 
not more abundant. They are, in short, but means to an end—good, only in so far as 
they help us to be good and do good—to glorify God and do good to man; and that 
end can perhaps be best attained by him whose life is a busy one, whose avocations 
bear him daily into contact with his fellows, into the intercourse of society, into the 
heart of the world. No man can be a thorough proficient in navigation who has never 
been at sea, though he may learn the theory of it at home. No man can become a 
soldier by studying books on military tactics in his closet: he must in actual service 
acquire those habits of coolness, courage, discipline, address, rapid combination, 
without which the most learned in the theory of strategy or engineering will be but a 
‘school-boy soldier after all. And, in the same way, a man in solitude and study may 
become a most learned theologian, or may train himself into the timid, effeminate piety 
of what is technically called “the religious life.” But never, in the highest and holiest 
sense, can he become a religious man until he has acquired those habits of daily self- 
denial, of resistance to temptation, of kindness, gentleness, humility, sympathy, active 
benificence, which are to be acquired only in daily contact with mankind. Tell us not, 


then, that the man of business, the bustling tradesman, the toil-worn laborer, has‘, 


little or no time to attend to religion. As well tell us that the pilot amid the winds 
arid storms has no leisure to attend to navigation—or the general on the field of battle, 
to the art of war! Where will he attend to it? Religion is not a perpetual moping 
over good books—religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances; these are 


necessary to religion—no man can be religious without them. But religion, I repeat, 
is mainly and chiefly the glorifying God amid the duties and trials of the world; 


manfully, wisely, courageously, for the honor of Christ, our great Leader, in the 
conflict of life. Away, then, with the notion that ministers and devotees may be 


Teligious, but that a religious and holy life is impracticable in the rough and busy 
world! Nay rather, believe me, that is the proper scene, the peculiar and appropriate 
field for religion—the place in which to prove that piety is not a dream of Sundays 
and solitary hours; that it can bear the light of day; that it can wear well amid the 
rough jostlings, the hard struggles, the coarse contacts of common life—the place, in 
one word, to prove how possible it is for a man to be at once not “slothful in busi- 
ness,” and “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” 


Another consideration which I shal! adduce in support of the assertion that it is 
ot impossible to blend religion with the business of common life, is this: that reli- 
ion consists not so much in doing spiritual or sacred acts, as in doing secular acts 
rom a sacred or spiritual motive. 


There is a very common tendency in our minds to classify actions according to 


iL 


66 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


their outward form, rather than according to the spirit or motive which pervades them. 
Literature is sometimes arbitrarily divided into “sacred” and “profane” literature, . 
history into “sacred” and “profane” history—in which classification the term “profane” 
is applied, not to what is bad or unholy, but to every thing that is not technically 
sacred or religious—to all literature that does not treat of religious doctrines and 
duties, and to all history save Church history. And we are very apt to apply the same 
principle to actions. Thus, in many pious minds there is a tendency to regard all the 
actions of common life as so much—an unfortunate necessity—lost to religion. 
‘Prayer, the reading of the Bible and devotional books, public worship—and buying, — 
SOE ain sewring,_bertering-Mmoney-makine are separa eller Zping, sowing,—bartering; money-making, are separated into two distinct, 
and almost hostile, categories. The religious heart and sympathies are thrown entirely 
into the former, and the latter are barely tolerated as a bondage incident to our fallen 
state, but almost of necessity tending to turn aside the heart from God. 


But what God hath cleansed, why should we call common or unclean? The ten- 
dency in question, though founded on right feeling, is surely a mistaken one. For it is 
to be remembered that moral qualities reside _not in actions, but in the agent who 
performs them, and that it is the spirit or motive from which we do any work that 
constitutes it base or noble, worldly or spiritual, secular or sacred. The actions of 
an automaton may be outwardly the same as those of a moral agent, but who attri- 
butes to them goodness or badness? A musical instrument may discuss sacred 
melodies better than the holiest lips can sing them, but who thinks of commending it 
for its piety? It is the same with actions as with places. Just as no spot or scene on 
earth is in itself more or less holy than another; but the presence of a holy heart may 
hallow—of a base one, desecrate—any place where it dwells; so with actions. Many 
actions, materially great and noble, may yet, because of the spirit that prompts and 
pervades them, be really ignoble and mean; and, on the other hand, many actions, 
externally mean and lowly, may, because of the state of his heart who does them, be 
truly exalted and honorable. It is possible to fill the highest station on earth, and 
go through the actions pertaining to it in a spirit that degrades all its dignities, and 
renders all its high and courtly doings essentially vulgar and mean. And it is no 
mere sentimentality to say, that there may dwell in a lowly mechanic’s or household 
servant's breast a spirit that dignifies the coarsest toils and ‘‘renders drudgery divine.” 
Herod of old was a slave, though he sat upon a throne; but who will say that the 
work of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth was not noble and kingly work indeed? 


And as the mind constitutes high or low, so secular or spiritual. A life spent 
amid holy things may be intensely secular; a life, the most of which is passed in the 
thick and throng of the world, may be holy and divine. A minister, for instance, 
preaching, praying, ever speaking holy words and performing sacred acts, may be all 
the while doing actions no more holy than those of a printer who prints Bibles, or of 
the bookseller who sells them; for, in both cases alike, the whole affair may be nothing 
more than a trade. Nay, the comparison tells worse for the former, for the secular 
trade is innocent and commendable, but the trade which trafics and tampers with 
holy things is, beneath all its mock solemnity, “earthly, sensual, devilish.” So, to 
adduce one other example, the public worship of God is holy work: no man can be 
living a holy life who neglects it. But the public worship of God may be—and with 


» multitudes who frequent our churches is—degraded into work most worldly, most 


unholy, most distasteful to the great Object of our homage. He ‘to whom all hearts 
be open, all desires known,” discerns how many of you have come hither today from 
the earnest desire to hold communion with the Father of spirits, to open your hearts 
to Him, to unburden yourselves in His loving presence, of the cares and crosses that 
have been pressing hard upon you through the past week, and by common prayer and 
praise, and the hearing of His holy word, to gain fresh incentive and energy for the 


Religion in Common Life—Caird. , ot 


prosecution of His work in the world; and how many, on the other hand, from no 
better motive, perhaps, than curiosity or old habit, or regard to decency and respect- 
ability, or the mere desire to get rid of yourselves and pass a vacant hour that would 
hang heavy on your hands. And who can doubt that, where such motives as these 
prevail, to the piercing, unerring inspection of Him whom outwardly we seem to 
reverence, not the market-place, the exchange, the counting-room, is a place more 
intensely secular—not the most reckless and riotous festivity, a scene of more unhal- 
lowed levity, than is presented by the house of prayer? 

But, on the other hand, carry holy principles with you into the world, and the 
world will become hallowed by their presence, A Christ-like spirit will Christianize 
everything it touches. A meek heart, in which the altar-fire of love to God is burning, 
will lay hold of the commonest, rudest things in life, and transmute them, like coarse 
fuel at the touch of fire, into a pure and holy flame. Religion in the soul will make 
all the work and toil of life—its gains and losses, friendships, rivalries, competitions, 
its manifold incidents and events—the means of religious advancement. Marble or 
coarse clay, it matters not much with which of these the artist works, the touch of 
genius transforms the coarser material into beauty, and lends to the finer a value it 
never had before. Lofty or lowly, rude or refined as life’s work to us may be, it will 
become to a holy mind only the material for an infinitely nobler than all the creations 
of genius—the image of God in the soul. To spiritualize what is material, to Chris- 
tianize what is secular—this is the noble achievement of Christian principle. If you 
are a sincere Christian, it will be your great desire, by God’s grace, to make every 
gift, talent, occupation of life, every word you speak, every action you do, subservient 
to Christian motive. Your conversation may not always—nay, may seldom, save 
with intimate friends—consist of formally religious words; you may perhaps shrink 
from the introduction of religious topics in general society: but it demands a less 
amount of Christian effort occasionally to speak religious words, than to infuse the 
spirit of religion into all our words; and if the whole tenor of your common talk be 
pervaded by a spirit of piety, gentleness, earnestness, sincerity, it will be Christian 
conversation not the less. If God has endowed you with intellectual gifts, it may be 
well if you directly devote them to His service in the religious instruction of others; 
but a man may be a Christian thinker and writer as much when giving to science, or 
history, or biography, or poetry, a Christian tone and spirit, as when composing 
sermons or writing hymns. To promote the cause of Christ directly, by furthering 
every religious and missionary enterprise at home and abroad, is undoubtedly your 
duty; but remember that your duty terminates not when you have done all this, for 
you may promote Christ’s cause even still more effectually when in your daily 
demeanor—in the family, in society, in your business transactions, in all your common 
intercourse with the world—you are diffusing the influence of Christian principle 
around you by the silent eloquence of a holy life. Rise superior, in Christ’s strength, 
to all equivocal practices and advantages in trade; shrink from every approach to 
meanness or dishonesty; let your eye, fixed on a reward before which earthly wealth 
grows dim. beam with honor; let the thought of God make you self-restrained, tem- 
perate, watchiul over speech and conduct; let the abiding sense of Christ’s redeeming 
love to you make you gentle, self-denied, kind, and loving to all around you; then 
indeed will your secular life become spiritualized, while at the same time your 
spiritual life will grow more fervent; then not only will your prayers become more 
devout, but when the knee bends not, and the lip is silent, the life in its heavenward 
t will “pray without ceasing;” then from amid the roar and din of earthly toil the 
ear of God will hear the sweetest anthems rising; then, finally, will your daily expe- 
rience prove that it is no high and unattainable elevation of virtue, but a simple and 


92 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


natural thing to which the text points, when it bids us be both “diligent in business” 
and “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” 

As a last illustration of the possibility of blending religion with the business of 
common life, let me call your attention to what may be described as the Mind’s power 
of acting on Latent Principles. 

In order to live a religious life in the world, every action must be governed by 
religious motives. But in making this assertion it is not, by any means, implied, that 
in all the familiar actions of our daily life religion must form a direct and conscious 
object of thought. To_be always thinking of God, and Christ, and eternity amid our 
worldly work; and however busy, eager, interested we may be in the special business 
betore us, to have religious ideas, doctrines, beliefs, present fo the thi mply 
Gmpossible. ‘The mind can no more consciously Think —Ot-heaven Ral canta ae ene 
same moment than the body can be in heaven and earth at the same moment. More- 
over, there are few kinds of work in the world that, to be well done, must not be done 
heartily; many that require, in order to excellence, the whole condensed force and 
energy of the highest mind. 

But though it be true that we can not, in our worldly work, be always consciously 
thinking of religion, yet it is also true that, unconsciously, insensibly, we may be 
acting under its ever-present control. As there are laws and powers in the natural — 
orld, of which, without thinking of them, we are ever availing ourselves—as I do 
not think of gravitation when, by its aid, I lift my arm, or of atmospheric laws, when, 
by means of them, I breathe, so in the routine of daily work, though comparatively 
seldom do I think of them, I may yet be constantly swayed by the motives, sustained 
by the principles, living, breathing, acting in the invisible atmosphere of true religion. 
There are under-currents in the ocean which act independently of the movement of 
the waters on the surface; far down too in its hidden depths there is a region where, 
even though the storm be raging on the upper waves, perpetual calmness and stillness 


reign. So there may be an under-current beneath the surface-movements of your life— 
there mayrdwell in the secret Tepihs of yOuF DEE Ihe abiding peace of God, the repose 
‘of a holy mind, even though, all the while, the restless stir and commotion of worldly 
DSS Ey Or er soy 


And, in order to see this, it is to be remembered that many of the thoughts and 
motives that most powerfully impel and govern us in the common actions of life are 
latent thoughts and motives. Have you not often experienced that curious law— 
a law, perhaps, contrived by God, with an express view to this its highest application— 
by which a secret thought or feeling may lie brooding in your mind, quite apart from 
the particular work in which you happen to be employed? Have you never, for 
instance, while reading aloud, carried along with you in your reading the secret 
impression of the presence of the listener—an impression that kept pace with all the 
mind’s activity in the special work of reading; nay, have you not sometimes felt the 
mind, while prosecuting without interruption the work of reading, yet at the same 
time carrying on some other train of reflection apart altogether from that suggested 
by the book? Here is obviously a particular “business” in which you were “diligent,” 
yet another and different thought to which the “spirit” turned. Or, think of the work 
in which I am this moment occupied. Amid all the mental exertions of the public 
speaker—underneath the outward workings of his mind, so to speak, there is the latent 
thought of the presence of his auditory. Perhaps no species of exertion requires 
greater concentration of thought or undividedness of attention than this: and yet, 
amid all the subtle processes of intellect—the excogitation or recollection of ideas— 
the selection, right ordering, and enunciation of words, there never quits his mind for 
one moment the idea of the presence of the listening throng. Like a secret atmos- 
phere it surrounds and bathes his spirit as he goes on with the external work, And 


Religion in Common Life—Caird. 93 


_ have not you, too, my friends, an Auditor—it may be, a “great cloud of witnesses’”— 
but at least one all-glorious Witness and Listener ever present, ever watchful, as the 
discourse of life proceeds? Why then, in this case too, while the outward business 
is diligently prosecuted, may there not be on your spirit a latent and constant impres- 
sion of that awful inspection? What worldly work so absorbing as to leave no room 
in a believer’s spirit for the hallowing thought of that glorious Presence ever near? 
Do not say that you do not see God—that the presence of the divine Auditor is not 
forced upon your senses, as that of the human auditory on the speaker. For the same 

_ process goes on in the secret meditations as in the public addresses of the preacher— 
the same latent reference to those who shall listen to his words dweils in his mind when 
in his solitary retirement he thinks and writes, as when he speaks in their immediate 
presence. And surely if the thought of an earthly audiiory—oi human minds and 
hearts that shall respond to his thoughts and words—can intertwine itself wit all the 
activities of a man’s mind, and flash back inspiration on his soul, at least as potent and 
as penetrating may the thought be, of Him, the great Lord of heaven and earth, who 
not only sees and knows us now, but before whose awful presence, in the last great 

_ congregation, we shall stand forth to recount and answer for our every thought and 


_ deed. 


Or, to take but one other example, have we not all felt that the thought of 
anticipated happiness may blend itself with the work of our busiest hours? The 
laborer’s evening release from toil—the schoolboy’s coming holiday, or the hard- 
wrought business-man’s approaching season of relaxation—the expected return of a 
long absent and much-loved friend—is not the thought of these, or similar joyous 

_ events, one which oiten intermingles with, without interrupting, our common work? 
When a father goes forth to his “labor till the evening,” perhaps often, very often, in 

_ the thick of his toils, the thought of home may start up to cheer him. The smile that 

is to welcome him, as he crosses his lowly threshold when the work of the day is over, 

the glad faces, and merry voices, and sweet caresses of little ones, as they shall gather 

round him in the quiet ev Sees h se a pousht of all this may dw ell a latent j 

a hidden motive j 


a secre ; v TE FON € olen eet ae oer precious to be 


_ parted with even for a moment. 
And why may not the highest of all hopes and ossess the same all-pervadin 


_ influence? ave we, if Our religio on be real, no anticipation of happiness in the 
Blorious future? Is there no “rest that remaineth for the people of God,” no home 
and loving heart awaiting us when the toils of our hurried day of life are ended? 
What i is earthly rest or relaxation, what that release from toil after which we so often 
sigh, but the faint shadow of the saint's everlasting rest—the repose of eternal purity— 
the calm of a spirit in which, not the tension of labor only, but the strain of the moral 
‘Strife with sin, has ceased—the rest of the soul in God! What visions of earthly bliss 
can ever—if our Christian faith be not a form—compare with “the glory soon to be 
revealed;” what joy of earthly reunion with the rapture of the hour when the heavens 
‘shall yield our absent Lord to our embrace, to be parted from us no more forever! 
_ And if all this be not a dream and a fancy, but most sober truth, what is there to except 
e joyful hope from that law to which, in all other deep joys, our minds are subject? 

y may we not, in this case, too, think often, amid our r worldly work, of the Home 
to which we are going, of the true and loving heart that beats for us, and of the sweet 
and j joyous welcome that awaits us there? And, even when we make them not, of set 


pie 


“ L 


94 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


purpose, the subject of our thoughts, is there not enough of grandeur in the objects of 
a believer’s hope to pervade his spirit at all times with a calm and reverential joy? 
Do not think all this strange, fanatical, impossible. If it do seem so, it can only be 
because your heart is in the earthly hopes, but not in the higher and holier hopes— 
because love to Christ is still to you but a name—because you can give more ardor of 
thought to the anticipation of a coming holiday than to the hope of heaven and glory 
everlasting. No, my friends! the strange thing is, not that amid the world’s work we 
should be able to think of our Home, but that we should ever be able to forget it; 
and the stranger, sadder still, that while the little day of life is passing—morning, 
noontide, evening—each stage more rapid than the last, while to many the shadows are 
already fast lengthening, and the declining sun warns them that “the night is at hand, 
wherein no man can work,” there should be those among us whose whole thoughts are 
absorbed in the business of the world, and to whom the reflection never occurs’ that 
soon they must go out into eternity—without a friend—without a home! 

Such, then is the true idea of the Christian life—a life not of periodic observances, 
or of occasional fervors, or even of splendid acts of heroism and self-devotion, but of 
quiet, constant, unobtrusive earnestness, amid the common-place work of the world. 
This is the life to which Christ calls us. Is it yours? Have you entered upon it, or are you 
now willing to enter upon it? It is not, I admit, an imposing or an easy one. There 
is nothing in it to dazzle, much in its hardness and plainness to deter the irresolute. 
The life of a follower of Christ demands not, indeed, in our day, the courage of the 
hero or the martyr, the fortitude that braves outward dangers and sufferings, and 
flinches not from persecution and death. But with the age of persecution the diff- 
culties of the Christian life have not passed away. In maintaining a spirit of Christian 
cheerfulness and contentment—in the unambitious routine of humble duties—in pre- 
serving the fervor of piety amid the unexciting cares and wearing anxieties—in the 
perpetual reference to lofty ends amid lowly toils—there may be evinced a faith as 
strong as that of the man who dies with the song of martyrdom on his lips. It is a 
great thing to love Christ so dearly as to be “ready to be bound and to die” for Him; 
but it is often a thing not less great to be ready to take up our daily cross, and to 
live for Him. 

But be the difficulties of a Christian life in the world what they may, they need 
not discourage us. Whatever the work to which our Master calls us, He offers us a 
strength commensurate with our needs. No man who wishes to serve Christ will ever 
fail for lack of heavenly aid. And it will be no valid excuse for an ungodly life that it 
is difficult to keep alive the flame of piety in the world, if Christ be ready to supply 
the fuel. 

To all, then, who really wish to lead such a life, let me suggest that the first thing 
to be done—that without which all other efforts are worse than vain, is heartily to 
devote themselves to God through Christ Jesus. Much as has been said of the infu- 
sion of religious principle and motive into our worldly work, there is a preliminary 
advice of greater importance still—that we be religious. Life comes before growth. 
The soldier must enlist before he can serve. In vain, directions how to keep the fire 
ever burning on the altar, if first it be not kindled. No religion can be genuine, no 
goodness can be constant or lasting, that springs not, as its primary source, from faith 
in Jesus Christ. To know Christ as my Savior—to come with all my guilt and weak- 
ness to Him in whom trembling penitence never fails to find a friend—to cast myself at 
His feet in whom all that is sublime in divine holiness is softened, though not obscured, 
by all that is beautiful in human tenderness; and, believing in that love stronger than 
death, which, for me, and such as me, drained the cup of untold sorrows, and bore 
without a murmur the bitter curse of sin, to trust my soul for time and eternity into 
His hands—this is the beginning of true religion. And it is the reverential love with 
which the believer must ever look to Him to whom he owes so much, that constitutes 


e 


Religion in Common Life—Caird. 95 


_ the main-spring of the religion of daily life. Selfishness may prompt to a formal reli- 
gion, natural susceptibility may give rise to a fitful one, but for a life of constant 
fervent piety amid the world’s cares and toils, no motive is sufficient save one—self- 
devoted love to Christ. 

But again, if you would lead a Christian life in the world, let me remind you that 
that life must be continued as well as begun with Christ. You must learn to look to 
Him not merely as your Savior from guilt, but as the Friend of your secret life, the 
chosen Companion of your solitary hours, the Depositary of all the deeper thoughts 
and feelings of your soul. You can not live for Him in the world unless you live 
much with Him apart from the world. In spiritual, as in secular things, the deepest 
and strongest characters need much solitude to form them. Even earthly greatness, 
much more moral and spiritual greatness, is never attained but as the result of much 

_ that is concealed from the world—of many a lonely and meditative hour. Thought- 
fulness, self-knowledge, self-control, a chastened wisdom and piety, are the fruit of 
habitual meditation and prayer. In these exercises heaven is brought near, and our 
exaggerated estimate of earthly things corrected. By these our spiritual energies, 
shattered and worn by the friction of worldly work, are repaired. In the recurring 
seasons of devotion the cares and anxieties of worldly business cease to vex us; 
exhausted with its toils, we have, in daily communion with God, “‘meat to eat which 
the world knoweth not of;’” and even when its calamities and losses fall upon us, and 
our portion of worldly good may be withdrawn, we may be able to show, like those 
holy ones of old at the heathen court, by the fair serene countenance of the spirit, that 
we have something better than the world’s pulse to feed upon. 

But, further, in availing yourself of this divine resource amid the daily exigencies 
of life, why should you wait always for the periodic season and.the formal attitude of 
prayer? The heavens are not open to the believer’s call only at intervals. The grace 
of God’s Holy Spirit falls not like the fertilizing shower, only now and then; or like 
the dew on the earth’s face, only at morning and night. At all times, on the uplifted 
face of the believer’s spirit, the gracious element is ready to descend. Pray always; 
pray without ceasing. When difficulties arise, delay not to seek and obtain at once the 
Succor you need. Swifter than by the subtle electric agent is thought borne from 
earth to heaven. The Great Spirit on high is in constant sympathy with the spirit 
beneath, and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the thrill of aspiration flashes 
from the heart of man to God. Whenever anything vexes you—whenever, from the 
rude and selfish ways of men, any trials of temper cross your path; when your spirits 
are ruffled, or your Christian forbearance put to the test, be this your instant resource! 
Haste away, if only for a moment, to the serene and peace-breathing presence of Jesus, 
and you will not fail to return with a spirit soothed and calmed. Or when the impure 
and low-minded surround you—when, in the path of duty, the high tone of your 
Christian purity is apt to suffer from baser contacts—O, what relief to lift the heart to 
_ Christ! to rise on the wings of faith—even for one instant to breathe the air of that 
_ fegion where the infinite Purity dwells, and then return with a mind steeled against 
_ temptation, ready to recoil with the instinctive abhorrence of a spirit that has been 

beside the throne, from all that is impure and vile. Say not, then, with such aid at 

_ your command, that religion can not be brought down to Common Life! 

2 In conclusion, let me once more urge upon you the great lesson upon which we 

a have been insisting. Carry religious principle into every-day life. Principle elevates 

_ whatever it touches. Facts lose all their littleness to the mind which brings principle 

_ and law to bear upon them. The chemist’s or geologist’s soiled hands are no sign of 

_ base work; the coarsest operations of the laboratory, the breaking of stones with a 

_ hammer, cease to be mechanical when intellectual thought and principle govern the 

_ mind and guide the hands. And religious principle is the noblest of all. Bring it to 

__ bear on common actions and coarse cares, and infinitely nobler even than the philo- 


_ Sophic or scientific, becomes the Christian life, Live for Christ i zS 


, a 


96 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 
and all your work will bec i E As in the temple of old, it was holy work 


to hew wood or mix oil, because it was done for the altar-sacrifice or the sacred lamps; 
so all your coarse and common work will receive a consecration when done for God’s 
glory, by one who is a true priest to his temple. 

Carry religion into common life, and your life will be rendered useful as well as 
noble, There are many men who listen incredulously to the high-toned exhortations 
ofthe pulpit; the religious life there depicted is much too seraphic, they think, for 
this plain and prosaic world of ours. Show these men that the picture is not a fancy 
one. Make it a reality. Bring religion down from the clouds. Apply to it the 
infallible test of experiment, and, by diffusing your daily actions with holy principles, 
prove that love to God, superiority to worldly pleasure, spirituality, holiness, 
heavenly-mindedness, are something more than the stock ideas of sermons. 

Carry religion into common life, and common life will lose its transitoriness. ‘““The 
world passeth away!” The things that are seen are temporal. Soon business, with all 
its cares and anxieties—the whcle ‘unprofitable stir and fever of the world”—will be to 
us a thing of the past. But religion does something better i ch and muse over 
the perishableness of earthly things: it finds in them the s No 
work done for Christ perishes; no action that helps to mold the deathless mind of a 
saint of God is ever lost. Live for Christ in the world, and you carry out with you 
into eternity all of the results of the world’s business that are worth the keeping. The 
river of life sweeps on, but the gold grains it held in solution are left behind, deposited 
in the holy heart. ‘‘The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth 
the will of God abideth forever.’”” Every other result of our “diligence in business” 
will soon be gone. You can not invent any mode of exchange between the visible and 
invisible worlds, so that the balance at your credit in the one can be transferred, when 
you migrate from it, to your account in the other. Worldly sharpness, acuteness, ver- 
satility, are not the qualities in request in the world to come. The capacious intellect, 
stored with knowledge, and disciplined with admirable perspicacity, tact, worldly 
wisdom, by a lifetime devoted to politics or business, is not, by such attainments, fitted 
to take a higher place among the sons ci immortality. The honor, fame, respect, obse- 
quious homage that atiend worldly greatness up to the grave’s brink, will not follow 
it one step beyond. These advantages are not to be despised; but if these be all that, 
by the toil of our hand, Or the sweat of our brow, we have gained, the hour is fast” 
coming when we shail discoi that» we have labored in vain, and spent our strength 
for naught. But while thes: ese are other things that remain. The world’s 
gains and losses may soon c: us, but not the gratitude or the patience, the 
kindness or the resignation ‘orth from our hearts. The world’s scenes of 
t; the ne cf its restless pursuits may fall no more upon 
our ear, when we pass £0 meet our God; but not one unselfish thought, not one kind 
and gentle word, not one act of sell-sacrincing love done for Jesus’ sake, in the midst 
of our common work, but wi! ielible impress on the soul, which will go 
out with it to its eternai de that this may be the result of your 
labors; so live that your wo urch or in the world, may become a 
discipline for that is rious he Cl 


Oo 
Ht 6 


rk, whether i 
state of being in which the Church and the world shall 

become one; where work shall be w ae and labor shall be rest; where the worker 
shall never quit the temple, nor the worshiper the place of work, because “there is no) 
temple therein, but the iia God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof.” 

[John Caird was born at Greenock, Scotland, 1820, and came to be known as one) 
of the leading pulpit orators. In 1862 he was projessor of ' divinity in the University of 
Glasgow, and became principal of the University in 1873. His liter ary work consists” 
principally of Religions oi India, an Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, ete: 

This sermon is the one preached before the Queen, and print aa at her “command. 
Many thousands of copies of it were sold in Engiand. His Union with God is sai 
to be equal to it, but not so well-known.] 


ON THE JUSTIFICATION AND CORONA- 
TION OF THE MESSIAH. 


ALEXANDER CAMPBELL. 


“Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in 
the flesh, justified by the spirit, seen of angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed on 
in the world, received up to glory.”” I Tim. 3:16. “But we see Jesus, who for a little 
while was made less than the angels, that by the grace of God He might taste death 
for all, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor.” Heb. 2: 9. 


_ The destiny of a man, a nation, an empire, a world, is sometimes suspended on 
a single event. On one act of one man, God, in His infinite wisdom and benevolence, 
suspended the entire destinies of the world. 

There is but one center in every circle, one center in the solar system; one center 
in the universe; and one central idea in nature, providence and redemption. Around 
that idea the physical, the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual universe revolves. If 
God delights in number, in variety, in magnitude, as the universe attests, He also 
delights in simplicity, in individuality, and in unity. Hence, one law is but the result 
of the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the universe. And from the continual 
antagonism of these forces arise all the order, the beauty, the life and happiness of 
all the empires of creation. 

But to man—fallen, ruined man—to his dim vision in this murky atmosphere, 
notwithstanding all its order, harmony, and beauty, the universe, at this peculiar 
angle of observation, appears as a “maze without a plan.”’ He sees an alternation of 
light and darkness, of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, of pleasure and pain, 
of life and death. Jaundiced with sin, to his moral vision, the evil transcends the 
good; corruption and decay luxuriate on youth and beauty; adversity treads upon 
the heels of prosperity; death and the grave triumph over all; while to the enlightened 
eye of faith and hope, God, in nature, in providence, in grace, is only “from seeming 
evil still educing good, and better still, and better thence again in infinite progression.” 
Sin, indeed, has reigned even to death, and to the desolation of the grave; but grace 
reigns to eternal life, and the glory and blessedness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

We thank God there were two Adams. Adam the first, and Adam the second. Ii 
by Adam the first came sin and death into our world, by Adam the second have come 
righteousness and life. If in our relation to the first, we toil, and sicken, and die, 
in our relation to the second we repose, convalesce and live forever. If by the first 
we have lost Eden and life, by the second we gain heaven and immortality. If through 

'man “sin has reigned even to death,” through another man grace reigns through 
righteousness unto eternal life. ‘lruly, then, with Paul, in our text, we exclaim, 
“Great is the mystery of godliness; God was manifested in the flesh, justified by the 
Spirit, attended by angels, announced by Prophets and Apostles to the nations, 
eved on in the world by Jew and Greek, and finally glorified in heaven.” Of the 
few predicates in the passage concerning the Messiah, so distinctly enunciated by 
the apostle, as constituting the great mystery of godliness and of redemption, we 
select but one for the present consideration, edification and comfort. Before stating 


_— 


bt 


98 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


our present theme, we must premise a remark or two, on the term mystery, or the 
mystery of godliness. 

The term mystery does not always, in its broadest sense, indicate something 
incomprehensible. If that were its uniform acceptation, Paul spoke amiss when he 
said, “Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be 
changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” etc. This was once a mystery, 
but it is not now a mystery. In other words, it was once a secret, but is not now 
a secret. 


Formerly, the condition of those living on the earth, when the Lord would come, 
was not known. It was then incomprehensible; but it is not now. The Gospel itself 
was a mystery, while indicated only in types, and figures, and prophecy, but now it 
is a mystery revealed. The calling of the Gentiles, in the same sense, was a mystery, 
hid and kept secret for ages, but is no longer a mystery. “It was given to the 
Apostles to know the mysteries of God’’—secrets hid from ages and generations, 
but now divulged. Mark 4: 2. ; 

There are yet mysteries unrevealed, concerning “the Man of Sin,” and the 
fortunes of the world, but in Christianity and the Gospel, what were formerly mys- 
teries, are mysteries no more. To call things that are simply incomprehensible 
mysteries, is to extend the word beyond our text, and to make everything a mystery; 
for, indeed, there is nothing that we can fully comprehend. Rom. 11; I Cor. 15. 
We cannot comprehend the union of body and soul in our own person, much less 
the union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in one God. But the mystery of godliness 
is not a mystery of that class. 

It is a mystery developed and revealed by the Holy Spirit. If, then, any one 
be ignorant of this mystery, the sin lies upon himself. As Paul says, “Let him be 
ignorant,” presuming it to be voluntary. 

To many, I fear, this single item embraced in my subject is still a mystery unre- 
vealed, or a secret unknown. Let me, then, ask, and let every one who hears ask 
himself, what means the declaration, “‘Jesus was justified in the spirit.” 

I am told that it is not the Spirit, but spirit in contrast with flesh, as both these 
terms, flesh and spirit, are found in the original Greek text, without the definite article. 
Literally, it is alleged, the orginal reads, ““God was manifest in the flesh, justified in 
the Spirit, seen by angels,’ and it might be added, in the same style of criticism, 
“preached in nations, believed in world, received up in glory,” or in a world and in 
glory. This is in truth, hypercriticism, as unsound, as uncouth. When, and in what 
manner was God justified in Spirit—by whom, or by what spirit? 

Griesbach gives another reading, which sound criticism and the context approve. 
It has now, indeed, a majority of ancient manuscripts, now known, to sanction it; but 
some other genuine and approved readings have not. It is, however, one which the 
context and the facts of the case approve. It is read “He who was manifest in the 
flesh” [Hos for Theos; namely, God in the person of Jesus] “was justified by the 
Spirit.” The work of the Holy Spirit, primarily, is to testify of Christ, or that “Jesus 
is the Christ,” to sustain His pretensions, to prove His mission; and thereby to 
convict (not merely to convince) the world of sin, in rejecting Him, and to convince 
(not to convict) the world of righteousness—His righteousness—against the calumnies 
and the condemnation of His enemies. It was not the human or the personal spirit of 
Jesus that justified Him. It was the Spirit of God that justified all His pretentions 
against all the false charges and calumnies of the world. 

But the task we now assume is to develop the most important item of the mystery 
of godliness, namely, that the subject of this proposition, whether read, “God was 
manifest in the flesh,” or ‘““He who was manifest in the flesh,’ was justified by the 
Holy Spirit: In any case there are but five predicates of the subject of the proposition, 


b 
} 


ery. 


Justification and Coronation of the Messiah—Campbell. 99 


inless we suppose that the mystery of godliness itself was the subject of the proposi- 
ion. Should this be assured, then we have six predicates—*God manifest in the 
lesh,”” would be the first; “Justified by the Spirit,” the second. But does the term 
ustify apply to a person, or a proposition? “Seen by angels,” is the third predicate. 
But was a mystery or a person seen by angels! ‘“Preached to the Gentiles,” the 
ourth; “Believed on in the world,” the fifth. These scarcely apply to a mystery; 
ather to a person “Received up to glory,” the sixth item. But was the mystery of 
yodliness taken up into heaven! It must, then, be conceded that the words, “God 
nanifest in the flesh,” are the subject of the proposition. Of the five grand predicates 
concerning Him, we have selected the first named as essentially fundamental to His 
avorable reception on earth, and ultimately to His coronation as Lord of All in 
leaven. 


The present inquiry is, What is the impert of the fact affirmed in the words, “Justi- 
ied by the Spirit?” To develop this fact in its scriptural import and bearings, is of 
ranscendent importance. Its standing at the head of the sublime predicates of the 
“ord Jesus, and if any one please, at the head of the grand mystery of godliness, 
ybviously suggests its primary importance. 

In conducting the mind of a Bible student in such an inquiry as that proposed, it 
vould seem expedient: First, to indicate the meaning of the word justify; second, to 
nquire into its appropriateness to the Lord Jesus Christ. Third, to ascertain the time, 
lace and the circumstances of His justification. Fourth, the consequences thence 
esulting in His coronation as Lord of All, and the commencement of His reign. 

To indicate the meaning of the term justify, it must be observed that it is in a 
orensic term. It implies that a person has been accused; that an issue has been 
ormed; and that the allegations have been heard, examined, and satisfactorily refuted 
yefore a competent tribunal. In consequence of which, the accused is officially pro- 
lounced not guilty, legally righteous, and absolved from all blame in the affair. 

But there is evangelical as well as legal justification. There is a justification by 
grace, as well as justification by law. It is, therefore, important in this case to 
ippreciate fully the difference between legal, or forensic justification by grace or favor. 
in the latter, there must have been the guilt of transgression, else the accused 
‘ould not have been justified by favor. In legal justification, the accused 
nust have been proved to be innocent. In evangelical justification, the 
ustified must have been proved to be guilty. It follows, then, that justification 
Dy grace is only equivalent to pardon or forgiveness. It is called justi- 
ication, merely because the party thus justified is treated as though he were 
nnocent of the guilt alleged and proved. Hence, it is said, “To him that believeth on 
im who justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted to him for righteousness.” But 
vho dare say that He who was “God manifest in the flesh” was justified by grace: He 
vas holy, harmless, and undefiled by sin, and purer than the heavens, that only 
itnessed sin. 


But there is besides the legal and evangelical sense of the term justify, a figurative 
ise of the word. Jesus was accused of hypocrisy, as pretending to be God, while, as 
ey alleged, He was no more than man. He was accused of imposture, and being 
ed with “the prince of demons.” He assumed to be the Son of God, in its true, 
teral, and unfigurative sense. And because He was audibly and visibly recognized 
His baptism by a voice from heaven, declaring Him to be truly and literally God’s 
y begotten and well-beloved Son, and, by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon His 
d, identified and visibly marked out as the person to whom the oracles of Jehovah 
plied, it may be alleged that He was justified from such imputations by the Holy 
irit. But at most, this was only private and figurative, being without formal trial 
accusation, and while He was merely acting out the duties of a prophet. It does 


100 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


not meet the case of legal evangelical justification, indicated by Paul, when the Lord 
Jesus had passed a final and formal trial. Paul makes the declaration in our text, after 
He had been accused, tried and condemned to die, by both the ecclesiastical or 
sacredotal, and the political tribunals under whose supervision and eo oat He had 
spent His life. 


This will appear more striking and conclusive from a careful perusal of His vale- 
dictory address to His disciples, immediately before His trial and condemnation to 
death. In that discourse, He intimates to His disconsolate friends, that it was 
expedient, nay better, for them, that He should return to heaven, and send a third 
person, of equal power and glory, to plead His innocence and His cause, than that 
He, in His own person, should continue with them, and plead His own cause, ‘“When,” 
said He, “My special advocate, the Paraclete, shall come, he will convict the world 
of its sin in repudiating Me; convince the world of My righteousness, because I will 
be honorably received into heaven. I will return to the bosom of my Father, and 
your Father, to my God, and to your God. And He will convince all men of a future 
and final judgment alter death, and of an eternal reward.” To this effect He spoke 
to His friends and confidants, before entering upon the last scenes of His superlatively 
eventful life. And here we are led more appropriately to the second item of 
importance necessary to our just conception of the grand fact, asserted in our text: 
namely, the appropriateness of the declaration that ‘‘He was justified by the Spirit.” 

When we reflect that His sun had set beliind a dark and portentous cloud—con- 
demned to the cross of a Roman slave, and that too by God’s own vicegerent, the 
high priest of His own nation, and by the civil powers that God had ordained, over 
His own country and people, it would seem expedient, if not for contemporaries, at 
least for posterity in all coming time, that His character should be more than rein- 
stated, indeed glorified above all rivalry and competition with any aspirant that ever 
had sought or obtained a miter or a crown. 

This view of the premises. suggests to us the propriety of formally inquiring, in 
the second place, into the appositeness of the term justify as here applied to the Lord 
Jesus Christ. Such an inquiry naturally leads us to the closing scenes of His life, 
especially during His trial and condemnation. It was, indeed, literally true, according 
to ancient peo “that He was numbered with transgressors,’ that *He died 
with the wicked;” and that too, as though He had been convicted of blasphensy against 
God and treason against the government of Rome. 

It is well for us that this last trial and condemnation occupy so large a space in 
the four Gospels, and one given to us with so much circumstantiality and detail. The 
trial of Jesus does not, I fear, occupy a corresponding space in the minds and hearts 
of our contemporaries. The great palpable facts are, however, all that we can at 
present note. 


The sum of the allegations against Him is that He claimed two thrones—the 
throne of God and the throne of Czesar—the government of earth and heaven. He 
claimed to be the son of David, according to the flesh, to whom the world belonged; 
and the Son of God, according to a Divine nature, to whom not only the authority of 
earth, but also that of heaven belonged. This was, indeed, often hinted at, alluded to, 
and, indeed, assumed by Himself and His friends, some of whom looked with a single 
eye, not merely to the loaves and fishes, but to provincial crowns and scepters under 
His administration. These assumptions had some way reached the ears of both Herod 
and Pontius Pilate and other contemporaries of note at that day. But the narrative 
of His trial and condemnation will place the subject more fully before our minds. I 
is as follows: 

In consequence of His doctrine and miracles, and especially of His developments 
of the hypocrisy, arrogance and perversity of the Pharisees and Scribes and the rulers 


Justification and Coronation of the Messiah—Campbell. tot 


of the nation, they machinated His murder and the annihilation of His party. At 
their great paschal anniversary during the last year of His jubilee ministry, while they 
were concerting measures for His apprehension, the devil tempted Judas to embrace 
the opportunity of betraying Him into the hands of His enemies. From his native 
cupidity he readily yielded to temptation; and soon finding an opportunity, he deliv- 
ered Him up into their hands. The chief priests, the Scribes and the elders imme- 
diately became His accusers in the court of Caiphas, assisted by his father-in-law, 
Annas, to whom they first tendered Him. False witnesses were sought with great 
avidity and diligence. And such, it appears, was the popular opinion of the Savior 
and awe of His person, that they had almost failed in finding the least number which 
the law required in such cases. “At the last,’’ says Matthew, “they found two false 
witnesses.” Yet, all they could allege against Him was that on one occasion He had 
said, ““Destroy this temple of God, and I will rebuild in three days.” This He had not 
said in the sense which they desired to give it. But it answered the purpose of the 
high priest’s court in any way to prove that, being a mere man, He had blasphem- 
ously assumed omnipotence or co-equality with God. But the witnesses disagreed so 
much in their other misrepresentations, that it was'in form as well as in substance, 
illegal evidence. Most unwarrantably in all our conceptions of law and evidence 
imperilling character or life, He was compelled, under a solemn oath or adjuration, to 
Swear against His own life. But He gave them a response, under that solemnity, in 
‘the affirmative that He was Christ, the Son of the Blessed, which in their sense was 
Bpesphemy, being, as they alleged, “making Himself equal with God.” 

But instead of mitigating His offense, He adds, “that they should yet see Him 
on the right hand of the Almighty, coming in the clouds of heaven, to judge the 
world.” This, in their construction, was blasphemy against God. In their judgment, as 
| the Supreme Court of the Jewish nation, they pronounced Him “guilty of death.” Imme- 
diately on pronunciation of His sentence, the mob, aided and abetted by His accusers 
and the court of the high priest, proceeded to show Him every form of indignity, to 

degrade and insult Him in every conceivable way. They spit in His face, buffeted 
Him, blindfolded Him, smote Him with the palms of their hands, and in derision said: 
“Prophecy to us who it was that smote Thee.” But although condemned by this 
court “to be worthy of death,” being tributary to the Roman government and under 
civil polity, they had not power to enforce their decision, and, therefore, resolved to 
have Him arraigned before Czxsar’s court, and under the administration of Pontius 
Pilate. 
_ That blasphemy or assumed divinity was not a mortal sin under the Roman law, 

Ognizing the worship of many gods, was essentially polytheistical in its spirit and 

cter. A new crime must be alleged against Him. He is, therefore, accused of 

son against that government, because He talked of establishing a new kingdom; 

, therefore, by implication, assumed to be a king. As a traitor, a treasonable 

person, aiming at the supremacy of the state—in fact a rival of Cesar—he is indicted 

and delivered up to Pontius Pilate. No sooner had Pilate’s wife heard of the commo- 

in among the people, and of her husband being called to judge His case than she 
ent to him her ominous dream with her warning not to decide against Him. 

_ Pilate, himself, well knew that on the part of the Jews, it was wholly a work of 

c Nevertheless, time- -serving and unprincipled Pagan that he was, despite of her 


ie 
f 
| 


principle but his own political aggrandizement, in mockery of ‘all justice, washing 
hands before the people instead of purifying his conscience, he commanded Him 


102 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


into whose custody he was committed even in the Governor’s court, arrayed him in 
an old scarlet robe, crowned him with a wreath of thorns, and put a mock-scepter into 
His hands, bowing the knee in derision and hailing Him as King of the Jews. Amid 
all this contumely and insult “‘as a lamb before its shearer is dumb, He opened not 
His mouth.” 

During this reign of darkness in His humiliation, His condemnation having been 
extorted from His own lips, while witnessing a good confession before many spec- 
tators, may we not exclaim with the prophet, ‘Who can describe the character of His 
contemporaries, by whose counsels and hands He was betrayed, condemned, insulted 
and crucified?” 

Yet in all this, as testifies one of His aspostles, ““When He suffered He threat- 
ened not,’ but committed His cause and made His appeal “to Him who judges 
righteously.” He is crucified between two of the vilest malefactors, in the presence 
of a world’s convention, composed not of Gentiles only, but of Jews assembled from 
every nation under the skies. 

No son of man ever possessed a sensitiveness so delicate as His; and, therefore, 
no one can conceive of the intense agonies which He endured. Forsaken by His 
Father, deserted by His friends, mocked and insulted by His enemies, nailed to a 
Roman cross, suspended between heaven and earth He expired. The earth trembled, 
the rocks were rent, but He dies a sin-offering, as the ‘Lamb of God” bearing away 
the sin of the world. 

The agonies He endured were not mere physical pain, though even that was 
beyond all our conception. His Father hid His face from Him, and His soul felt 
the bitterness of His indignation and desertion. Even the anticipation of it was a 
burden that covered Him with a sweat of blood, while in Gethsemane He groaned 
in horror at the approaching scene, and praying said, “Father, if it be possible let 
this cup pass from Me; but, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” No sinful man familiar- 
ized with guilt can ever fathom the depth of that agony indicated in the utterance of 
these words, “My God! my God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?” 

After His resurrection from the dead, at different intervals, He frequently held 
interviews with His disciples, and gave them many infallible proofs of His resur- 
rection and personal identity; and on His own assignation they were present to 
witness His ascension into heaven. , 

To Luke we are chiefly indebted for the narration of this glorious scene, and to 
David for our knowledge of His triumphant entrance into heaven. The former, in 
his Acts of the Apostles, records the manner of His ascension; and the latter, in his 
prophetic Psalms, makes the scene of His entrance into heaven and His reception 
there pass before us in all the splendors of the richest imagery. To these we can only 
make a brief allusion. , 

Having delivered His last instructions to His disciples, the Apostles, and led 
them out of Jerusalem as far as to Bethany, and thence again ascending the Mount 
of Olives, while in the act of pronouncing upon them a final benediction, in a chariot 
of angels He slowly and sublimely ascends to heaven. He does not suddenly vanish 
from their sight as a gleam of light or a vivid coruscation of lightning, but slowly 
and sublimely mounts in a chariot of angels, a fair vision of which Israel had when, 
from his pillow at Bethel, on a ladder, in a climax of glory, the angels of God were 
returning to their heavenly throne from a special visit to Him concerning the “Desire 
of Nations,” the light and “Morning Star” of Jacob. Enrapt in beatific vision, gazing 
on the wake of glory reflected from His celestial train while He approaches the 
heaven of heavens, absorbed even to an oblivion of themselves, of earth and all its 
glory, they stood breathless gazing, awaiting His return. But in condescendin 
sympathy He sends back a portion of His retinue to inform them that they need 0 


Justification and Coronation of the Mcssiah—Campbell. 103 


longer wait for His descent again. David, speaking by the Spirit, in solemn vision 
of this long anticipated scene, after informing us that God’s chariots are myriads of 
angels, opens to our contemplation His reception at the gates of the Celestial City. 
From him we learn that His. preceding heralds as soon as they approach the heavenly 
gate address the sentinels of the Eternal City in such words as these: “Lift up your 
heads, you towering gates, you heavenly doors give way that the King of Glory may 
enter in.” The sentinels demand “Who is this King of Glory? Who?” His heralds 
respond, ‘The Lord Messiah, the Almighty Hero who vanquished death and broke 
the scepter of the grave.” The sentinels in triumph shout, “Lift up your heads, you 
towering gates, you heavenly portals wide expand that the King of Glory may enter 
in.” Thus He enters the presence—the chamber of the Everlasting King. Soon as 
He approaches the Divine Majesty arising from His eternal throne and addressing 
Him says, “Sit Thou on My right hand, till I make Thy foes Thy footstool. Reign 
Thou in the midst of Thine enemies.” “I will extend the rod of Thy great empire 
over all the earth, and make Thy foes Thy footstool.” 


Thus was He crowned Lord of All. 


The angels from all the worlds above, from all the worlds of Jehovah, with all the 
principalities, authorities and powers of heavenly spheres, are summoned to the scene; 
and having presented to them “the First Born from the dead, the beginning of the 
new creation,” the Eternal Father who in the days of the Messiah’s humiliation once 
spoke from the excellent glory, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I delight; 
obey Him;” now addressing the heads of all the celestial departments of spiritual 
hierarchies, commands their allegiance to Him saying, “Let all the angels of God 
worship Him.” “To Him let every knee bow; to Him let every tongue swear alle- 
giance.” 

The choral triumph rises. The universal hallelujah echoes through all the realms 
of glory. The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat upon the throne, 
and worship Him that liveth forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the 
throne, saying, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and authority; 
for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.” 
Thus was the Messiah crowned Lord of All. 

And here we shall return to Jerusalem where He had been degraded and crucified 
asafelon. There we find the twelve Apostles in full assembly met; the chair vacated 
by the apostacy of Judas, the traitor, having been filled by an appeal to heaven. They 
were according to the command of the risen Lord, waiting for a new message from 
Him as the Supreme Sovereign of earth and heaven; and waiting too under the 
public reprobation consequent upon the condemnation and crucifixion of their 
leader. Under such a load of infamy how could they presume to say one word in His 
favor! They were, therefore, both kindly and wisely commanded by their Leader 
“to tarry in Jerusalem till they should receive power from on high.” 

It passed into a proverb, that wherever character or reputation is lost, there only 
can it be found or regained. As, therefore, He had been dishonored in Jerusalem, 
and before a national convention, in Jerusalem alone, before a similar national con- 
vention could He be successfully and triumphantly justified from all the charges 
alleged against Him. Hence the annunciation of what had transpired in heaven during 
the week intervening between His ascension and the day of Pentecost, was deferred 
till the next national convention. Meantime, as already observed, a grand revolution, 
or rather, perhaps, we should say, new order of things, had been consummated in 
heaven. All authority, legislative, judicial and executive, is irrevocably lodged in 
His hands. The Father now judges no man, and will not judge the world at the final 
judgment. He is ordered by God, His Father, to judge the living and the dead at 
His second coming. Moreover, the Holy Spirit Himself is given to Him, not as it 


104 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. ; 


was upon Him and in Him, during His personal ministry, qualifying Him as the Son 
of Man, for the grand mission on which He came; but it is now given Him to dis- 
pense in whatever gifts or measures He pleases. 

The convention annually succeeding the Passover week was called the Pentecost, 
or the commemoration of the giving of the law to Israel from Mount Sinai on the 
fiftieth day after the institution of the Passover sacrifice. Then God condescended to 
meet Moses on Mount Sinai, in Arabia, and, through ranks of angels, put into his 
hands the moral constitution, or law of ten commands. Most apposite, then, according 
to the symbolic institution, it was that the day which commemorated that event should 
be the day on which the Holy Spirit would descend from heaven to Mount Zion, in 
Jerusalem, at the opening of the new dispensation of remedial love. And as the 
descent in the presence of a grand convention of the seed of Abraham, so this, also, 
should be in the presence of a similar convention of the same people, present from 
every nation under heaven. When, therefore, the whole Christian church was con- 
vened in one place, and the nation, also, by its numerous representatives from all 
kingdoms and tribes, was assembled at their metropolis; the Gospel trumpet was 
heard; a sound from heaven equally significant of the Divine presence, affrighted and 
summoned all Jerusalem to the spot where the new community of the true Israel of 
God was solemnly waiting the advent of the promised Advocate—Paraclete—to 
empower them to proceed in the work given them in solemn charge. 

His arrival, or descent from heaven, was not only heard rending the heavens, but 
He was also seen in tongues resembling fire, separate from each other glowing in 
heaven’s own brightness, on the heads of the Holy Twelve. On seeing the concourse, 
simultaneously they arose as one man,-and opening their mouths in all the dialects 
of the earth there assembled, they solemnly and sublimely announced that the Mes- — 
siah was justified before God from all the allegations of blasphemy and treason 
preferred against Him; that He was, in fact, crowned ‘‘Lord of All,” and constituted 
the reigning Sovereign of the universe—angels, authorities and powers being subject 
to Him. Suffice it to say, that just as many Jews were saved that day as were killed 
at the giving of the law on the first Jewish Pentecost. 

Thus commenced the new kingdom or reign of heaven. 

An analysis of the incidents and events of that day, most memorable in the annals 
of Christianity, is fraught with many blessings to those who sincerely and with a 
single eye investigate its sublime details. Peter’s speech on that occasion is the grand 
opening of the new dispensation of divine grace. To him, in honor of his early 
confession of the true faith in the person, mission and office of the Lord Jesus at 
Ceesarea Phillippi, in attestation of its truthfulness and importance, were the keys 
of the kingdom of heaven granted. He, therefore, primarily and emphatically opened 
the kingdom of heaven to the Jews, and afterwards to the Gentiles convened at 
Cesarea in the house of the Roman centurion, Cornelius. The Holy Spirit on both 
occasions confirming his word with unequivocal attestations. 

If there was a revolution or change of government in heaven, a shaking of heaven, 
a change of administration, pursuant upon the ascension, trial, justification and coro- 
nation of the Lord Jesus Christ, there was also a new era—a new dispensation of 
divine government, evangelical and not legal, pursuant upon the descension of the 
Holy Spirit, to remain always in the Church, as its quickening, animating, sanctifying 
and soul-inspiring life. In the former case, its termination was an incarnation of | 
Divinity in humanity in the person of the Lord Jesus (for such was the consummation 
of the legal and typical age): but in the latter case, it is not an incarnation, but an 
inhabitation of God through the Holy Spirit, now the holy guest in the members of © 
that spiritual community called the body of Christ, or the house of God, the pillar and 4 
support of the truth in the world. We are thus led farther into the arcana of the | 


Justification and Coronation of the Messiah—Campbell. 105 


house that Jesus built, in contrast with the house, or rather tent, that Moses built. 
But to develop this would lead us far beyond our present limits and design, and, 
therefore, we undertake no such task at present. We can only add, as consonant with 
our theme and the occasion, the justification of the Lord Jesus both in heaven and 
on earth, from the specifications against Him on the part of His enemies, does not, 
in the least, mitigate against this fact that He did profess to be equal with God His 
Father in His supreme Deity, and the real and rightful King of earth and heaven; for 
this He virtually affirmed, while witnessing a good confession, both before Annas 
and Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. During His trial He admitted that He was 
emphatically “the Son of God;” that God was as really and literally His Father as 
Mary was His mother; and that He was born of her to be a king, and was a king, 
born of an heiress to the throne of David, and was her first-born, and consequently 
had a right to both the throne of David and the throne of God, both of which were 
symbolized in the throne of God’s annointed or Christed David. 

In aiming at and in claiming these honors and this sovereignty over the earth 
and heaven, in affirming that ali authority—legislative, executive and judicial—was 
rightfully His, and was given to Him by His Father and His God,.He was not in 
so doing guilty of either blasphemy against God or treason against Cesar. He 
admitted the indictment to be literally true and just in the facts on which it was based, 
but denied that in His case it was either blasphemy or treason so to assume. 

There is no stronger evidence or proof of the true, proper, and real Divinity of 
the Lord Jesus Christ, than that derived from His trial and conviction. He confessed, 
against His own life, that he was in the peculiar sense of the indictment, the “Son of 
the Blessed, the only Begotten of the Father.” They only proved it constructively 
and by implication, but He affirmed it boldly and explicitly. He denied not that He 
had said that He could “rebuild the temple of His own body in three days,” a greater 
miracle far than the building of Solomon’s temple. To give life to the dead is the 
superlative of all power. To be reanimated by a power inherent in one’s own self 
is the unequivocal assumption of real Divinity. And so the High Priests, the Rabbis, 
Scribes and the people understood it. 

What a silly excuse has any one for his lifeless, soulless Unitarianiism, who under- 
stands the trial, the confession, and the condemnation of the Messiah! Had He 
assumed Divinity in the Unitarian sense, the Jews would have had no argument 
against Him with the people of that day, who admitted the inspiration and Divine 
mission of so many eminent persons, some of whose Divine attestations were as 
unquestionable as those of Jesus, the Messiah. The last confession of Jesus, and His 

condemnation thereupon by the priesthood of His own nation, is to an enlightened 
and well-balanced mind free from prejudice, an all-sufficient argument in attestation 
of His true and proper Divinity, else He had died a martyr to a lie. It is also irre- 
fragably an evidence and proof that His death was a true, proper and real sacrifice 
for sin, or an atonement for sin, as it is of His personal and proper Divinity. For 
whose sins did He die? Death is the wages of sin. God had decreed that he who 
sins shall die, but He has not decreed that the innocent and unoffending shall die. 
Tf, then, an innocent, pure and holy man should die, death would cease to be the wages 
of sin, unless we suppose that his death was voluntarily tendered and accepted in the 
room or for the sake of another. The conclusion seems to be inevitable that Jesus 
‘was a rank impostor, or that He was really, truly and properly, a divine person; and 
that His death was a true and real sacrifice for sin. These conclusions may, indeed, 
be approached, and have often been most satisfactorily approached and confirmed in 
many a well-beaten and well-established path of reasoning, and evidence; but, as it 
appears to me, in none more clear, direct and satisfactory than this. : 


But this, though an important aim, and a chief point in this discourse, is not the 


106 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


cardinal object. These great facts and developments, though historical, are also 
doctrinal. They are, indeed, premises of transcendent significance. They teach the 
true, real and proper divinity and humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. They also 
teach His full and satisfactory sacrifice for sin, by which He magnified the divine law 
and government, and justified God’s character in forgiving iniquity, transgression 
and sin. His resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven, His coronation 
as Lord of the universe, having all power and authority over angels, men and demons, 
given unto Him, are indeed, ample evidence of the divine approbation of what He 
had done and suffered for us. They are, when contemplated in their evangelical 
import and bearings, supremely interesting and soul-absorbing themes—the very 
basis of what is called “the kingdom of heaven,” or the reign of God in man. 

This reign of grace within men, under the style of “the kingdom of heaven,” was 
the antitype of many a figure; the burthen of many a prophecy; the theme of many a 
discourse on the part of John the Harbinger, of the Messiah Himself, and of the 
Holy Twelve, after they had been plenarily inspired by the descent of the Holy Spirit. 
It is regarded as the grand ultimatum of sovereign and almighty love, and is 
emphatically styled the ‘‘Philanthropy of God, our Savior,’ shining forth from the 
full-orbed face of the Sun of Righteousness and Mercy, the contemplated design and 
consummation of the greatest of all events, the investiture of the Lord Jesus with 
absolute sovereignty, as the one only reigning monarch of God’s whole creation— 
“angels, authorities, principalities and powers” of all ranks and orders, “having been 
subjected to Him.””’ Amongst men it would be called a “revolution in the universe;” 
a term, however, wholly inappropriate. It is, indeed, a grand epoch, a new era in 
eternity, ‘“‘the consummation of ages.”’” When announcing it in Jerusalem, on Pente- 
cost, after he had received an unction from above, Peter made the proclamation 
consequent upon the coronation of his Master, ‘Let all the house of Israel most 
assuredly know that God has constituted that same Jesus, whom you crucified, both 
Lord and Christ,” the anointed sovereign of all. 

This christening, or anointing, of Jesus as autocrat of the universe was, indeed, 
the most grand, august and sublime event that ever transpired; and the proclamation 
of it the most thrilling and soul-subduing annunciation ever uttered on earth. This 
honor Peter had, and Jerusalem witnessed. It was indeed, the proper place. It was 
the capital of the only kingdom on earth especially related to God. It was “the city 
of the Great King,” and the theater of the temple of God. It was that Zion upon 
which Isaiah and Micah foretold the new law—the last message of Jehovah—should 
go forth; ‘‘For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from 
Jerusalem.” Hence it was that the Lord, in giving His last directions to the apostles, 
commanded them to begin at Jerusalem. Christianity was never clearly understood 
by any man who did not begin at Jerusalem and fully learn the meaning of the events 
that transpired there at the time of the first annunciation of the coronation of the 
Lord Messiah. It was, indeed, ‘‘the holy city,” the consecrated theater of all the 
grand scenes of human redemption. In its environs Jesus was born of Mary, the 
virgin, providentially summoned there from Nazareth, under a decree of Cesar 
Augustus. There, too, he was dishonored. 

There he was crucified, died, was buried and rose again. In its precincts after his 
return from Galilee,and from the Mount of Olives He ascended to heaven. There, 
too, the Holy Spirit personally descended from heaven to animate, sanctify and dwell 
in the church during His absence till He return to it again, or to His church mysti- 
cally so denominated. In Jerusalem the first Gospel sermon was. preached. There 
were the first three thousand penitents forgiven, and thence has been diffused over 
the broad earth “the Word of Life.’ Christianity is not a new addition of patriarchal 
or of Jewish institutions. It is not a reiterated allegory. It is a clear development of 


> << 


Justification and Coronation of the Messiah—Campbell. 107 


mysteries, “hid from ages and generations” that pass away before its promulgation. 
Many rénowned patriarchs and prophets desired to understand the institution which 
they ministered and the oracles which they uttered. But they did not. Their insti- 
tutions, their rites and ceremonies, their holy terms and holy things were but worldly 
and temporary adumbrations of good things then future; “God having provided some 
better things for us, that they without us, should not be made perfect.” 

Abel’s, Noah’s and Abraham’s lambs, the Paschal lamb, the millions of lambs 
“on Jewish altars slain,” the tabernacle and its worship, the temple and its more 
splendid ceremonies were, one and all, but shadows of the true Lamb of God, and His 
mission. He is the Lamb provided by God Himself, slain, only type “from the found- 
ation of the world” down to the crucifixien of the true “‘Lamb of God” that took 
away the sins of the world. . 

It was his harbinger, John the Baptist, that first pointed Him out as “the Lamb 
of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.” 

The Abrahamic and Jewish covenants were only covenants of promise. Their 
circumcisions, bloody offerings, washings and legal ablutions, were all but ‘“‘shadows 
of good things to come,” the substance of which was Christ and His evangelical 
institutions. The Jews were circumcised, ‘baptized into Moses, in the cloud, and in 
the sea;” ate the mystic manna, drank the mystic rock, yet feli in the wilderness, and 
fell short of Canaan. 

The sacrifices, purifications, pardons, were only types, symbols, of a real sacrifice, 
a real purification, a real pardon through faith in the blood of the true Lamb of God, 
whether by them prospectively or by us retrospectively contemplated. The heavens 
came down in the person of Jesus, and in that of the Holy Spirit on the first Pente- 
cost after the sacrifice of Christ and His coronation in heaven. 

“For a little while,” as Macknight translated it, “He was made lower than the 
angels, that, by the grace of God, He might taste of death for all; but now, being 
crowned with glory and honor, He is exalted a Prince and a Savior to grant (the 
benefits of) repentance to Israel—even the remission of sins.” Upon a review of our 
subject, indeed, of all the promises of the Bible we may say, that “as the path of the 
just shineth more and more from the sacrifice of Abel to the descent of the Holy 
Spirit to be the guest of the Christian temple on the first Pentecost after the Lord’s 
ascension; we, therefore, contemplate the patriarchal dispensation as the starlight; the 
Jewish dispensation as the moonlight; the mission of John as the twilight; the Chris- 
tian dispensation, beginning with the exaltation of the Lord Jesus and the descent of 
the Holy Spirit, as the sunlight of the world. The Son of Righteousness has, accord- 
ing to Malachi, the last of the ancient prophetic line, risen upon the world “with 
healing in his wings.” Let us “go forth, then, and grow up like calves of the stall.” 
The holy patriarchs had but the bud; the Jews had but the blossom; we have the 
mature fruit of Divine grace. 

But alas! how few, very few of us realize and enjoy the fullness of the blessings 
of the Gospel of Christ contained in the rich promises and the holy ordinances of 
Christ’s reign! 

Yet we are not straightened in Him, but in our own low, imperfect and inade- 
quate conceptions of Him in all His personal and official fullness and glory. Many 
of us are still serving under the oldness of the letter rather than in the newness of the 
Spirit. We have carnalized and secularized rather than spiritualized the Gospel and its 
institutions. We seem to prefer the husks that envelop the Gospel fruit rather than 
eat and enjoy the ripe corn in the ear—the weak and beggarly elements of a hoary 
tradition, even in its dotage, than the bread and water of life of the new kingdom of 
grace. We have created our metaphysical and theological idols, and after them we 
will go. One will have his faith alone, that is, his opinion, another acts as though 


108 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


he believed in watet alone; another in his works alone. One changes water into 
wine; another wine into water. One fights for the word alone; another for the Spirit 
alone. One converts his god into a wafer and eats him; another fattens upon new 
dreams and visions of some spirit which he mistakes for the Spirit of God. But the 
small remnant, the true elect of God, believe all that God says; hope for all that God 
promises; obey in aim and in heart all that God commands, and endeavor to keep 
themselves pure from all the idols of the world. As many as thus walk we will say and 
pray with the Apostles, “Peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon all the Israel of 
God.” 


[This sermon was requested by Mr. Townsend of the Christian Missionary So- 
ciety. It is from “The Home Life of Alexander Campbell,’ which is copyrighted and 
published by the Christian Publishing Co., St. Louis, Mo., and it is reproduced here 
with their permission. It was written by Mr. Campbell in 1850, to be used in a collec- 
tion of sermons, and was considered the most suitable for this work. 

Alexander Campbell was born near Ballymena, county Antrim, Ireland, and 
died at Bethany, W. Va., in 1866. He came to America in 1809, establishing a paper 
called the Christian Baptist, in 1823. Some four or five years later his labors crystal- 
lized into the formation of the Disciple or Christian church. ] 


Perera cies ws een 


Bg 


— 


09) 


: AN ENQUIRY. 


WILLIAM CAREY. 
Romans 10: 12-15. 


An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of 
the Heathens, in which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the 


Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, are 


considered by William Carey. Then follows the great conclusion of Paul in his letter 
to the Romans (10:12-15): ‘For there is no difference between the Jew and the 
Greek. . . . How shall they preach except they be sent?” He happened to be in 
Birmingham in 1786 collecting subscriptions for the rebuilding of the chapel in 
Moulton, when Mr. Thomas Potts, who had made a fortune in trade with America, 
discovering that he had prepared the manuscript, gave him £10 to publish it. And it 
appeared at Leicester in 1792, “price one shilling and sixpence,” the profits to go to 
the proposed mission, The pamphlet form doubtless accounts for its disappearance 
now; only three copies are known to be in existence. 

This Enquiry has a literary interest of its own, as a contribution to the statistics 
and geography of the world, written in a cultured and almost finished style, such as 
few, if any, University men of that day could have produced, for none were impelled 
by such a motive as Carey had. In an obscure village, toiling save when he slept, 
and finding rest on Sunday only by a change of toil, far from libraries and the society 
of men with more advantages than his own, this shoemaker, still under thirty, surveys 
the whole world, continent by continent, island by island, race by race, faith by faith, 
kingdom by kingdom, tabulating his results with an accuracy, and following them up 
with a logical power of generalization which would extort the admiration of the 
learned even of the present day. 

Having proved that the commission given by our Lord to His disciples is still 
binding on us, having reviewed former undertakings for the conversion of the heathen 
from the Ascension to the Moravians and “the late Mr. Wesley” in the West Indies, 
and having thus surveyed in detail the state of the world in 1786, he removes the five 
impediments in the way of carrying the Gospel among the heathen, which his con- 
temporaries advanced—their distance from us, their barbarism, the danger of being 
killed by them, the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life, the unintelligibleness 
of their languages. These his loving heart and Bible knowledge enable him skillfully 
to turn in favor of the cause he pleads. The whole section is essential to an apprecia- 
tion of Carey’s motives, difficulties, and plans:— 

“First, As to their distance from us, whatever objections might have been made 
on that account before the invention of the mariner’s compass, nothing can be alleged 
for it with any color of plausibility in the present age. Men can now sail with as much 
certainty through the Great South Sea as they can through the Mediterranean or any 
lesser sea. Yea, and providence seems in a manner to invite us to the trial, as there 
are to our knowledge trading companies, whose commerce lies in many of the places 
where these barbarians dwell. At one time or other ships are sent to visit places of 
more recent discovery, and to explore parts the most unknown; and every fresh 


IIO Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


account of their ignorance or cruelty should call forth our pity, and excite us to 
concur with providence in seeking their eternal good. Scripture likewise seems to 
point out this method, ‘Surely the Isles shall wait for me; the ships of Tarshish first, 
to bring my sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the 
Lord, thy God.’—Isaiah 60:9. This seems to imply that in the time of the glorious 
increase of the church, in the laiter days (of which the whole chapter is undoubtedly 
a prophecy), commerce shall subserve the spread of the Gospel. The ships of Tarshish 
were trading vessels, which made voyages for traffic to various parts; thus much 
therefore must be meant by it, that navigation, especially that which is commercial, 
shall be one great mean of carrying on the work of God; and perhaps it may imply 
that there shall be a very considerable appropriation of wealth to that purpose. 

“Secondly, As to their uncivilized and barbarous way of living, this can be no 
objection to any, except those whose love of ease renders them unwilling to expose 
themselves to inconveniences fer the good of others. It was no objection to the 
apostles and their successors, who went among the barbarous Germans and Gauls, 
and still more barbarous Britons! They did not wait for the ancient inhabitants of 
these countries to be civilized before they could be christianized, but went simply 
with the doctrine of the cross; and Tertullian could boast that ‘those parts of Britain 
which were proof against the Roman armies, were conquered by the gospel of Christ.’ 
It was no objection to an Eliot or a Brainerd, in later times. They went forth, and 
encountered every difficulty of the kind, and found that a cordial reception of the 
gospel produced those happy effects which the longest intercourse with Europeans 
without it could never accomplish. It is no objection to commercial men, It only 
tequires that we should have as much love to the souls of our fellow-creatures, and 
fellow-sinners, as they have for the profits arising from a few otter-skins, and all these 
difficulties would be easily surmounted. 


“After all, the uncivilized state of the heathen, instead of affording an objection 
against preaching the gospel to them, ought to furnish an argument for it. Can we 
as men, or as Christians, hear that a great part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls 
are as immortal as ours, and who are as capable as ourselves of adorning the gospel 
and contributing by their. preachings, writings, or practices to the glory of our 
Redeemer’s name and the good of His church, are enveloped in ignorance and bar- 
barism? Can we hear that they are without the gospel, without government, without 
laws, and without arts and sciences, and not exert ourselves to introduce among them 
the sentiments of men and of Christians? Would not the spread of the gospel be the 
most effectual means of their civilization? Would not that make them useful members 
of society? We know that such effects did in a measure follow the afore-mentioned 
efforts of Eliot, Brainerd, and others among the American Indians; and if similar 
attempts were made in other parts of the world, and succeeded with a divine blessing 
(which we have every reason to think they would), might we not expect to see able 
divines, or read well-conducted treatises in defence of the truth, even amongst those 
who at present seem to be scarcely human? 


“Thirdly, In respect to the danger of being killed by them, it is true that whoever 
does go must put his life in his hand, and not consult with flesh and blood; but do not 
the goodness of the cause, the duties incumbent on us as the creatures of God and 
Christians, and the perishing state of our fellow-men, loudly call upon us to venture 
all, and use every warrantable exertion for their benefit? Paul and Barnabas, who 
hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, were not blamed as being 
rash, but commended for so doing; while John Mark, who through timidity of mind 
deserted them in their perilous undertaking, was branded with censure. After all, 
as has been already observed, I greatly question whether most of the barbarities 
practiced by the savages upon those who have visited them, have not originated in 


An Enquiry—Carey. III 


some real or supposed affront, and were, therefore, more properly acts of self-defence 
than proofs of ferocious dispositions. No wonder if the imprudence of sailors should 
prompt them to offend the simple savage, and the offence be resented; but Eliot, 
Brainerd, and the Moravian missionaries have been very seldom molested. Nay, in 
general the heathen have showed a willingness to hear the word; and have principally 
expressed their hatred of Christianity on account of the vices of nominal *Christians. 
“Fourthly, As to the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life, this would not 
be so great as may appear at first sight; for, though we could not procure European 
food, yet we might procure such as the natives of those countries which we visit, 
subsist upon themselves. And this would only be passing through what we have 
virtually engaged in by entering on the ministerial office. A Christian minister is a 
person who in a peculiar sense is not his own; he is the servarit of God, and therefore 
ought to be wholly devoted to Him. By entering on that sacred office he solemnly 
undertakes to be always engaged, as much as possible, in the Lord’s work, and not to 
choose his own pleasure or employment, or pursue the ministry as a something that is 
to subserve his own ends, or interests, or as a kind of bye-work. He engages to go 
where God pleases, and to do or endure what He sees fit to command, or call him to, 
in the exercise of his function. He virtually bids farewell to friends, pleasures and 
comforts, and stands in readiness to endure the greatest sufferings in the work of his 
Lord and Master. It is inconsistent for ministers to please themselves with thoughts 
of a numerous auditory, cordial friends, a civilized country, legal protection, affluence, 
splendor, or even a competency. The slights and hatred of men, and even pretended 


friends, gloomy prisons and tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, 


miserable accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger and thirst, nakedness, 
weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly encouragement, should 
rather be the objects of their expectation. Thus the apostles acted, in the primitive 
times, and endured hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ; and though we, living 
in a civilized country where Christianity is protected by law, are not called to suffer 
these things while we continue here, yet I question whether all are justified in staying 
here, while so many are perishing without means of grace in other lands. Sure I am 
that it is entirely contrary to the spirit of the gospel for its ministers to enter upon 
it from interested motives, or with great worldly expectations. On the contrary, the 
commission is a sufficient call to them to venture all, and, like the primitive Christians, 
go everywhere preaching the gospel. 

“It might be necessary, however, for two, at least, to go together, and in general 
I should think it best that they should be married men, and to prevent their time from 
being employed in procuring necessaries, two or more other persons, with their wives 
and families, might also accompany them, who should be wholly employed in pro- 
viding for them. In most countries it would be necessary for them to cultivate a little 
spot of ground just for their support, which would be a resource to them, whenever 
their supplies failed. Not to mention the advantages they would reap from each 
other’s company, it would take off the enormous expense which has always attended 
undertakings of this kind, the first expense being the whole; for though a large colony 
needs support for a considerable time, yet so small a number would, upon receiving 
the first crop, maintain themselves. They would have the advantage of choosing their 
situation, their wants would be few; the women, and even the children, would be 
necessary for domestic purposes: and a few articles of stock, as a cow or two, anda 
bull, and a few other cattle of both sexes, a very few utensils of husbandry, and some 
corn to sow their land, would be sufficient. Those who attend the missionaries should 
understand husbandry, fishing, fowling, etc., and be provided with the necessary 
implements for these purposes. Indeed, a variety of methods may be thought of, and 
when once the work is undertaken, many things will suggest themselves to us, of 
which we at present can form no idea, 


112 : Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


“Fifthly, As to learning their languages, the same means would be found neces- 
sary here as in trade between different nations. In some cases interpreters might be 
obtained, who might be employed for a time; and where these were not to be found, 
the missionaries must have patience, and mingle with the people, till they have learned 
so much of their language as to be able to communicate their ideas to them in it. It 
is well known to require no very extraordinary talents to learn, in the space of a year, 
or two at most, the language of any people upon earth, so much of it at least as to 
be able to convey any sentiments we wish to their understandings. 

“The missionaries must be men of great piety, prudence, courage, and forbear- 
ance; of undoubted orthodoxy in their sentiments, and must enter with all their hearts 
into the spirit of their mission; they must be willing to leave all the comforts 
of life behind them, and to encounter all the hardships of a torrid or a frigid 
climate, an uncomfortable manner of living, and every other inconvenience that can 
attend this undertaking. Clothing, a few knives, powder and shot, fishing-tackle, and 
the articles of husbandry above mentioned, must be provided for them; and when 
arrived at the place of their destination, their first business must be to gain some 
acquaintance with the language of the natives (for which purpose two would be better 
than one), and by all lawful means to endeavor to cultivate a friendship with them, and 
as soon as possible let them know the errand for which they were sent. They must 
endeavor to convince them that it was their good alone which induced them to forsake 
their friends, and all the comforts of their native country. They must be very careful 
not to resent injuries which may be offered to them, nor to think highly of themselves, 
so as to despise the poor heathens, and by those means lay a foundation for their 
resentment or rejection of the gospel. They must take every opportunity of doing 
them good, and laboring and traveling night and day, they must instruct, exhort, and 
rebuke, with all long suffering and anxious desire for them, and, above all, must be 
instant in prayer for the effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the people of their charge. 
Let but missionaries of the above description engage in the work, and we shall see 
that it is not impracticable. 

“Tt might likewise be of importance, if God shall bless their labors, for them 
to encourage any appearances of gifts amongst the people of their charge; if such 
should be raised up many advantages would be derived from their knowledge of the 
language and customs of their countrymen; and their change of conduct would give 
great weight to their ministrations.” 

This first and still greatest missionary treatise in the English language closes 
with the practical suggestion of these means—fervent and united prayer, the formation 
of a catholic or, failing that, a Particular Baptist Society of “persons whose hearts are 
in the work, men of serious religion and possessing a spirit of perseverance,” with an 
executive committee, and subscriptions from rich and poor of a tenth of their income 
for both village preaching and foreign missions, or at least, an average of one penny 
or more per week from all members of congregations. He thus concludes:—“It is 
true all the reward is of mere grace, but it is nevertheless encouraging; what a treasure, 
what a harvest must await such characters as Paul, and Eliot, and Brainerd, and others, 
who have given themselves wholly to the work of the Lord. What a heaven will it be 
to see the many myriads of poor heathens, of Britons amongst the rest, who by their 

‘labors have been brought to the knowledge of God. Surely a crown of rejoicing like 
this is worth aspiring to. Surely it is worth while to lay ourselves out with all our 
might, in promoting the cause and kingdom of Christ.” 


[The ministers’ meeting of 1792 came round, and on the 3lst of May Carey seized 
his opportunity. The place was Nottingham, from which the 1784 invitation to prayer 
had gone forth. Was the answer to come just there after nine years’ waiting? Hus 
Enquiry had been published; had it prepared the brethren? Ryland had been always 


OS 


An Enquiry—Carey. 113 


loyal to the journeyman shoemaker he had baptized in the river, and he gives us this 
record:—‘‘Tf all the people had lifted up their voices and wept, as the children of Israel 
did at Bochim, I should not have wondered at the effect. It would only have seemed 
proportionate to the cause, so clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness 
in the cause of God.” The text was Isaiah’s (54: 2, 3) vision of the widowed church’s 
tent stretching forth till her children inherited the nations and peopled the desolate 
cities, and the application to the reluctant brethren was couched in these two great 
maxims written ever since on the banners of the missionary host of the kingdom:— 


EXPECT GREAT THINGS FROM GOD. 
ATTEMPT GREAT THINGS FOR GOD. 


The service was over; even Fuller was afraid, even Ryland made no sign, and the 
ministers were leaving the meeting. Seizing Fuller’s arm with an imploring look, 
the preacher, whom despair emboldened to act alone for his Master, exclaimed: “And 
are you, after all, going again to do nothing?’ What Fuller describes as the “much 
fear and trembling” of these inexperienced, poor, and ignorant village preachers gave 
way to the appeal of one who had gained both knowledge and courage, and who, as to 
funds and men, was ready to give himself. They entered on their minutes this much: 
“That a plan be prepared against the next ministers’ meeting at Ketering for forming 
a Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.” The first purely 
English Missionary Society, which sent forth its own English founder, was thus con- 
stituted as described in the minutes of the Northampton ministers’ meeting.] 


[William Carey was born at Paulerspury, Northamptonshire, August 17, 1761, died 
at Serampore, India, June 9, 1834. His missionary labors commenced in India in 
1794. He prepared grammars or dictionaries of Mahratta, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telinga 
and Bengali. Had he done nothing more, this service would have been of incalculable 
value to the missionary cause. 

D. L. Leonard, the authority on missions, does not remember ever seeing Carey’s 
sermon, Isaiah 54: 2-3, which we had expected to use, so a summary of Carey’s 
Enquiry is used, from George Smith’s Life of Carey, published by John Murray, 
London. ] 


114 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE EXPULSIVE POWER OF GAR 
AFFECTION. 


THOMAS CHALMERS. 


“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love 
the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”—I John 2: 15. 


There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from 
the human heart its love of the world—either by a demonstration of the world’s vanity, 
so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an 
object that is not worthy of it; or, by setting forth another object, even God, as more 
worthy of its attachment; so as that the heart shall be prevailed upon, not to resign 
an old affection which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old aftec- 
tion for a new one. My purpose is to show, that from the constitution of our nature, 
the former method is altogether incompetent and ineffectual—and that the latter 
method will alone suffice for the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong 
affection that domineers over it. After having accomplished this purpose, I shall 
attempt a few practical observations. 

Love may be regarded in two different conditions. The first is when its object 
is at a distance, and when it becomes love in a state of desire. The second is when 
its object is in possession, and then it becomes love in a state of indulgence. Under 
the impulse of desire, man feels himself urged onward in some path or pursuit of 
activity for its gratification. The faculties of his mind are put into busy exercise. 
In the steady direction of one great and engrossing interest, his attention is recalled 
from the many reveries into which it might otherwise have wandered; and the 
powers of his body are forced away from an indolence in which it else might have 
languished; and that time is crowded with occupation, which but for some object of 
keen and devoted ambition, might have driveled along in successive hours of weari- 
ness and distaste—and though hope does not always enliven, and success does not 
always crown this career of exertion, yet in the midst of this very variety, and with 
the alternations of occasional disappointment, is the machinery of the whole man 
kept in a sort of congenial play, and upholden in that tone and temper which are 
most agreeable to it. Insomuch, that if through the extirpation of that desire which 
forms the originating principle of all this movement, the machinery were to stop, 
and to receive no impulse from another desire substituted in its place, the man would 
be left with all his propensities to action in a state of most painful and unnatural 
abandonment. A sensitive being suffers, and is in violence, if, after having thoroughly 
rested from his fatigue, or been relieved from his pain, he continue in possession of 
powers without any excitement to these powers; if he possess a capacity of desire 
without having an object of desire; or if he have a spare energy upon his person, 
without a counterpart, and without a stimulus to call it into operation. The misery 
of such a condition is often realized by him who is retired from business, or who 
is retired from law, or who is even retired from the occupations of the chase, and of 
the gaming-table. Such is the demand of our nature for an object in pursuit, that 


2 


a 
a4 
: 


—— SS —— 


The Expulsive Power of a New Affection—Chalmers. 115 


no accumulation of previous success can extinguish it—and thus it is, that the most 
prosperous merchant, and the most victorious general, and the most fortunate 
gamester, when the labor of their respective vocations has come to a close, are often 
found to languish in the midst of all their acquisitions, as if out of their kindred and 
rejoicing element. It is quite in vain with such a constitutional appetite for employ- 
ment in man, to attempt cutting away from him the spring or the principle of one 
employment, without providing him with another. The whole heart and habit will .. 


rise in resistance against such an undertaking. The else unoccupied female, ‘atine = 


spends the hours of every evening at some play of hazard, knows as well as you, 
that the pecuniary gain, or the honorable triumph of a successful contest, are alto- 
gether paltry. It is not such a demonstration of vanity as ‘this that will force her 
away from her dear and delightful occupation. The habit can not so be displaced 
as to leave nothing but a negative and cheerless vacancy behind it—though it may 
so be supplanted as to be followed up by another habit of employment, to which the 
power of some new affection has constrained her. It is willingly suspended, for 
example, on any single evening, should the time that is wont to be allotted to gaming, 
required to be spent on the preparations of an approaching assembly. 


The ascendant power of a second affection will do what no exposition, however 


forcible, of the folly and worthlessness of the first, ever could effectuate. And it aa ee 


the same in the great world. You never will be able to _arrest any of its leadings 
pursuits by a naked d_ demonstration ¢ of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of 
stopping one of these pursuits in any way else, but by stimulating to another. In 
attempting to bring a worthy man, intent aaa busied with the prosecution of- his 
objects, to a dead stand, you have not merely to encounter the charm which he 
annexes to these objects—but you have to encounter the pleasure which he feels in 
the very prosecution of them. It is not enough, then, that you dissipate the charm 


by your moral and eloquent and effecting exposure of its illusiveness. You must _ 


ad e.eye of his mind another object, with a charm powerful enough to 
pspossess the first of its influence, and to engage him in some other prosecution as 
f interest and. hope and con cenial activity, as the former. It is this which 


. an impotency on all moral and pathetic declamation about the insignificance 
of the world. A man will no more consent to the misery of being without an object, 
because that object is a trifle, or of being without a pursuit, because that pursuit ter- 
minates in some frivolous or fugitive acquirement, than he will voluntarily submit 
himself to the torture, because that torture is to be of short duration. If to be with- 
Out desire and without exertion altogether, is a state of violence and discomfort, then 
the present desire, with its correspondent train of exertion, is not to be got rid of 
simply by destroying it. It must be by substituting another desire, and another linz 
or habit of exertion in its place—and the most effectual way of withdrawing the mind 
— one object, is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeop!ed vacancy— 
but by presenting to its regards another object still more alluring, 

“These remarks apply not merely to love considered in its state of desire for an 
object not yet obtained. They apply also to love considered in its state of indul- 
gence, or placid gratification, with an object already in possession. It is seldom that 
any of our tastes are made to disappear by a mere process of natural extinction. At 
least, it is very seldom that this is done through the instrumentality of reasoning. 
It may be done by excessive pampering—but it is almost never done by the mere 
force of mental determination. But what can not be thus destroyed, may be dis- 
possessed—and one taste may be made to give way to another, and to lose its 
power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind. It is thus that the boy ceases, 
at length, to be the slave of his appetite, but it is because a manlier taste has now 
brought it into subordination—and that the youth ceases to idolize pleasure, but it 


“Banunciation 


nina 


r 


116 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


is because the idol of wealth has become the stronger and gotten the ascendency— 


and that even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart of many a - 


thriving citizen, but it is because drawn into the whirl of city politics, another affec- 
tion has been wrought into his moral system, and he is now lorded over by the love 


of power. There is not one of these transformations in which the heart is left with- 


out an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered; but as to its 


desire for having some one object or other, this is unconquerable. Its adhesion to 


that on which it has fastened the preference of its regards, can not willingly be over- 
come by the rending away of a simple separation. It can be done only by the appli- 
cation of something else, to which it may feel the adhesion of a still stronger and 
more powerful preference. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that 
it must haye.a.something.to lay hold of—and which, | if wrested away “without ‘the 


substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as __ 


painful to the mind as hunger is.to the natural system. It may be dispossessed of 
one object, or of any, but it can not be desolated of all. Let there be a breathing 
and a sensitive heart, but without a liking and without affinity to any of the things 
that are around it, and in a state of cheerless abandonment it would be alive to nothing 
but the burden of its own consciousness, and feel it to be intolerable. It would make 
no difference to its owner, whether he dwelt in the midst of a gay and goodly world, 
or placed afar beyond the outskirts of creation, he dwelt a solitary unit in dark and 
unpeopled nothingness. The heart must have something to cling to—and never, by its 
own voluntary consent, will it so denude itself of all its attachments that there shall 
not be one remaining object that can draw or solicit it. 


The misery of a heart thus bereft of all relish for that which is wont to minister 
enjoyment, is strikingly exemplified in those, who satiated with indulgence, have 
been so belabored, as it were, with the variety and the poignancy of the pleasureable 
sensations that they have experienced, that they are at length fatigued out of all 
capacity for sensation whatever. The disease of ennui is more frequent in the French 
metropolis, where amusement is more exclusively the occupation of higher classes, 
than it is in the British metropolis, where the longings of the heart are more diversi- 
fied by the resources of business and politics. There are the votaries of fashion, who, 
in this way, have at length become the victims of fashionable excess—in whom the 
very multitude of their enjoyments has at last extinguished their power of enjoyment 
—who, with the gratifications of art and nature at command, now look upon all that 
is around them with an eye of tastelessness—who, plied with the delights of sense 
and of splendor even to weariness, and incapable of higher delights, have come to the 
end of all their perfection, and like Solomon of old, found it to be vanity and vexation. 
The man whose heart has thus been turned into a desert can vouch for the insupport- 
able languor which must ensue, when one affection is thus plucked away from the 
bosom, without another to replace it. It is not necessary that a man receive pain 
from anything, in order to become miserable. It is barely enough that he looks with 
distaste to everything—and in that asylum which is the repository of minds out of 
joint, and where the organ of feeling as well as the organ of intellect has been im- 
paired, it is not in the cell of loud and frantic outcries where you will meet with the 
acme of mental suffering. But that is the individual who outpeers in wretchedness all 
his fellows, who throughout the whole expanse of nature and society meets not an 
object that has at all the power to detain or to interest him; who neither in earth 
beneath, nor in heaven above, knows of a single charm to which his heart can send 
forth one desirous or responding movement; to whom the world, in his eye a vast and 
empty desolation, has left him nothing but his own consciousness to feed upon—dead 
to all that is without him, and alive to nothing but to the load of his own torpid and 
useless existence. 


The Expulsive Power of a New Affection—Chalmers. i1? 


ft will now be seen, perhaps, why it is that the heart keeps by its present affec- 


~ tions with so much tenacity—when the attempt is to do them away by a mere process 


of extirpation. It will not consent to be so desolated. The strong man, whose 
dwelling-place is there, may be compelled to give way to another occupier—but tinless 
another, stronger than he, has power to dispossess and to succeed him, he will keep 
his present lodgment inviolable. The heart would revolt against its own emptiness. 


“It could not bear to be s0 left in a4 state Of waste and cheerless insipidity, The 


moralist who tries such a process of dispossession as this upon the heart is thwarted 
at every step by the recoil of its own mechanism. You have all heard that Nature 
abhors a vacuum, Such at least is the nature of the heart, that though the room 
which is in it may change one inmate for another, it can not be left void without pain 
of most intolerable suffering. It is not enough then to argue the folly of an existing 
affection. It is not enough, in the terms of a forcible or an affecting demonstration, to 
make good the evanescence of its object. It may not even be enough to associate the 
threats and terrors of some coming vengeance with the indulgence of it. The heart 
may still resist the every application, by obedience to which it would finally be con- 
ducted to a state so much at war with all its appetites as that of downright inanition. 
So to tear away an affection from the heart, as to leave it bare of all its regards, and of 
all its preferences, were a hard and hopeless undertaking—and it would appear as if the 
alone powerful engine of dispossession were to bring the mastery of another affection 
to bear upon it. ‘ 


_ We know not a more sweeping interdict upon the affections of Nature, than that 
which is delivered by the apostle in the verse before us. To bid a man into whom 
there is not yet entered the great and ascendant influence of the principle of regenera- | 
tion, to bid him withdraw his love from all the things that are in the world, is to bid 
him give up all the affections that are in his heart. The world is the all of a natural 
man. He has not a taste, nor a desire, that points not to a something placed within 
the confines of its visible horizon. He loves nothing above it, and he cares for 
nothing beyond it; and to bid him love not the world is to pass a sentence of expul- | 
sion on all the inmates of his bosom. To estimate the magnitude and the difficulty of 
such a surrender, let-us only think that it were just as arduous to prevail on him not 
to love wealth, which is but one of the things in the world, as to prevail on him to 
set willful fire to his own property. This he might do with sore and painful reluctance, 
if he saw that the salvation of his life hung upon it. But this he would do willingly if 
he saw that a new property of tenfold value was instantly to emerge from the wreck of 
the old one. In this case there is something more than the mere displacement of an 
affection. There is the overbearing of one affection by another. But to desolate his 


heart of all love for the things of the world without the substitution of any love in its 


place, were to him a process of as unnatural violence, as to destroy all the things he 
has in the world, and give him nothing in their room. So that, if to love not the 
world be indispensable to one’s Christianity, then the crucifixion of the old man is not 
too strong a term to mark that transition in his history, when all old things are done 
away, and all things are become new. 


We hope that by this time, you understand the impotency of a mere demonstration 
of this world’s insignificance. Its sole practical effect, if it had any, would be to leave 
the heart in a state to which every heart is insupportable, and that is a mere state of 
nakedness and negation. You may remember the fond and unbroken tenacity with 
which your heart has often recurred to pursuits, over the utter frivolity of which it 
sighed and wept but yesterday. The arithmetic of your short-lived days may on 
Sabbath make the clearest impression upon your understanding—and from his fancied 
bed of death may the preacher cause a voice to descend in rebuke and mockery on all 
the pursuits of earthliness—and as he pictures before you the fleeting generations of 


y 


118 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


men, with the absorbing grave, whither all the joys and interests of the world hasten 
to their sure and speedy oblivion, you may, touched and solemnized by his argument, 
‘feel for a moment as if on the eve of a practical and permanent emancipation from the 
'scene of so much vanity. But the morrow comes, and the business of the world, and 
the objects of the world, the moving forces of the world come along with it—and the 
‘machinery of the heart, in virtue of which it must have something to grasp, or some- 
thing to adhere to, brings it under a kind of moral necessity to be actuated just as 
‘before—and in utter repulsion toward a state so unkindly as that of being frozen out 
both of delight and of desire, does it feel all the warmth and the urgency of its wonted 
| solicitations—nor in the habit and history of the whole man can we detect so much 
as one symptom of the new creature—so that the church, instead of being to him a 
_school of obedience, has been a mere sauntering place for the luxury of a passing and 
‘theatrical emotion; and the preaching which is mighty to compel the attendance of 
| multitudes, which is mighty to still and solemnize the hearers into a kind of tragic 
_ sensibility, which is mighty in the play of variety and vigor that it can keep te around 


| the imagination, is not mighty to the pulling down of strongholds. 
The love of the world can not be expunged by a mere demonstration of the world’s 


worthlessness, But may it not be supplanted by the love of that which is more worthy 


eigen P= 
=: 


than itself? The heart can not be prevailed upon to part with the world, b by a simple 


act of resignation, But may not the heart be prevailed upon to admit into its prefer- 
ence another, who shall subordinate the world, and bring it down from its wonted 
ascendency? If the throne which is placed there must have an occupier, and the 
tyrant that now reigns has occupied it wrongfully, he may not leave a bosom which 
would rather detain him than be left in desolation. But may he not give way to the 
lawful sovereign, appearing with every charm that can secure his willing admittance, 
and taking unto Himself His great power to subdue the moral nature of man, and to 
reign over it? Ina word, if the way to disengage the heart from the positive love of 
one great and ascendant object is to fasten it in positive love to another, then it is not 
by exposing the worthlessness of the former, but by addressing to the mental eye the 


worth and excellence of the latter, that all old things are to be done away, and _ al 


things are to become new. 
~ To obliterate all our present affections, by simply expunging them, and so as to 


leave the seat of them unoccupied, would be to destroy the old character, and to sub- 
' stitute no new character in its place. But when they take their departure upon the 
\ ingress of other visitors; when they resign their sway to the power and predominance 


of new affections; when, abandoning the heart to solitude, they merely give place to 
a successor who turns it into as busy a residence of desire, and interest, and expecta- 
tion as before—there is nothing in all this to thwart or to overbear any of the laws 
of our sentient nature—and we see now, in fullest accordance with the mechanism of 
the heart, a great moral revolution may be made to take place upon it. 

This, we trust, will explain the operation of that charm which accompanies the 
effectual, preaching of the Gospel. The love of God, and the love of the world, are 
two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity—and that 
‘so “irreconcilable that they can not dwell together in the same bosom... We have 


already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its 
own, to cast the world away from it, and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart 


is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the 


expulsive power of a new one. Nothing can exceed ‘the 1e magnitude of the required 
change in a man’s character—when bidden as he is in the New Testament, to love 
not the world; no, nor any of the things that are in the world—for this so compre- 
hends all that is dear to him in existence as to be equivalent to a command of seli- 
annihilation. But the same revelation which dictates so mighty an obedience places 


The Expulsive Power of a New Affection—Chalmers. 119 


within our reach as mighty an instrument of obedience. It brings for admittance, to 
the very door of our heart, an affection which, once seated upon its throne, will either 
subordinate every previous inmate, or bid it away. Beside the world it places before 
the eye of the mind Him who made the world, and with this peculiarity, which is all 
its own—that in the Gospel do we so behold God as that we may love God. It is 
there, and there only, where God stands revealed as an object of confidence to sinners 
—and where our desire after Him is not chilled into apathy by that barrier of human 
guilt which intercepts every approach that is not made to Him through the appointed 
ye Mediator. It is the bringing in of this better hope, whereby we draw nigh unto God— / 
and to live without hope is to live without God, and if the heart be without God the | 
world will then have all the ascendency. It is God apprehended by the believer as | 
God in Christ who alone can dispost it from this ascendency. It is when He stands \ 
dismantled of the terrors which belong to Him as an offended lawgiver, and when we 
are enabled by faith, which is His own gift, to see His glory in the face of Jesus Christ, 
ve and to hear His beseeching voice, as it protests good-will to men, and entreats the 
return of all who will to a full pardon, and a gracious acceptance—it is then that a 
love paramount to the love of the world, and at length expulsive of it, first arises in 
the regenerating bosom. It is when released from the spirit of bondage, with which 
love can not dwell, and when admitted into the number of God’s children, through the 
Taith that isin Christ Jesus, the spirit of adoption is poured upon us—it is then that 
the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is de- 
livered from the tyranny of its former desires, and in the only way in which deliveranc2 
is possible. And that faith which is revealed to us from heaven, as indispensable to a 
sinner’s justification in the sight of God, is also the instrument of the greatest of all 
moral and spiritual achievements on a nature dead to the influence, and beyond the 
reach of every other application. 
Thus may we come to perceive what it is that makes the most effective kind of 
preaching. It is not enough to hold out to the world’s eye the mirror of its own \ 
imperfections. It is not enough to come forth with a demonstration, however 
pathetic, of the evanescent character of all its enjoyments. It is not enough to travel | 
the walk of experience along with you, and speak to your own conscience, and your / 
own recollection of the deceitfulness of the heart, and the deceitfulness of all that the 
heart is set upon. There is many a bearer of the Gospel-message, who has not shrewd- 
ness or natural discernment enough, and who has not power of characteristic descrip- ' 
tion enough, and who has not the talent of moral delineation enough, to present you 
with a vivid and faithful sketch of the existing follies of society. But that very cor- 
ruption which he has not the faculty of representing in its visible details, he may 
practically be the instrument of eradicating in its principle. Let him be but a faithful 
‘expounder of the Gospel testimony. Unable as he may be to apply a descriptive hand 
to the character of the present world, let him but report with accuracy the matter 
_ which revelation has brought to him from a distant world—unskilled as he is in the 
work of so anatomizing the heart, as with the power of a novelist to create a graphical 
or impressive exhibition of the worthlessness of its many affections—let him only deal 
in those mysteries of peculiar doctrine on which the best of novelists have thrown the 
wantonness of their derision. He may not be able, with the eye of shrewd and. 
satirical observation, to expose to the ready recognition of his hearers the desires of 
worldliness—but with the tidings of the Gospel in commission he may wield the only 
engine that can extirpate them. He can not do what some have done, when, as if by 
the hand of a magician, they have brought out to view, from the hidden recesses of 
our nature, the foibles and lurking appetites which belong to it. But he has a truth in 
his possession, which into whatever heart it enters, will, like the rod of Aaron, swallow 
up them all; and unqualified as he may be, to describe the old man in all the nicer 


ae 


120 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


shading of his natural and constitutional varieties, with him is deposited that ascend- 
ant influence under which the leading tastes and tendencies of the old man are de- 
stroyed, and he becomes a new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord. 


Let us not cease, then, to ply the only instrument of powerful.and positive 
operation, to do away from you the love of the world. Let us try every legitimate 
method of finding access to your hearts for the love of Him who is greater than the 
world. For this purpose let us, if possible, clear away that shroud of unbelief which 
so hides and darkens the face of the Deity. Let us insist on His claims to your 
affection—and whether in the shape of gratitude, or in the shape of esteem, let us 
never cease to affirm that in the whole of that wondrous economy, the purpose of 
which is to reclaim a sinful world unto Himself—He, the God of love, so sets Himself 
forth in characters of endearment that naught but faith, and naught but understand- 
ing are wanting, on your part, to call forth the love of your hearts back again. 

And here let me advert to the incredulity of a worldly man when he brings his 
own sound and secular experience to bear upon the high doctrines of Christianity— 
when he looks on regeneration as a thing impossible—when feeling, as he does, the 
obstinacies of his own heart on the side of things present, and casting an intelligent 
eye, much exercised perhaps in the observation of human life, on the equal obstinacies 
of all who are around him, he pronounces this whole matter about the crucifixion of 
the old man, and the resurrection of a new man in his place, to be in downright 
opposition to all that is known and witnessed of the real nature of humanity. We 
think that we have seen such men, who, firmly trenched in their own vigorous and 
home-bred sagacity, and shrewdly regardful of all that passes before them through the 
week, ‘and upon the scenes of ordinary business, look on that transition of the heart 


‘by which it gradually dies unto time, and awakens in all the life of a new-felt and 


ever-growing desire toward God, as a mere Sabbath speculation; and who thus, with 
all their attention engrossed upon the concerns of earthliness, continue unmoved, to 
the end of their days, among the feelings, and the appetites, and the pursuits of 
earthliness. If the thought of death, and another state of being after it, comes across 
them at all, it is not with a change so radical as that of being born again, that they 
ever connect the idea of preparation. They have some vague conception of its being 
quite enough that they acquit themselves in some decent and tolerable way of their 
relative obligations; and that, upon the strength of some such social and domestic 
moralities as are often realized by him in whose heart the love of God has never 
entered, they will be transplanted in safety from this world, where God is the Being 
with whom, it may almost be said, that they have had nothing to do, to that world 
where God is the Being with whom they will have mainly and immediately to do 
throughout all eternity. They admit all that is said of the utter vanity of time, when 
taken up with as a resting-place. But they resist every application made upon the 
heart-of man, with the view of so shifting its tendencies that it shall not henceforth 


~ find-in the interests of time all its rest and all its refreshment. They, in fact, regard 


such an attempt as an enterprise that is altogether aerial—and with a tone of secular 


-wisdom, caught from the familiarities of everyday experience, do they see a visionary 
‘character in-all that is said of setting our affections on the things that are above; and 


‘of walking by faith; and-of keeping our hearts in such a love of God as shall shut out 


ftom-them the-love of the world; and of having no confidence in the flesh; and of so 
renouncing earthly things as to’ have our conversation in heaven. 


~~“ Now, it is altogether worthy of being remarked of those men who thus disrelish 


‘spiritual Christianity, and, in‘ fact, deeti it an impracticable acquirement, how much 
of a piece their incredility about the ‘demands <of Christianity, and their incredulity 
‘about the doctrines of Christianity, are with one ‘another. No wonder that they feel 
the work of the New Testament to be beyond their-strength,’so long as*they hold the 


A 


The Expulsive Power of a New Affection—Chalmers. 121 


4 jwords * the New Testament to be beneath their attention. Neither they nor anyone 

_ else can dispossess the heart of an old affection, but by the impulsive power of a new 
one—and, if that new affection be the love of God, neither they nor anyone else can 

_ be made to entertain it, but on such a representation of the Deity as shall draw the 
heart of the sinner toward Him. Now it is just their belief which screens from the 
discernment of their minds this representation. They do not see the love of God in 
sending His Son into the world. They do not see the expression of His tenderness 
to men, in sparing Him not, but giving Him up unto the death for us all. They do 
not see the sufficiency of the atonement, or of the sufferings that were endured by 
Him who bore the burden that sinners should have borne. They do not see the 
blended holiness and compassion of the Godhead, in that He passed by the transgres- 

sions of His creatures, yet could not pass them by without an expiation. It is a 
mystery to them how a man should pass to the state of godliness from a state of 
nature—but had they only a believing view of God manifest in the flesh, this would 
resolve for them the whole mystery of godliness, As it is they can not get quit of 
their old affections, because they are out of sight from all those truths which have 
influence to raise a new one. They are like the children of Israel in the land of 
Egypt, when required to make bricks without straw—they cannot love God, while they 
want the only food which can aliment this affection in a sinner’s bosom—and however 
great their errors may be both in resisting the demands of the Gospel as imprac- 
ticable, and in rejecting the doctrines of the Gospel as inadmissible, yet there is not 
a spiritual man (and it is the prerogative of him who is spiritual to judge all men) 
who will not perceive that there is a consistency in these errors. 

But if there be a consistency in the errors, in like manner is there a consistency in 
the truths which are opposite to them. The man who believes in the peculiar doc- 
trines will readily bow to the peculiar demands of Christianity. When he is told to 
love God supremely, | this may startle another, but it will not startle him to whom God 


as been revealed in peace, and in pardon, and in all the freeness of an offered recon- ; 


lim who has nothing to replace it—but not impossible wih him who has found in 
God a sure and satisfying portion. When told to withdraw his affections from the 
things that are beneath, this were laying an order of self-extinction upon the man, 
who knows not another quarter in the whole sphere of his contemplation to which he 
could transfer them—but it were not grievous to him whose view had been opened to 
the loveliness and glory of the things that are above, and can there find, for every 
feeling of his soul, a most ample and delighted occupation. When told to look not 
to the things that are seen and temporal, this were blotting out the light of all that 
is visible from the prospect of him in whose eye there is a wall of partition between 
guilty nature and the joys of eternity—but he who believes that Christ has broken 
down this wall finds a gathering radiance upon his soul, as he looks onward in faith 
to the things that are unseen and eternal. Tell a man to be holy—and how can he 
compass such a performance, when his fellowship with holiness is a fellowship of 
despair? It is the atonement of the cross reconciling the holiness of the lawgiver with 
the safety of the offender, that hath opened the way for a sanctifying influence into 
the sinner’s heart, and he can take a kindred impression from the character of God 
now brought nigh, and now at peace with him. Separate the demand from the doc- 
trine, and you have either a system of righteousness that is impracticable, or a barren 
orthodoxy. Bring the demand and the doctrine together, and the true disciple of 
Christ is able to do the one, through the other strengthening him. The motive is 
_ adequate to the movement; and the bidden obedience to the Gospel is not beyond the 
measure of his strength, just because the doctrine of the Gospel is not beyond the 
Measure of his acceptance. The shield of faith, and the hope of salvation, and the 


122 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Word of God, and the girdle of truth—these are the armor that he has put on; and 
with these the battle is won, and the eminence is reached, and the man stands on the 


vantage ground of a new field and a new prospect. The effect is great, but the cause — 
is equal to it—and stupendous as this moral resurrection to the precepts of Christianity — 


undoubtedly is, there is an element of strength enough to give it being and continu- 
ance in the principles of Christianity. 


The object of the Gospel is both to pacify the sinner’s conscience and to purify his 
heart; and it is of importance to observe, that what mars the one of these objects mars 


\the other also. The best way of casting out an impure affection is to admit a pure 
\one; and by the love of what is good to expel the love of what is evil. Thus it is, 


that the freer Gospel, the more sanctifying is the Gospel; and the more it is received 
as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness. 
This is one of the secrets of the Christian life, that the more a man holds of God as a 
pensioner, the greater is the payment of service that He renders back again. On the 
tenure of ‘Do this and live,” a spirit of fearfulness is sure to enter; and the jealousies 
of a legal bargain chase away all confidence frdm the intercourse between God and 
man; and the creature striving to be square and even with his Creator is, in fact, pur- 
suing all the while his own selfishness instead of God’s glory; and with all the con- 
formities which he labors to accomplish, the soul of obedience is not there, the mind 
is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed under such an economy ever can be. It 


~ oe 


is only when, as in the Gospel, acceptance is bestowed as a present, without money 


and without price, that the Séctirity which man feels in God is placed “beyond ‘the 


gladness of his heart lies in the impulse of a gratitude by which it is awakened to the 
charms of a new moral existence. Salvation by grace—salvation by free _grace—salva- 


‘feach of disturbance—or that he can repose in Him as one friend reposes in another— 
“or that any liberal and generous understanding can be established betwixt them—the 
one party rejoicing over the other to do him good—the other finding that the truest 


tion not of works, but according to the mercy of God—salvation on such a footing is~ 


not more indispensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of justice than 
it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and the weight of ungodliness. 
Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the Gospel, and you raise a topic ‘ot 
distrust between man and God. You take away from the power of the Gospel to melt 


and to conciliate. For this purpose the freer it is the better it is. That very peculiarity 


which so many dread as the germ of Antinomianism, is, in fact, the germ of a new 


spirit and a new inclination against it. Along with the light of a free Gospel does there © 
enter the love of the Gospel, which, in proportion as you impair the freeness, you are ~ 
sure to chase away. And never does the sinner find within himself so mighty a moral © 
transformation, as when under the belief. that he is saved by grace, he feels constrained 


thereby ‘to. ‘offer his, heart a “devoted. thing, and. to deny ungodliness.” 


aera a 


Te ere ene a 


To do any work in the best manner, you would make use “of the fittest tools for 
it. And we trust that what has been said may serve in some degree for the practical © 


guidance of those who would like to reach the great moral achievement of our text, 


\ 


but feel that the tendencies and desires of nature are too strong for them. We know ; 


_of no other way by which to. keep the love of the world out of our heart. than. to_keep. 
‘no our ur hearts the love of God—and no other way by which to keep our hearts in the 
love of God,. than_by..building.ourselves-on_our most holy faith, That denial of the 


f 
f 
: 
4 


“world which is not possible to him that dissents from the Gospel testimony, is possible, — 


even as all things are possible to him that believeth. To try this without faith is to } 


work without the right tool or the right instrument. But faith worketh by love; = 
the way of expelling from the heart the love that transgresseth the law is to admit into 
its receptacles the love which fulfilleth the law. 


Conceive a man to be standing on the margin of this green world, and that, when — 


The Expulsive Power of a New Affection—Chalmers. 123 


‘ 


the looked toward it, he saw abundance smiling upon every field, and all the blessings 
which earth can afford, scattered in profusion throughout every family, and the light oi 
the sun sweetly resting upon all the pleasant habitations, and the joys of human com- 
panionship brightening many a happy circle of society—conceive this to be the general 
character of the scene upon one side oi his contemplation, and that on the other, 
beyond the verge of the goodly planet on which he was situated, he could descry noth- 
ing but a dark and fathomless unknown. Think you that he would bid a voluntary 
adieu to all the brightness and all the beauty that were before him upon earth, and 
commit himself to the frightful solitude away from it? Would he leave its peopled 
dwelling places, and become a solitary wanderer through the fields of nonenity? Ii 
space offered him nothing but a wilderness, would he for it abandon the home-bred 
scenes of life and of cheerfulness that lay so near, and exerted such a power of urgency 
to detain him? Would not he cling to the regions of sense, and of life, and of society? 
—and shrinking away from the desolation that was beyond it, would not he be glad 
to keep his firm footing on the territory of this world, and to take shelter under the 
silver canopy that was stretched over it? 

But if, during the time of his contemplation, some happy island of the blest had 
floated by, and there had burst upon his senses the light of its surpassing glories, and 
its sounds of sweeter melody, and he clearly saw that there a purer beauty rested upon 
every field, and a more heartfelt joy spread itself among all the families, and he could 
discern there a peace, and a piety, and a benevolence which put a moral gladness into 
every bosom, and united the whole society in one rejoicing sympathy with each other, 
and with the beneficent Father of them all. Could he further see that pain and mortal- 
ity were there unknown, and above all, that signals of welcome were hung out, and 
an avenue of communication was made for him—perceive you not that what was before 
the wilderness, would become the land of invitation, and that now the world would 
be the wilderness? What unpeopled space could not do, can be done by space teeming 
with beatific scenes, and beatific society. And let the existing tendencies of the heart 
be what they may to the scene that is near and visible around us, still if another stood 
revealed to the prospect of man, either through the channel of faith or through the 
channel of his senses—then, without violence done to the constitution of his moral 
nature, may he die unto the present world, and live to the lovelier world that stands 
in the distance away from it. 


{This sermon is from the History and Repository of Pulpit Eloquence, by Henry 
C. Fish, and published by Dodd, Mead & Co. 


Thomas Chalmers was born at East Anstruther, Fifeshire, Scotland, March 17, 
1780; died at Morningside, near Edinburgh, May 31, 1847. He was minister at Glas- 


~gow 1815 to 1823, professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews, 1823 to 1828, ana 


of divinity at Edinburgh, 1828 to 1843. He was a leader in 1843 of the secession from 
the Church of Scotland. His principal works were: Discourses on Astronomy, Poli- 
tical Economy, Natural Theology, etc. It is said that he did not experience the 
transforming power of the Spirit until he had been in the ministry some time. He 
was awakened by investigations made as to the evidences of Christianity in the prep- 
aration of an article on that subject for an encyclopedia. ] 


124 Pulpit Power and Eloquence, 


CHRISTIANITY A RATIONAL RELIGION. 
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 


Romans 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.” 


Such was the language of Paul; and every man will respond to it who compr 
hends the character and has felt the influence of Christianity. In a former discours 
I proposed to state to you some reasons for adopting as our own the words of f 
Apostle, for joining in this open and resolute testimony to the Gospel of Christ: 
observed, that I was not ashamed of the Gospel, first, because it is true, and to thi 
topic the discourse was devoted. I wish now to continue the subject, and to sta 
another ground of undisguised and unshaken adherence to Christianity. I say, the 
I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, because it is a rational religion. It agr 
with reason; therefore I count it worthy of acceptation, therefore I do not blush t 
enroll myself among its friends and advocates. The object of the present discours 
will be the illustration of the claim of Christianity. I wish to show you the harmon 
which subsists between the light of God’s word, and that primitive light of reaso 
which He has kindled within us to be our perpetual guide. If, in treating this subjec 
I shall come into conflict with any class of Christians, I trust I shall not be considere 
as imputing to them any moral or intellectual defect. I judge men by their motive: 
dispositions and lives, and not by their speculations or peculiar opinions; and 
esteem piety and virtue equally venerable, whether found in friend or foe. 

Christianity is a rational religion. Were it not so, I should be ashamed to profes 
it. I am aware that it is the fashion with some to decry reason, and to set up revela 
tion aS an opposite authority. This error though countenanced by good men, an 
honestly maintained for the defence of the Christian cause, ought to be earnestly with 
stood; for it virtually surrenders our religion into the hands of the unbeliever. 1] 
saps the foundation to strengthen the building. It places our religion in hostility t 
human nature, and gives to its adversaries the credit of vindicating the rights an 
noblest powers of the mind. 

We must never forget that our rational nature is the greatest gift of God. Fe 
this we owe Him our chief gratitude. It is a greater gift than any outward aid o 
benefaction, and no doctrine which degrades it can come from its Author. Th 
development of it is the end of our being. Revelation is but a means, and is con 
signed to concur with nature, Providence, and God’s spirit, in carrying forward reaso 
to its perfection. I glory in Christianity because it enlarges, invigorates, exalts m 
rational nature. If I could not be a Christian without ceasing to be rational, I shoul 
not hesitate as to my choice. I feel myself bound to sacrifice to Christianity propert 
reputation, life; but I ought not to sacrifice to any religion that reason which lifts m 
above the brute and constitutes me a man. I can conceive no sacrilege greater than t 
prostrate or renounce the highest faculty which we have derived from God. In § 
doing we should offer violence to the divinity within us. Christianity wages no we 
with reason, but is one with it, and is given to be its helper and friend. ‘ 

I wish, in the present discourse, to illustrate and confirm the views now give! 
My remarks will be arranged under two heads. I propose, first, to show t 


Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing 125 


hristianity is founded on, and supposes, the authority of reason, and cannot therefore 
pose it without subverting itself. My object in this part of the discourse will be to 
pose the error of those who hope to serve revelation by disparaging reason. I shall 
en, in the second place, compare Christianity and the light of reason, to show their 
cordance; and shall prove, by descending to particulars, that Christianity is eminently 
rational religion. My aim, under this head, will be to vindicate the Gospel from the 
proaches of the unbeliever, and to strengthen the faith and attachment of its friends. 
efore I begin, let me observe that this discussion, from the nature of the subject, 
ust assume occasionally an abstract form, and will demand serious attention. I am 
speak of reason, the chief faculty of the mind; and no simplicity of language in 
eating such a topic can exempt the hearer from the necessity of patient effort of 
ought. : 

I am to begin with showing that Christian revelation is founded on the authority 
f reason, and consequently cannot oppose it; and here it may be proper to settle the 
eaning of the word reason. One of the most important steps towards the truth 
to determine the import of terms. Very often fierce controversies have sprung from 
bscurity of language, and the parties, on explaining themselves, have discovered that 
ey have been spending their strength in a war of words. What, then, is reason? 

The term reason is used with so much latitude that to fix its precise limits is not an 
sy task. In this respect it agrees with the other words which express the intellectual 
culties. One idea, however, is always attached to it. All men understand by reason 
e highest faculty or energy of the mind. Without laboring for a philosophical defi- 
ition that will comprehend all its exercises, I shall satisfy myself with pointing out 
© of its principal characteristics or functions. 

First, it belongs to reason to comprehend universal truths. This is among its 
host important offices. There are particular and there are universal truths. The last 
re the noblest, and the capacity of perceiving them is the distinction of intelligent 
eings; and these belong to reason. Let me give my meaning by some illustrations. I 
ee a stone falling to the ground. This is a particular truth; but I do not stop here. I 
yelieve that not only this particular stone falls towards the earth, but that ‘every parti- 
le of matter, in whatever world, tends, or, as is sometimes said, is attracted towards 
ll other matter. Here is a universal truth, a principle extending to the whole 
naterial creation, and essential to its existence. This'truth belongs to reason. Again, 
see a man producing some effect, a manufacture, a house. Here is a particular truth. 
3ut I am not only capable of seeing particular causes and effects; I am sure that every- 
hing which begins to exist, no matter when or where, must have a cause, that no 
‘hange ever has taken place or ever will take place without a cause. Here is a univer- 
al truth, something true here and everywhere, true now and through eternity; and 
his truth belongs to reason. Again, I see with my eyes, I traverse with my hands, a 
imited space; but this is not all. I am sure that, beyond the limits which my limbs 
yr senses reach, there is an unbounded space; that, go where I will, infinity will 
pread around me. Here is another universal truth, and this belongs to reason. The 
dea of infinity is indeed one of the noblest conceptions of this faculty. Again, I see 
1 man conferring a good on another. Here is a particular truth or perception. But 
ny mind is not confined to this. I see and feel that it is right for all intelligent beings, 
‘xist when or where they may, to do good, and wrong for them to seek the misery of 
thers. Here is a universal truth, a law extending from God to the lowest human 
yeing; and this belongs to reason. I trust I have conveyed to you my views in regard 
o the first characteristic of this highest power of the soul. Its office is to discern 
iiversal truths, great and eternal principles. But it does not stop here. Reason 
s also exercised in applying these universal truths to particular cases, beings, events. 
for example, reason teaches me, as we have seen, that all changes without exception 


| 


126 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


require a cause; and in conformity to this principle, it prompts me to seek the parti- 
cular causes of the endless changes and appearances which fall under my observation. | 
Thus reason is perpetually at work on the ideas furnished us by the senses, by con- 
sciousness, by memory, associating them with its own great truths, or investing them 
with its own universality. 4 

I now proceed to the second function of reason, which is indeed akin to the first. | 
Reason is the power which tends, and is perpetually striving, to reduce our various 
thoughts to the Unity or Consistency. Perhaps the most fundamental conviction of | 
reason is that all truths agree together; that inconsistency is the mark of error. Its 
intensest, most earnest effort is to bring concord into the intellect, to reconcile what 
seem to be clashing views. On the observation of a new fact, reason strives to incor- 
porate it with former knowledge. It can allow nothing to stand separate in the mind. 
It labors to bring together scattered truths, and to give them the strength and beauty 
of a vital order. Its end ard delight is harmony. It is shocked by an inconsistency 
in belief, just as a fine ear is wounded by a discord. It carries within itself an instine- 
tive consciousness, that all things which exist are intimately bound together; and it 
cannot rest until it has connected whatever we witness with the infinite whole. Reason 
according to this view, is the most glorious form or exercise of the intellectual nature. 
It corresponds to the unity of God and the universe, and seeks to make the soul the 
image of this sublime unity. 

I have thus given my views of reason; but, to prevent all perversion, before I pro- 
ceed to the main discussion, let me offer a word or two more of explanation. In this 
discourse, when I speak of the accordance of revelation with reason, I suppose this 
faculty to be used deliberately, conscientiously, and with the love of truth. Men often 
baptize with the name of reason their prejudices, unexamined notions, or opinions 
adopted through interest, pride, or other unworthy biases. It is not uncommon to 
hear those who sacrifice the plainest dictates of the rational nature to impulse and 
passion, setting themselves up as oracles of reason. Now when I say revelation must 
accord with reason, I do not mean by the term the corrupt and superficial opinions of 
men who have betrayed and debased their rational powers. I mean reason, calmly, 
honestly exercised for the acquisition of truth and the invigoration of virtue. 

After these explanations, I proceed to the discussion of the two leading principles 
to which this discourse is devoted. 

First, I am to show that revelation is founded on the authority of reason, and 
cannot therefore oppose or disparage it without subverting itself. Let me state a few 
of the considerations which convince me of the truth of this position. The first is, 
that reason alone makes us capable of receiving a revelation. It must previously exist 
and operate, or we should be wholly unprepared for the communications of Christ. 
Revelation, then, is built on reason. You will see the truth of these remarks if you 
will consider to whom revelation is sent. Why is it given to men rather than to 
brutes? Why have not God’s messengers gone to the fields to proclaim His glad 
tidings to bird and beast? The answer is obvious. These want reason; and, wanting 
this, they have no capacity or preparation for revealed truth. And not only would 
revelation be lost on the brute; let it speak to the child, before his rational faculties 
have been awakened, and before some ideas of duty and his own nature have been 
developed, and it might as well speak to a stone. Reason is the preparation and 
ground of revelation. 

This truth will be still more obvious, if we consider, not only to whom, but in 
what way, the Christian revelation is communicated. How is it conveyed? In words. — 
Did it make these words? No. They were in use ages before its birth. Again, I ask, — 
Did it make the ideas or thoughts which these words express? No. If the hearers — 
of Jesus had not previously attached ideas to the terms which he employed, they could 


Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing 127 


not have received his meaning. He might as well have spoken to them in a foreign 
tongue. Thus the ideas which enter into Christianity subsisted before. They were 
ideas of reason, so that to this faculty revelation owes the materials of which it is 
composed. 

Revelation, we must remember, is not our earliest teacher. Man is not born with 
the single power of reading God’s word, and sent immediately to that guide. His eyes 
open first on another volume, that of the creation. Long before he can read the Bible. 
|he looks round on the earth and sky. He reads the countenances of his friends, and 
hears and understands their voices. He looks, too, by degrees within himself, and 
acquires some ideas of his own soul. Thus his first school is that of nature and reason, 
land this is necessary to prepare him for a communication from heaven. Revelation 
does not find the mind a blank, a void, prepared to receive unresistingly whatever may 
be offered; but finds it in possession of various knowledge from nature and experi- 
ence, and, still more, in possession of great principles, fundamental truths, moral 
ideas, which are derived from itself, and which are the germs of all its future 
improvement. This last view is peculiarly important. The mind does not receive every- 
thing from abroad. Its great ideas arise from itself, and by those native lights it reads 
and comprehends the volumes of nature and revelation. We speak indeed of nature 
and revelation as making known to us an intelligent First Cause; but the ideas of 
intelligence and causation we derive originally from our own nature. The elements 
of the idea of God we gather from ourselves. Power, wisdom, love, virtue, beauty and 
happiness, words which contain all that is glorious in the universe and interesting 
in our existence, express attributes of the mind, and are understood by us only 
through consciousness. It is true, these ideas or principles of reason are often 
obscured by thick clouds, and mingled with many and deplorable errors. Still they are 
‘never lost. Christianity recognizes them, is built on them, and needs them as its 
‘interpreters. If an illustration of these views be required, I would point you to wha: 
may be called the most fundamental idea of religion. I mean the idea of right, of 
‘duty. Do we derive this originally and wholly from sacred books? Has not every 
‘human being, whether born within or beyond the bounds of revelation, a sense of the 
distinction between right and wrong? Is there not an earlier voice than revelation, 
approving or rebuking men according to their deeds? In barbarous ages is not con- 
science heard? And does it not grow more articulate with the progress of society? 
Christianity does not create, but presupposes the idea of duty; and the same may be 
‘said of other great convictions. Revelation, then, does not stand alone, nor is it 
addressed to a blank and passive mind. It was meant to be a joint worker with other 
teachers, with nature, with Providence, with conscience, with our rational powers; and 
as these all are given us by God, they cannot differ from each other. God must agree 
with Himself. He has but one voice. It is man who speaks with jarring tongues. 
Nothing but harmony can come from the Creator; and, accordingly, a religion claim- 
ing to be from God, can give no surer proof of falsehood than by the contradicting 
of those previous truths which God is teaching by our very nature. We have thus seen 
that reason prepares us for a divine communication, and that it furnishes the ideas or 
“Materials of which revelation consists. This is my first consideration. 


I proceed to a second. I affirm, then, that revelation rests on the authority of 
reason, because to this faculty it submits the evidences of its truth, and nothing but 
the approving sentence of reason binds us to receive and obey it. This is.a very 
weighty consideration. Christianity, in placing itself before the tribunal of reason 
and in resting its claims on the sanction of this faculty, is one of the chief witnesses 
to the authority and dignity of our rational nature. That I have ascribed to this 
faculty its true and proper office, may be easily made to appear. I take the New 
Testament in hand, and on what ground do I receive its truths as divine? I see 


ee S63 a ee 


128 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


nothing on its pages but the same letters in which other books are written. No mirac- 
ulous voice from heaven assures me that it is God’s word, nor does any mysterious 
voice within my soul command me to believe the supernatural works of Christ. How, 
then, shall I settle the question of the origin of this religion? I must examine it by 
the same rational faculties by which other subjects are tried. I must ask what are 
its evidences, and I must lay them before reason, the only power by which evidence 
can be weighed. I have not a distinct faculty given me for judging a revelation. I 
have not two understandings, one for inquiring into God’s word and another into His 
works, As with the same bodily eye I now look on the earth, now on the heavens, 
so with the same power of reason I examine now nature, now revelation. Reason 
must collect and weigh the various proofs of Christianity. It must especially compare 
this system with those great moral convictions, which were written by the finger of 
God on the heart, and which made man a law to himself. A religion subverting these, 
it must not hesitate to reject, be its evidences what they may. A religion, for example, 
commanding us to hate and injure society, reason must instantly discard, without even 
waiting to examine its proofs. From these views we learn, not only that it is the 
province of reason to judge of the truth of Christianity, but, what is still more 
important, that the rules or tests by which it judges are of its own dictation. The laws 
which it applies in this case have their origin in itself. No one will pretend that 
revelation can prescribe the principles by which the question of its own truth should 
be settled; for, until proved to be true, it has no authority. Reason must prescribe the 
tests or standards, to which a professed communication from God should be referred; 
and among these none are more important than that moral law, which belongs to the 
very essence, and is the deepest conviction of the rational nature. Revelation, then, 
rests on reason, and, in opposing it, would act for its own destruction. 


I have given two views. I have shown that revelation draws its ideas or materials 
from reason, and that it appeals to this power as the judge of its truth. I now assert, 
thirdly, that it rests on the authority of neason, because it needs and expects this fac- 
ulty to be its interpreter, and without this aid would be worse than useless. How is 
the right of interpretation, the real meaning, of Scriptures to be ascertained? I answer 
—by reason. I know of no process by which the true sense of the New Testament is 
to pass from the page into my mind without the use of my rational faculties. It will 
not be pretended that this book is so exceedingly plain, its words so easy, its sentences 
so short,-its meaning so exposed on the surface, that the whole truth may be received 
- in a moment and without any intellectual effort. There is no such miraculous sim- 
plicity in the Scriptures. In truth, no book can be written so simply as to need no 
exercise of reason. Almost every word has more than one meaning, and judgment 
is required to select the particular sense intended by the writer. Of all books, per- 
haps the Scriptures need most the use of reason for their just interpretation; and this, 
not from any imperfection, but from the strength of boldness, and figurative character 
of their style, and from the distance of the time when they were written. I open the 
New Testament and my eye lights on this passage: “If thy hand offend thee, cut it 
off and cast it from thee.” Is this language to be interpreted in its plainest and most 
obvious sense? Then I must mutilate my body, and become a suicide. I look again, 
and I find Jesus using these words to the Jews: “Fill ye up the measure of your 
iniquities.” Am I to interpret this according to the letter, or the first ideas which it 
suggests? Then Jesus commanded His hearers to steep themselves in crime, and was 
Himself a minister of sin. It is only by a deliberate use of reason that we can pene- 
trate beneath the figurative, hyperbolical, and often obscure style of the New Testa- 
ment, to the real meaning. Let me go to the Bible, dismissing my reason and taking 
the first impression which the words convey, and there is no absurdity, however gross, 
into which I shall not fall, I shall ascribe a limited body to God, and unbounded 


a 


Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing 129 


knowledge to man, for I read of God having limbs, and of man knowing all things. 
Nothing is plainer than that I must compare passage with passage, and limit one by 
another, and especially limit all by those plain and universal principles of reason, 
which are called common sense, or I shall make revelation the patron of every folly - 
and vice. So essential is reason to the interpretation of the Christian records. Reve- 
lation rests upon its authority. Can it then oppose it, or teach us to hold it in light 
esteem? 
I have now furnished the proofs of my first position, that revelation is founded 
_ on reason; and in discussing this, I have wished not only to support the main doctrine, 
but to teach you to reverence, more perhaps than you have done, your rational nature. 
This has been decried by theologians, until men have ceased to feel its sacredness and 
dignity. It ought to be regarded as God's greatest gift. It is His image within us. 
To renounce it would be to offer a cruel violence to ourselves, to take our place 
among the brutes. Better pluck out the eye, better quench the light of the body, than 
the light within us. We all feel that the loss of reason, when produced: by disease, is 
the most terrible calamity of life, and we look on an hospital for the insane as the 
receptacle for the most pitiable of our race. But, in one view, insanity is not so 
great an evil as the prostration of reason to a religious sect or a religious chief; for the 
first is a visitation of Providence, the last is a voluntary act, the work of our own 
hands. 
- Iam aware that those who have spoken most contemptuously of human reason, 
have acted from a good motive; their aim has been to exalt revelation. They have 
thought that by magnifying this as the only means of divine teaching, they were 
adding to its dignity. But truth gains nothing by exaggeration; and Christianity, as 
we have seen, is undermined by nothing more effectually than by the sophistry which 
would bring discredit on our rational powers. Revelation needs no such support. For 
myself I do not find that, to esteem Christianity, I must think it the only source of 
instruction to which I must repair. I need not make nature dumb to give power or 
attraction to the teaching of Christ. The last derives new interest and confirmation 
from its harmony with the first. Christianity would furnish a weapon against itself, 
not easily repelled, should it claim the distinction of being the only light vouchsafed 
by God to men; for, in that case, it would represent a vast majority of the human race 
as left by their Creator without guidance or hope. I believe, and rejoice to believe, 
that a ray from heaven descends on the path of every fellow-creature. The heathen, 
though in darkness when compared with the Christian, has still his light; and it comes 
| from the same source as our own, just as the same sun dispenses, now the faint dawn, 
and now the perfect day. Let not nature’s teaching be disparaged. It is from God as 
truly as His word. It is sacred as truly as revelation. Both are manifestations of one 
infinite mind, and harmonious manifestations; and without this agreement the claims 
of Christianity could not be sustained. 


In offering these remarks, I have not forgotten that they will expose me to the 
Teproach of ministering to “the pride of reason;’’ and I may be told that there is no 
worse form of pride than this. The charge is so common as to deserve a moment’s 
| attention. It will appear at once to be groundless, if you consider that pride finds 
its chief nourishment and delight in the idea of our own superiority. It is built on 
something peculiar and distinctive, on something which separates us from others and 
Taises us above them, and not on powers which we share with all around us. Now, in 
speaking, as I have done, of the worth and dignity of reason, I have constantly 
regarded and represented this faculty as the common property of all human beings. I 
have spoken of its most important truths as universal and unconfined, such as no 
individual can monopolize or make the grounds of personal distinction or elevation. 
T have given, then, no occasion and furnished no nutriment to pride. I know, indeed, 


130 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


that the pride of reason or of intellect exists; but how does it chiefly manifest itself? 
Not in revering that rational nature, which all men have derived from God; but in . 
exaggerating our particular acquisitions or powers, in magnifying our distinctive - 
views, in looking contemptuously on other minds, in making ourselves standards for 
our brethren, in refusing new lights, and in attempting to establish dominion over the 
understandings of those who are placed within our influence. 

Such is the most common form of the pride of intellect. It is a vice confined 
to no sect and perhaps will be found to prevail most where it is most disclaimed. 

I doubt not that they who insist so continually on the duty of exalting Scripture 
above reason, consider themselves as particularly secured against the pride of reason. 
Yet none, I apprehend, are more open to the charge. Such persons are singularly 
prone to enforce their own interpretations of Scripture on others, and to see peril and 
crime in the adoption of different views from their own. Now, let me ask, by what 
power do these men interpret revelation? Is it not by their reason? Have they any 
faculties but the rational ones, by which to compare Scripture with Scripture, to 
explain figurative language, to form conclusions as to the will of God? Do they not 
employ on God’s word the same intellect as on His works? And are not their inter- 
pretations of both equally results of reason? It follows that in imposing on others 
their explications of the Scriptures, they as truly arrogate to themselves a superiority 
of reason, as if they should require conformity to their explanations of nature. Nature 
and Scripture agree in this, that they cannot be understood at a glance. Both volumes 
demand patient investigation, and task all our powers of thought. Accordingly it is 
well known, that as much intellectual toil has been spent on theological systems as on 
the natural sciences; and unhappily it is not less known, that as much intellectual 
pride has been manifested in framing and defending the first as the last. I fear, indeed, 
that this vice has clung with peculiar obstinacy to the students of revelation. Nowhere, 
I fear, have men manifested such infatuated trust in their own infallibility, such over- 
weening fondness for their own conclusions, such positiveness, such impatience of 
contradiction, such arrogance towards the advocates of different opinions, as in the 
interpretation of the Scriptures; and yet these very men, who so idolize their own 
intellectual powers, profess to humble reason, and consider a criminal reliance on it as 
almost exclusively chargeable on others. The true defence against the pride of reason 
is, not to speak of it contemptuously, but to reverence it as God’s inestimable gift to 
every human being, and as given to all for never-ceasing improvements of which we 
see but the dawn in the present acquisitions of the noblest mind. 

I have now completed: my views of the first principle, which I laid down in this 
discourse, namely, that the Christian revelation rests on the authority of reason. Of 
course, it cannot oppose reason without undermining and destroying itself. I main- 
tain, however, that it does not oppose, that it perfectly accords with reason. It is a 
rational religion. This is my second great position, and to this I ask your continued 
attention. This topic might easily be extended to a great length. I might state, in 
succession, all the principles of Christianity, and show their accordance with reason. 
But I believe that more general views will be more useful, and such only can be given 
within the compass of a discourse. 

In the account which I gave you of reason, in the beginning of this discourse, I 
confined myself to two of its functions, namely, its comprehension of universal truths, 
and the effort it constantly makes to reduce the thoughts to harmony or consistency. 
Universality and consistency are among the chief attributes of reason. Do we find | 
these in Christianity? If so, its claim to the character of a rational religion will be 
established. These tests I will therefore apply to it, and I will begin with consistency. 

That a religion be rational, nothing more is necessary than that its truths should 
consist or agree with one another, and with all truths, whether derived from outward 


4 


F Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing 131 


‘nature or our own souls. Now I affirm that the Christian doctrines have this agree- 
ment; and the more we examine, the more brightly this mark of truth will appear. 
I go to the Gospel, and I first compare its various parts with one another. Among 
these I find perfect harmony; and what makes this more remarkable is, that Chris- 
tianity is not taught systematically, or like a science. Jesus threw out, if I may so 
speak, his precepts and doctrines incidentally, or as they were required by the occasion, 
and yet, when they are brought together, they form a harmonious whole. I do not 
think it necessary to enlarge on this topic, because I believe it is not questioned by 
infidelity. I will name but one example of this harmony in Christianity. All its 
doctrines and all its precepts have that species of unity, which is most essential in a 
religion, that is, they all tend to one object. They all agree in a single aim or purpose, 
and that is to exalt the human character to a height of virtue never known before. Let 
the skeptic name, if he can, one Christian principle which has not a bearing on this 
end. A consistency of this kind is the strongest mark of a rational religion which can 
be conceived. Let me observe, in passing, that besides this harmony of the Christian 
doctrines with one another, there is a striking and beautiful agreement between the 
teachings of Jesus and His character, which gives confirmation to both. Whatever 
Jesus taught you may see embodied in Himself. There is perfect unity between the 
system and its founder. His life republished what fell from His lips. With His lips 
he enjoined earnestly, constantly a strong and disinterested philanthropy; and how 
harmoniously and sublimely did His cross join with His word in enforcing this 
exalted virtue! With His lips He taught the mercy of God to sinners; and of this 
attribute He gave a beautiful illustration in His own deep interest in the sinful, in His 
free intercourse with the most fallen, and in His patient efforts to recover them to vir- 
tue and to filial reliance on their Father in Heaven. So, His preaching turned much 
on the importance of raising the mind above the world; and His own life was a con- 
stant renunciation of worldly interests, a cheerful endurance of poverty that He might 
make many truly rich. So, His discourses continually revealed to man the doctrine of 
immortality; and in His own person He brought down this truth to men’s senses, by 
rising from the dead and ascending to another state of being. I have only glanced 
| at the unity which subsists between Jesus and His religion. Christianity, from every 
point of view, will”be found a harmonious system. It breathes throughout one spirit 
and one purpose. Its doctrines, precepts and examples have the consistency of 
Treason. 
But this is not enough. A rational religion must agree not only with itself, but 
| with all other truths, whether revealed by the outward creation or our own souls. I 
| take, then, Christianity into the creation, I place it by the side of nature. Do they 
agree? I say, perfectly. I can discover nothing, in what claims to be God’s word, at 
variance with His works. This is a bright proof of the reasonableness of Christianity. 
When I consult nature with the lights modern science affords, I see continually multi- 
plying traces of the doctrine of One God. The more I extend my researches into 
Mature, the more I see that it is a whole, the product of one wisdom, power and good- 
ness. It bears witness to one Author, nor has its testimony been without effect; for 
although the human mind has often multiplied its objects of worship, still it has 
always tended towards the doctrine of the divine unity, and has embraced it more and 
more firmly in the course of human improvement. The heathen, while he erected 
| many altars, generally believed in one Supreme Divinity, to whom the inferior deities 
| were subjected and from whom they sprung. Need I tell you of the harmony which 
subsists between nature and revelation in this particular? To Christianity belongs 
the glory of having proclaimed this primitive truth with new power, and of having 
spread it over the whole civilized world. Again, nature gives intimation of another 
truth, I mean of the universal, impartial goodness of God. When I look around on the 


132 ! Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


creation, I see nothing to lead me to suspect that its Author confines His love to a few. 
The sun sends no brighter beam into the palace of the proudest king, than into the 
hut of the meanest peasant. The clouds select not one man’s fields rather than his 
neighbor’s, but shed down their blessings on rich and poor, and still more, on the 
just and the unjust. True, there is a variety of conditions among men; but this takes 
place, not by any interposition of God, but by fixed and general laws of nature. 
Impartial, universal goodness is the character in which God is revealed by His works, 
when they are properly understood; and need I tell you how brightly this truth shines 
in the pages of Christianity, and how this religion has been the great means of estab- 


lishing it among men? Again, when I look through nature, nothing strikes me more — 
than the union which subsists among all its works. Nothing stands alone in the 


creation. The humblest plant has intimate connections with the air, the clouds, the 


sun. Harmony is the great law of nature, and how strikingly does Christianity 


coincide here with God’s werks; for what is the design of this religion, but to bring 
the human race, the intelligent creation of God, into a harmony, union, peace, like 
that which knits together the outward universe? I will give another illustration. It 


is one of the great laws of nature, that good shall come to us through agents of God’s — 
appointment; that beings shall receive life, support, knowledge and safety through the 


interposition and labors and sufferings of others. Sometimes whole communities are 


rescued from oppression and ruin chiefly by the efforts and sacrifices of a wise, dis- 


interested and resolute individual. How accordant with this ordination of nature is the 


doctrine of Christianity, that our Heavenly Father, having purposed our recovery from 


sin and death, has instituted for this end the agency and mediation of His Son; that 


He has given an illustrious Deliverer to the world, through whose toils and suffer-— 


ings we may rise to purity and immortal life. I say, then, that revelation is consistent 
with nature, when nature is truly interpreted by reason. I see it bringing out with 
noonday brightness the truths which dawn in nature; so that it is reason in its most 
perfect form, 


I have thus carried Christianity abroad into nature. I now carryit within, and 
compare it with the human soul; and is it consistent with the great truths of reason 
which I discover there? I affirm that it is. When I look into the soul, I am at 
once struck with its immeasurable superiority to the body. I am struck with the con- 
trast between these different elements of my nature, between this active, soaring mind, 
and these limbs and material organs which tend perpetually to the earth, and are soon 
to be resolved into dust. How consistent is Christianity with this inward teaching; 
in Christianity, with what strength, with what bold relief, is the supremacy of the 
spiritual nature brought out! What contempt does Jesus cast on the body and its 
interests, when compared with the redemption of the soul! Another great truth dawns 
on me, when I look within I learn more and more that the great springs of happiness 


and misery are in the mind, and that the efforts of men to secure peace by other 


processes than by inward purification, are vain strivings; and Christianity is not only 
consistent with, but founded on, this great truth; teaching us that the Kingdom of 
Heaven is within us, and proposing, as its great end, to rescue the mind from evil, 
and to endue it with strength and dignity worthy its divine origin. Again, when I 
look into the soul I meet intimations of another great truth. I discern in it capacities 
which are not fully unfolded here. I see desires which find no adequate good on 
earth. I see a principle of hope always pressing forward into futurity. Here are 
marks of a nature not made wholly for this world; and how does Christianity agree 
with this teaching of our own souls? Its great doctrine is that of a higher life, where 
the spiritual germ within us will open forever, and where the immortal good after 
which the mind aspires will prove a reality. Had I time, I might survey distinctly 


the various principles of the soul, the intellectual, moral, social and active, and might 
4 


Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing 133 


_ proposing to them nobler objects and aiding their development by the impulse of a 
| boundless hope. But, commending these topics to your private meditation, I will 
ake but one more view of sin, and fears and forebodings of guilt; and how adapted 
0 such a nature is Christianity, a religion which contains blood-sealed promises of for- 
giveness to the penitent, and which proffers heavenly strength to tortify us in our 
‘conflict with moral evil. I say, then Christianity consists with the nature within us, as 
well as with nature around us. The highest truths in respect to the soul are not only 
sponded to, but are carried out by Christianity, so that it deserves to be called the 
perfection of reason. 
I have now shown in a variety of particulars that Christianity has the character 
of consistency, and thus satisfies the first demand of reason. It does not divide the 
mind against itself, does not introduce discord into the intellects by proposing doc- 
trines which our consciousness and experience repel. But these views do not exhaust 
the present topic. It is not enough to speak of Christianity as furnishing views which 
“harmonize with one another and with all known truth. It gives a new and cheering 
“consistency to the views with which we are furnished by the universe. Nature and 
Providence, with all their beauty, regularity and beneficence, have yet perplexing 
aspects. Their elements are often seen in conflict with one another. Sunshine and 
‘storms, pleasure and pain, success and disaster, abundance and want, health and sick- 
ee life and death, seem to ordmary spectators to be mixed together confusedly and 
without aim. Reason desires nothing so earnestly, so anxiously, as to solve these 
“dis iscordant appearances, as to discover some great, central, reconciling truth, around 
which they may be arranged, and from which they may borrow light and harmony. 
- This deep want of the rational nature Christianity has supplied. It has disclosed a 
unity of purpose in the seemingly hostile dispensations of Providence, and opened 
to the mind a new world of order, beauty and benevolent design. Christianity reveal- 
‘ing, as it does, the unbounded mercy of God to His sinful creatures; revealing an end- 
less futurity, in which the inequalities of the present state are to be redressed, and 
which reduces by its immensity the sorest pains of life to light and momentary evils; 
‘revealing a moral perfection, which is worth all pain and conflicts, and which is most 
ectually and gloriously won amidst suffering and temptation; revealing in Jesus 
Christ the sublimity and rewards of tried and all-enduring virtue; revealing in Him 
the founder of a new moral kingdom or power, which is destined to subdue the world 
p God; and proffering the Holy Spirit to all who strive to build up in themselves and 
Others the reign of truth and virtue; Christianity, I say, by these revelations, has 
poured a flood of light over nature and Providence, and harmonized the infinite com- 
plexity of the works and ways of God. Thus it meets the first want of the rational 
Mature, the craving for consistency of views. It is reason’s most effectual minister and 
friend. Is it not, then, eminently a Rational Faith? 
Having shown that Christianity has the character of consistency, I proceed to the 
second mark or stamp of reason on a religion; that is, Universality; and this I claim 
for Christianity. This indeed is one of the most distinguishing features of our religion, 
and so obvious and striking as to need little illustration. When I examine the doc- 
q Fines, precepts, and spirit of Christianity, I discover, in them all, this character of 
universality. I discover nothing narrow, temporary, local. The Gospel bears the 
stamp of no particular age or country. It does not concern itself with the perishable 
ests of communities or individuals; but appeals to the Spiritual, Immortal, 
Jnbounded principle in human nature. Its aim is to direct the mind to the Infinite 
Being, and to an Infinite good. It is not made up, like other religions, of precise forms 
| details; but it inculcates immutable and all-comprehending principles of duty; 
ving every man to apply them for himself to the endless variety of human conditions. 


134 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


It separates from God the partial, limited views of Judaism and heathenism, and holds 
Him forth in the sublime attributes of the Universal Father. In like manner, it incul- 
cates philanthropy without exceptions or bounds; a love to man as man, a love 
founded on that immortal nature of which all men partake, and which binds us to 
recognize in each a child of God and a brother. The spirit of bigotry, which confines 
its charity to a sect, and the spirit of aristocracy, which looks on the multitude as an 
inferior race, are alike rebuked by Christianity; which, eighteen hundred years ago, in 
a narrow and superstitious age, taught, what the present age is beginning to under- 
stand, that all men are essentially equal, and that all are to be honored, because made 
for immortality and endued with capacities of ceaseless improvement. The more I 
examine Christianity the more I am struck with its universality. I see in it a religion 
made for all regions and all times, for all classes and all stages of society. It is fitted 
not to the Asiatic or the European, but to the essential principles of human nature, 
to man under the tropical or polar skies, to all descriptions of intellect and condition. 
It speaks a language which all can understand; enjoins a virtue, which is man’s happi- 
ness and glory in every age and clime; and ministers consolations and hopes which 
answer to man’s universal lot, to the sufferings, the fear, and the self-rebuke, which 
cleave to our nature in every outward change. I see in it the light, not of one nation, 
but of the world; and a light reaching beyond the world, beyond time, to higher modes 
of existence and to an interminable futurity. Other religions have been intended to 
meet the exigencies of particular countries or times, and therefore society in its prog- 
ress has outgrown them; but Christianity meets more and more the wants of the soul 
in proportion to the advancement of our race, and thus proves itself to be Eternal 
Truth. After these remarks, may I not claim for Christianity that character of 
universality which is the highest distinction of reason? To understand fully the con- 
firmation which these views give to the Gospel, you must compare it with the religions 
prevalent in the age of Christ, all of which bore the marks of narrow, local, temporary 
institutions. How striking the contrast! And how singular the fact, that amid this 
darkness there sprung up a religion so consistent and universal, as to deserve to be 
called the perfection of reason! 

I do and must feel, my friends, that the claim of Christianity to the honor of being 
a rational religion is fully established. As such I commend it to you. As such it will 
more and more approve itself, in proportion as you study and practice it. 

You will never find cause to complain that by adopting it you have enslaved or 
degraded your highest powers. Here then, I must stop, and might consider my work 
as done. But I am aware that objections have been made to the rational character of 
our religion, which may still linger in the minds of some of my hearers. A brief notice 
of these may aid the purpose, and will form a proper conclusion of this discourse. 

I imagine that were some who are present to speak they would tell me that if 
Christianity be judged by its fruits it deserves any character but that of rational. I 
should be told that no religion has borne a more abundant harvest of extravagance 
and fanaticism. I should be told that reason is a calm, reflecting, sober principle, and 
I should be asked whether such is the character of the Christianity which has over- 
spread the world. Perhaps some of you will remind me of the feverish, wild, passion- 
ate religion, which is now systematically dispersed through our country, and I shall 
be asked whether a system under which such delusions prevail can be a rational one. 

To these objections I answer, You say much that is true. I grant that reason is a 
calm and reflecting principle, and I see little calmness or reflection among many who 
take exclusively the name of Christ. But I say, you have not right to confound 
Christianity with its professors. This religion, as you know, has come down to us 
through many ages of darkness, during which it must have been corrupted and 
obscured. Common candor requires that you should judge of it as it came from its 


‘ 
. 
? 
3 


» 


Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing 135 


Founder. Go, then, to its original records; place yourselves near Jesus; and tell me 
if you ever found yourselves in the presence of so calm a teacher. We indeed discern 
in Jesus great earnestness, but joined with entire self-control. Sensibility breathes 
through His whole teaching and life; but always tempered with wisdom. Amidst His 
boldest thoughts and expressions, we discover no marks of ungoverned feeling or a 
diseased imagination. Take, as an example, His longest discourse, the Sermon on the 
Mount. How weighty the thoughts! How grave and dignified the style! You recol- 
lect that the multitude were astonished, nat at the passionate vehemence, but at the 
authority with which He spoke. Read next the last discourse of Jesus to His disciples 
in St. John’s Gospel. What a deep, yet mild and subdued tenderness mingles with 
conscious greatness in that wonderful address. Take what is called the Lord’s Prayer, 
which Jesus gave as the model of all prayer to God. Does that countenance fanatical 
fervor, or violent appeals to our Creator? Let me further ask, Does Jesus anywhere 
place religion in tumultuous, ungoverned emotion? Does He not teach us that obedi- 
ence, not feeling, marks and constitutes true piety, and that the most acceptable offer- 
ing to God is to exercise mercy to our fellow-creatures? When I compare the clamor- 
ous preaching and passionate declamation, too common in the Christian world, with 
the composed dignity, the deliberate wisdom, the freedom from all extravagance, 
which characterized Jesus, I can imagine no greater contrast; and I am sure that the 
fiery zealot is no representative of Christianity. 

I have done with the first objection; but another class of objections is often urged 
against the reasonable character of our religion. It has been strenuously maintained 
that Christianity contains particular doctrines which are irrational, and which involve 
the whole religion to which they are essential in their own condemnation. To this 
class of objections I have a short reply. I insist that these offensive doctrines do not 
belong to Christianity, but are human additions, and therefore do not derogate from 
its reasonableness and truth. What is the doctrine most frequently adduced to fix the 
charge of irrationality on the Gospel? It is the Trinity. This is pronounced by the 
unbeliever a gross offence to reason. It teaches that there is one God, and yet that 
there are three divine persons. According to the doctrine, these three persons perform 
different offices, and sustain different relations to each other. One is Father, another 
his Son. One sends, another is sent. They love each other, converse with each other, 
and make a covenant with each other; and yet, with all these distinctions, they are, 
according to the doctrine, not different beings, but one being, one and the same God. 
Is this a rational doctrine? has often been the question of the objector to Christianity. 
| IT answer, No. I can as easily believe that the whole human race are one man, as that 
three infinite persons, performing such different offices, are one God. But, I main- 
tain that, because the Trinity is irrational, it does not follow that the same reproach 
| belongs to Christianity; for this doctrine is no part of the Christian religion. I know 
there are passages which are continually quoted in its defence; but allow me to prove 
doctrines in the same way, that is, by detaching texts from their connection and 
interpreting them without reference to the general current of Scripture, and I can 
| prove anything and everything from the Bible. I can prove that God has human 
passions. I can prove transubstantiation, which is taught much more explicitly than 
the Trinity. Detached texts prove nothing. Christ is called God; the same title is 
given to Moses and to rulers. Christ has said, “I and My Father are one;” so He 
prayed that all His disciples might be one, meaning not one and the same being, but 
| One in affection and purpose. I ask you, before you judge on this point, to read the 
Scriptures as a whole, and to inquire into their general strain and teaching in regard 
to Christ. I find Him uniformly distinguishing between Himself and God, calling 
Himself, not God the Son, but the Son of God, continually speaking of Himself as 
sent by God, continually referring His power in miracles to God. I hear Him 


136 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


saying, that of Himself He can do nothing, and praying to His Father under 


the character of the only true God. Such I affirm to be the tenor, the current, the - 


general strain of the New Testament; and the scattered passages, on which a different 
doctrine is built, should have no weight against this host of witnesses. Do not rest 
your faith on a few texts. Sometimes these favorite texts are no part of Scripture. 
For example, the famous passage on which the Trinity mainly rests, “These are three 
that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these 
three are one;” this text, I say, though found at present in John’s Epistle, and read 
in our churches, has been pronounced by the ablest critics a forgery; and a vast 
majority of the educated ministers of this country are satisfied that it is not a part of 


Scripture. Suffer no man then to select texts for you as decisive of religious contro- — 


versies. Read the whole record for yourselves, and possess yourselves of its general 
import. I am very desirous to separate the doctrine in question from Christianity, 
because it fastens the charge of irrationality on the whole religion. It is one of the 
great obstacles to the propagation of the Gospel. The Jews will not hear of a Trinity 
I have seen in the countenance, and heard in the tones of the voice, the horror with 
which that people shrink from the doctrine, that God died on the cross. Mahome- 


tans, too, when they hear this opinion from Christian missionaries, repeat the first 


’ 


article of their faith, “There is one God;’’ and look with pity or scorn on the disciples 


of Jesus, as deserters of the plainest and greatest truth of religion. Even the Indian ~ 
of our wilderness, who worships the Great Spirit, has charged absurdity on the teacher © 


who has gone to indoctrinate him in a Trinity. How many, too, in Christian coun- 
tries, have suspected the whole religion for this one error. Believing, then, as I do, 


that it forms no part of Christianity, my allegiance to Jesus Christ calls me openly 


to withstand it. In so doing I would wound no man’s feelings. I doubt not, that they 
who adopt this doctrine intend, equally with those who oppose it, to render homage 


to the truth and service to Christianity. They think that their peculiar faith gives new 


interest to the character and new authority to the teaching of Jesus. But they griey- 
ously err. The views, by which they hope to build up love towards Christ, detract from 
the perfection of his Father; and I fear that the kind of piety which prevails now in the 
Christian world bears witness to the sad influence of this obscuration of the true glory 
of God. We need not desert reason or corrupt Christianity to insure the purest, deep- 


est love towards the only true God, or toward Jesus Christ, whom He has sent for our 


redemption. 


I have named one doctrine, which is often urged against Christianity as irrational. 
There is one more on which I would offer a few remarks. Christianity has often been 
reproached with teaching that God brings men into life totally depraved, and con- 
demns immense multitudes to everlasting misery for sins to which their nature has 
irresistibly impelled them. This is said to be irrational and consequently such must be 
the religion which teaches it. I certainly shall not attempt to vindicate this theological 
fiction. A more irrational doctrine could not, I think, be contrived; and it is some- 
thing worse; it is as immoral in its tendency as it is unreasonable. It is suited to alien- 
ate men from God and from one another. Were it really believed (which it cannot be) 
nen would look up with dread and detestation to the Author of their being and look 


around with horror on their fellow-creatures. It would dissolve society. Were men 


to see in one another wholly corrupt beings, incarnate fiends, withgut one genuine 
virtue, society would become as repulsive as a den of lions or a nest of vipers. All 
confidence, esteem, love, would die; and without these the interest, charm and worth 
of existence would expire. What a pang would shoot through a parent’s heart, if he 
were to see in the smiling infant a moral being continually and wholly propense to sin, 
in whose mind were thickly sown the seeds of hatred to God and goodness, and who 
had commenced his existence under the curse of his Creator? What good man could 


Christianity a Rational Religion—Channing , 137 


consent to be a parent, if his offspring were to be born to this infinitely wretched 
inheritance? I say, the doctrine is of immoral tendency; but I do not say that they who 
_ profess it are immoral. The truth is that none do or can hold it in its full and proper 
import. I have seen its advocates smile as benignantly on the child whom their creed 
has made a demon, as if it were an angel; and I have seen them mingling with their 
fellow-creatures as cordially and confidingly as if the doctrine of total depravity had 
never entered their ears. Perhaps the most mischievous effect of the doctrine is the 
dishonor which it has thrown on Christianity. This dishonor I would wipe away. 
Christianity teaches no such doctrine. Where do you find it in the New Testament? 
Did Jesus teach it when he took little children in his arms and blessed them, and said, 
“Of such is the Kingdom of God?” Did Paul teach it, when he spoke of the Gentiles, 
who have not the law, or a written revelation, but who do by nature the things con- 
tained in the law? Christianity indeed speaks strongly of human guilt, but always 
treats men as beings who have the power of doing right, and who have come into 
existence under the smile of their Creator. 


I have now completed my vindication of the claim of the Gospel to the character 
of a rational religion; and my aim has been, not to serve a party, but the cause of our 
common Christianity. At the present day one of the most urgent duties of its friends 
is to rescue it from the reproach of waging war with reason. The character of our 
age demands this. There have been times when Christianity, though loaded with 
unreasonable doctrines, retained its hold on men’s faith; for men had not learned to 
think. They receive their religion as children learn their catechism; they substituted 
the priest for their own understandings, and cared neither what nor why they believed. 
But that day is gone by, and the spirit of freedom, which has succeeded it, is subjecting 
Christianity to a scrutiny more and more severe; and if this religion cannot vindicate 
itself to the reflecting, the calm, the wise, as a reasonable service, it cannot stand. 
Fanatical sects may, for a time, spread an intolerant excitement through a community 
_and impose silence on the objections of the skeptical. But fanaticism is the epidemic of 
a season; it wastes itself by its own violence. Sooner or later the voice of reflection 
will be heard. Men will ask what are the claims of Christianity? Does it bear the 
marks of truth? And if it be found to war with nature and reason, it will be, and. it 
ought to be, abandoned. On this ground, I am anxious that Christianity should be 
cleared from all human additions and corruptions. If indeed irrational doctrines 
belong to it, then I have no desire to separate them from it. I have no desire, for the 
sake of upholding the Gospel, to wrap up and conceal, much less to deny, any of its 
real principles. Did I think that it was burdened with one irrational doctrine, I would 

say so, and I would leave it, as I found it, with this millstone round its neck. But I 
know none such. I meet, indeed, some difficulties in the narrative part of the New 
Testament; and there are arguments in the Epistles, which, however suited to the 
Jews, to whom they were first addressed, are not apparently adapted to men at large; 
but I see not a principle of the religion, which my reason, calmly and impartially 
exercised, pronounces inconsistent with any great truth. I have the strongest con- 
viction that Christianity is reason in its most perfect form, and therefore I plead for 
its disengagement from the irrational additions with which it has been clogged for 
ages. 

With these views of Christianity, I do and must hold it fast. I cannot surrender 
it to the cavils or scoffs of infidelity. I do not blush to own it, for it is a rational 
religion. It satisfied the wants of the intellect as well as those of the heart. I know 
that men of strong minds have opposed it. But, as if Providence intended that their 
sophistry should carry a refutation on its own front, they have generally fallen into 
errors so gross and degrading, as to prove them to be anything rather than the apostles 
of reason. When I go from the study of Christianity to their writings, I feel as if 


— 


138 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


I were passing from the warm, bright sun into a chilling twilight, which too often — 
deepens into utter darkness. I am not, then, ashamed of the Gospel. I see it glorified — 
by the hostile systems which are reared for its destruction. I follow Jesus, because He 
is eminently “the Light; and I doubt not that, to His true disciples, He will be a 
guide to that world, where the obscurities of our present state will be dispersed, and 
where reason as well as virtue will be unfolded under the quickening influence and in 
the more manifest presence of God. 


[This sermon was chosen as the result of the opinions of Kerr Boyce Tupper and 
F. W. Gunsaulus that it was one of the ten best sermons of the century. In only one 
of the three leading books of sermon collections do we find one by Channing. If the 
sermon is treated as fairly as he says he judges those that differ from him, its beauties 
will be acknowledged, whatever may be thought of it doctrinally. 

William Ellery Channing was born at Newport, R. I., April 7, 1780; died at Ben- 
nington, Vt., Oct. 2, 1842. He became pastor of the Federal Street Church, Boston, 
in 1803, and was one of the chief founders of American Unitarianism. ] a 


a 


(139) 


GRIEVING THE SPIRIT. 


REV. J. WILBUR CHAPMAN, D. D. 
“Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.”—Ephesians 4: 30. 


Of all the epistles that ever came from the heart of the great Apostle Paul, this 
letter to the Ephesians seems to me about the sweetest and best. It is the epistle in 
‘which we find “‘the heavenly places” mentioned so many times; it is the epistle in which 
_ we find different names applied to our Father, and I suppose it is the letter in which 
we find the very highest spiritual truth presented in all the Bible. But where we find 
the very high scope of spiritual things, we also find the Apostle Paul turning to give 
us instructions concerning the most ordinary affairs of daily life; some rules concern- 
ing Christian conversation; some suggestions concerning the relation which the 
husband has to his wife, and the wife to her husband. Indeed, if one should live in the 
spirit of this letter to the Ephesians, he would do nothing less than to live what has 
been called “‘the life of surrender,” and “the victorious life,” but which Paul calls “the 
life in the heavenly places.’ Paul makes all these different suggestions, and then 
adds, “And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God,” as if He were grieved by a wrong 
atmosphere in the home, or by a wrong use of the lips. While many of us would 
shrink from doing things plainly inconsistent with our Christian profession, we should 
be astonished if we could be made to understand that the way we have used our lips 
has grieved the Holy Spirit. 


First of all the very fact that we may grieve Him proves by inference His per- 
sonality. It seems to me that we may grieve the Spirit by even stopping to prove that 
He has a personality equal to the Father and to the Son; and yet many men and 
women do not yet seem to have grasped that thought. In the second place the fact 
that we may grieve Him proves His sensitiveness. In John 1: 32, it is said, “I saw 
the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove.’”’ The dove stands for all that is sensi- 
tive in the family of birds. I have been told that the dove has been known to tremble 
when there was held before it one single feather of a vulture. The Spirit of God is so 
sensitive that that which has even the appearance of evil in it hurts Him. This idea of 
Sensitiveness presents to us the thought of His love. If I do not love you, you 
cannot grieve me. You cannot grieve an indifferent person; you may possibly hurt his 
feelings; you may anger him, but you grieve only the one whose heart is filled to over- 
flowing with affection for you. The feeling that the mother must have when her own 
offspring breaks her heart by evil doing, is the feeling—but multiplied by infinity— 
which the Holy Ghost has when we grieve Him. 


__ There are several different expressions in the New Testament in line with my text. 
“You do always resist the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 7:51.) I believe that only the 
unregenerate resist Him. In his letter to the Thessalonians Paul says, ‘““Quench not 
the Spirit.” That may refer especially to the life of the Holy Ghost in the Church, so 
that we may quench Him by ignoring Him in the government of the Church. If we 
would have a blessing sweeping over our land from sea to sea, from north to south, 
I believe that we must begin by conforming the life of our Church to the teachings of 
the Holy Ghost. “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” Only a child of God may 


140 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


grieve the Spirit; and that is the sad part of it. How many times we have heard these 


words referred to read as if they admonished us not to grieve away the Spirit of God! 


It seems to me that we must at least grieve the Spirit when we add to or take from 
any part of revealed truth. It would be contrary to Scripture to say that we could 
grieve away the Spirit. If the Spirit of God comes to abide in us, He comes to stay, 
and there is no power in earth that can separate us from Him when once He takes 
possession of us. We have been born of the Spirit, and we cannot grieve Him away. 
That would mean a change of all God’s plan for us, for we were “chosen in Him before 
the foundation of the world,” and “we are kept by the power of God through faith unto 
salvation.” I believe that I am a part of God’s great plan for ages to come, and if I 
should fall out it would mean a change of all God’s plans for time and eternity. We 
cannot grieve away the Holy Spirit of God, no, but we may grieve Him. 

First of all we may grieve Him by disobedience. Disobedience of children always 
raises a barrier between them and their parents. There may be ever so much love in 
a father’s heart, and he may have ever so much desire to pour forth that love, but he 
cannot do it so long as there is this barrier of disobedience between him and his child. 
The father of the prodigal son never ceased to love him, but the barrier of disobedi- 
ence was there, higher.than the highest mountain. Never until the son crossed 
that mountain could the father begin to pour forth his love upon him. What does 
Paul mean when he says, ‘And be not drunk with wine wherein is excess”? We take 
that to be a command. ‘But be filled with the Spirit.” That is just as much a com- 
mand as to be not drunk with wine. The only difference between the first part and 
the second is that one is negative and the other is positive. Are you filled with the 
Spirit, or have you disobeyed God’s commandments, so that there is a barrier between 
you and the Spirit? 

There are two tests, I think, by which we may know. First, if you are filled with 
the Spirit, God will give to you the testimony in His own word: “And whatsoever 
ye shall ask in my name, that will I do.” (John 14:13.) Have you ever asked to be 
filled with the Spirit? “That we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” 
If you have prayed, believing that the infilling of the Holy Ghost would come upon 
you, He will come. The promise of the Spirit is a term of power, and “all the promises 
of God in Him are yea, and in Him Amen.” (2 Cor. 1:20.) Then it is not a question 
of feeling, but of belief. Once, when I was in deepest sorrow, a member of my church 
said to me, “I am very much afraid that you are having financial difficulties,” and he 
gave me a little piece of paper. It was a blank check signed with his name, which I 
might fill in for any amount. I said, “I think it is rather unsafe to give a man a check 
like that—I might send it back for half a million of dollars.” “Well,” he said, “if it 
would do you any good to think you had my fortune back of you, you may take the 
check.” I put it in my pocket, and every time I passed a man on the street I thought, 
I wonder if he has such a fortune back of him as I. I believed in that check simplv 
because I believed in the name that was signed to it. Have you asked to be filled with 
the Spirit, believing in Christ? Well, then, if you do not believe that you are filled, you 
are grieving the Holy Spirit of God. But there is another test. “By their fruits ye 
shall know them.” “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” (Gal. 5:22.) Where there is a fullness 
of the Spirit there will be a fullness of the fruit of the Spirit—not always in perfection, 
of course. The fullness of the Spirit is a gift, and the fruit of the Spirit is a growth. 
To be drunk with wine is to be filled with a kind of exultation which leaves the last 


state of the man worse than the first. To be filled with the Spirit of God is to be filled — 


with the joy and exultation which is heavenly, and every wave of blessing that comes 
in upon us, wave upon wave, like the tide of the sea, pushes a man nearer to the 
heavenly places. ; 


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Grieving the Spirit—Chapman. 141 


In the second place we grieve the Spirit by failing to keep our hearts clean. John 
McNeil of Australia says, that a new heart is not necessarily a clean heart, but many of 
us have been thinking that it was. David committed a great transgression and was 
pardoned and prayed, ‘Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me.” 


But Paul says, “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from 


all unrighteousness.” John McNeil uses the illustration of a mother who puts a clean 
dress on her child in the morning, and tells her to keep it unspotted all day long. 
When night comes the child’s dress is so soiled that it is hard to tell whether it is 
white or black; but the mother cleanses it. The child had the will to keep it clean, but 
the nature of the child made her get it soiled. The same thing takes place every day, 
but if that mother could only impart some of her own spirit into that child, so that the 
child would not only have the will but the ability to keep clean, would not that be 
wonderful? That is exactly what God wants to do for us. He wants to put Himseli 
in us, and, while we have the old nature of the flesh, He wants to give us, in all its 
fullness, His own blessed nature, to keep us free from sin. Some say, that is perfec- 


_ tion. As an old minister once said to me, “I wish that people were as much afraid of 


imperfection as of perfection.” But we may forsake every known sin and still be very 


_ imperfect in God’s sight. In I Corinthians 4:4, Paul says, “I find nothing against 


myself.” “We receive that which we ask of Him, because we keep His command- 
ments and do the things that are well pleasing in His sight.” It is not a question as 
to whether I can keep from sin or not—I know that I cannot, for I have tried it for 
many years—but the question is as to whether Jesus Christ can keep me. Who am I 
that I should limit the power of the Almighty? “He is able to save unto the utter- 
most.” Has He not told us in Jude that He is “able to keep us from stumbling?” 
“Ts anything too hard for the Lord?” 


What must we do to be filled? You are the temple of God, and the Spirit dwelleth 
in you, so that if you want Him to fill you, the first thing to do is to get the temple 
clean. God does not require golden vessels or silver vessels, but He must have clean 
vessels. In the days of Hezekiah, when the temple was filled with things that had no 
place there, it had to be cleansed before God would manifest Himseli there. Again, 
when the court was filled with money changers, Christ had to drive them out. Too 
many of us have allowed ourselves to be soiled by contact with the world. We may 
not be grossly inconsistent, and yet many times we have lost our power. A man can 
never be filled with electricity so long as he stands on the ground; he may touch the 
current, but it will pass away from him; but if he stands on an insulated stool he will 
be filled. But if he touch the earth with one finger, he will lose the power. Now Paul 
says, “Come out from among them and be ye separate,—and touch not the unclean 
thing.” We have been told that if we would be filled with the Spirit, we must weep, 
pray, agonize, but it is all to no purpose. One minister said to me, “I believe this 
filling is only for a few elect persons.” Another said, “I have fulfilled every command 
of God, and still I am not filled.” Brethren, the thing to do is to stop weeping, 
agonizing, and to get down before God and say, “Search me, O God, and know my 
heart: try me and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me.” 
When you have become cleansed and set right then God will be ready to fill you. 


Then we may grieve the Spirit of God by practically denying His word. Was 


there not much of pathos in Jesus’ words when He said (John 8:43), “Why do ye 


not understand My speech?” Christ has promised to be with us “alway, even unto the 
end of the world.” With us in disappointment and trial. Dr. Dixon has said that a 
Christian should spell dis-appointment, His-appointment. When the oculist told 
Thane Miller that he would never see again in this life did he turn against God? No. 
For he said, “When the doctor whispered in my ear that my sight was gone, the Lord 
whispered, ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end,’ and He has been better than 


142 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


His word.” When trials come to you, and you rebel against them, you grieve the 
Holy Spirit of God. “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” 

But we grieve the Spirit more perhaps in matters of doctrine than in anything else. 
It must grieve Him when we embrace one truth to the exclusion of another. Some 
people think that as soon as a man begins to study prophecy, he becomes a fanatic. 
We grieve Him in the matter of assurance. John says, ‘‘But this is written that ye may 
know ye have eternal life,” and yet Christians are continually praying, “Save us at 
last.” Do you not think that grieves the Spirit of God? We know that we are saved, 
not by feelings, for they change like the waves of the sea, but because the word of the 
Lord hath spoken it. To say anything elise, to believe anything else, to act as if you 
believed anything else, grieves the Spirit. I am thankful that I believe things not 
because I feel them, not because I understand them, not because I can reconcile them 
with science, nor because other men believe them, but because the Lord has spoken 
them. A man has no right to advance his views, unless he has compared scripture 
with scripture, and has reached his conclusions from the Word of God. Blessed book! 
Laughed at, scorned at, railed at; it is sweeter, more powerful than ever. Heaven and 
earth shall pass away, but this word, never, never, never! 

One word in closing. In Ephesians 4:31, the apostle says: “Let all bitterness, 
and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all 
malice.” This is a practical thought with which to close. Paul would seem to indicate 
that we grieve the Spirit by yielding to any of these things. The Spirit of God is 
grieved whenever we allow our old nature to triumph. 


[J. Wilbur Chapman was born in Indiana in 1859, studying at Oberlin College and 
Lake Forest University, and Lane Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 
1882. The year following he went to the Reformed Church at Schuylerville, N. Y., 
where a revival resulted in bringing into the church some of the leading men of the 
place. He was called to the First Reformed Church, Albany, which had in two years 
listened to one hundred and ten different candidates. In 1889 he was called to succeed 
A. T. Pierson at Bethany Church, Philadelphia. In three years over eleven hundred 
persons were added to the membership, over half of them being men. Four years later 
he resigned to enter more fully into evangelistic work, and now divides his time 
between the pastorate of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, New York, evangelistic 
work, and his summer Bible conference at Winona Lake, Ind., where he has built what 
is known as the Moody Memorial Home, at which preachers having a salary less than 
$1,000 per year are entertained during vacation months, practically free of charge. 

This sermon is on Dr. Chapman’s most effectual theme, the Holy Spirit. One 
who has heard him preach on this subject will never forget it. The report is from the 
Northfield Echoes, as delivered at East Northfield, Mass., in 1896.] 


re cRE er ee em ren ew 


(143) 


THE LORD THAT HEALETH THEE. 


THEODORE CHRISTLIEB, D. D., Ph. D. 


Exodus 15: 22-26, especially the last clause of the 26th verse—‘‘I am the Lord, 
thy healer.” (From Luther's version.) 


Here, beneath the very shadows of Sinai, we have the Gospel already in the Old 
Covenant, as truly comforting and supporting as anywhere in all the Bible. Weil 
could the Lord in after ages say, “When Israel was a child I loved him; I led them 
with bands of love.” Hosea 11: 1-4. For here, at the very threshold of the wilderness, 
He meets them with the gracious assurance, I am thy healer. 

How grandly was this Gospel promise verified! At every step they took in their 
onward journey, the divine helps multiplied. The triumphant song over their miracu- 
lous deliverance at the Red Sea had scarcely died away, and their first sad experience 
of life in the wilderness had hardly been realized, when the Lord heals the bitter 
waters of Marah. Thence He leads them to the palm grove and refreshing fountains 
of Elim; thence on to Sin, “where the people asked, and God brought quails, and 
satisfied them with the bread of heaven.” With unseen hands He had stretched “the 
bands of love” throughout the wilderness, along which He guides them in “The fiery, 
cloudy pillar;” seeking to heal them of their youthful arrogance and stubbornness. 
And in order that they might clearly perceive that His mercies and His judgments 
alike aimed at the healing of their spiritual maladies, He gives them at the very outset 
of their pilgrimage, if they would but obey His voice, the abiding, comforting assur- 
ance, “I am the Lord, thy healer.” As if He would say: My child, in this wearisome 
journey thou wilt often be footsore; but I am thy healer. Often thou wilt suffer from 
hunger and thirst; the sun will smite thee by day, and the moon by night; but I am thy 
healer. Enemies, mighty and many, will assail to wound and bruise thee; but I am thy 
healer, thy hope, thy help. 

How well, beloved, was this wilderness adapted to train, as in a school, a young, 
arrogant nation into obedience to God, and trust in His word. Here, without the 
intervention of second causes, they were absolutely thrown upon God’s mercy, and 
had to derive, each morning, their daily subsistence from the dew of His love. 

Is it otherwise with us, beloved? Do not we realize the same gracious inter- 
positions of the Almighty? Has not the same unseen hand stretched “the bands of 
love” along our paths? At the very entrance of our life-pilgrimage, does He not 
meet us with His grace, in holy baptism, and say: “I am the Lord, thy healer?” 
In all the loving as well as the chastening dispensations of His providence, does He 
not aim to heal the maladies of our hearts? O, that we might never forget, when we 
come to our Marahs, and taste their bitter waters, this consoling truth, that He is 
our healer! 

But is this truth, that we are really being healed, manifested in our lives? Do we, 
in our needs, hasten at once to this healing Lord? Are His disciplines of “goodness 
and severity” restoring us to spiritual health? Alas! Alas! Look out upon the present 
Israel in the wilderness—Christendom; how sick, how very sick, the whole yet appears. 
How many have hewed them out numerous cisterns in the wilderness, who, never- 
theless, with Israel of old, still ery, “What shall we drink?” They quaff one cup of 


144 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


pleasure after another, and perceive not the poison in the chalice. Their thirst is 
only aggravated; their condition becomes increasingly more hopeless and helpless, 
whilst—strange delusion!—they regard themselves as perfectly sound. Surveying our 
times and the world at large—Christendon and heathendom, church and state, home 
and family, ourselves and others—one may well exclaim with Isaiah: ‘“The whole head b 
is sick, and the whole heart faint.” j 

% 

, 


Listen, then, ye ailing, though pretending hale ones; ye pilgrims in the wilderness, 
whether your sojourn in it has only been three days or forty years; and ye, too, my 
countrymen, who have tasted something of the bitterness of exile in the land of 
strangers, listen today to the Gospel of Marah: “I am the Lord, thy healer.” Every ~ 
word of this Gospel is full of grace, and power, and comfort. The Lord will Himself } 
be our healer; is today; is your and my special healer; is in very truth the healer, 
who is fully adequate to all our maladies. 

Let us then refresh and strengthen ourselves, as we meditate on Marah’s Gospel: 
“T am the Lord, thy healer.’”’ We consider— 

I. That here all other help is excluded; “I am the Lord, thy healer.” 

II. That this help is of perpetual continuance: “I am the Lord, thy healer.” 

III. That it is both of universal and special application: “I am the Lord, thy 
healer.” 

IV. That it is irrevocably pledged, and demands, therefore, our fullest confidence: 
“T am the Lord, thy healer.” 

Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for this precious truth! Preach it here today, as 
first at Marah, and may this Gospel, like the breath of life, penetrate and permeate all 
ailing hearts and homes. Lord, our complaints are so many and grievous, that Thou 
canst make Thy name renowned in our midst. Thou knowest them all better than we 
do ourselves. O, produce within us the conviction that we need a physician, and 
enable us to seek and find our remedy in Thee and Thy dear Son, that we may 
exultingly say, “Through His wounds we are healed!” Amen. 

1. “I am the Lord, thy healer.” 

If we place the emphasis here, where God Himself, because of His incomparable- 
ness, has placed it, we shall at once perceive that all other help or healing is here 
excluded. Israel had probably sought and expected help from Moses. And no 
wonder. A three days’ journey in the wilderness, beneath a scorching sun and over 
burning sand, with waning strength of man and beast, was no ordinary trial; when, 
lo! they came to Marah. Water! water! is the tumultuous exclamation that echoes 
through Israel’s camp. All rush to the fountain, then—O, cruel disappointment!— 
“the people could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter.” Sadness 
succeeds gladness—disappointment, transport. With murmurs long and loud the 
people turn to Moses, and despairingly ask, “What shall we drink?” ‘““Man’s extremity 
is God’s opportunity,” and the Lord, in answer to Moses’ cries, sweetens the bitter 
waters by means of a tree. 

The Lord was the healer, and the Lord exclusively. This is the first truth taught 
in the Gospel of Marah; a truth, by the way. not easily learned. For how many and 
various are the contrivarices to which men resort—and even Christian men—before 
they learn this divine exclusiveness of help asserted in the text. 

No man is without some healer or helper. Somehow, somewhere, he seeks for 
deliverance and comfort, be it in himself or in others. And to what sorry helpers he 
often resorts with his heart troubles! How little, after all, has the world learned to 
go directly to the living God for help. When men come to their Marah in any need 
or bitterness of life, what do they do? Just see. Yonder kneels the besotted heathen 
before his dumb idol, and that shall help him; or he runs to some priest, or wizard, 
oi juggler, and they shall help him; or he plunges into some sacred stream, tortures 


The Lord That Healeth Thee—Christlieb. 145 


_ or lacerates his body, or “offers his first born for the sins of his soul;” and all this 


shall deliver him from guilt and perdition! 
7 And how is it in Christian lands? Alas! Here the ointment for their wounded 
hearts is sought in haunts of pleasure, in convivial clubs, in diverting comedies, in 
amusing stories, in art galleries, in operatic entertainments; these shall divert, deliver, 
help, heal! Men everywhere act as though it had never been proclaimed, “I, the Lord 
¥ am thy healer.” In the lazar-house of this world one plague-patient seeks help of 
_ another, and if any one essays to deliver himself, it only proves that self-help is self- 
destruction. And why? Because all these helps and helpers are not adequate to the 
terrible malady that afflicts the race. So men have found it. So God has declared it, 
“Thus saith the Lord: Thy bruise is incurable, thy wound grievous. There is none to 
plead thy cause, that thou mayest be bound up; thou hast no healing medicines.” Jer. 
30: 12. The whole world contains not within itself a single drop of cooling water to 
quench the thirst of the soul, or to penetrate to the burning conscience. The 
incessant cry, therefore, continues: ‘‘What shall we drink?” 

Marah’s sad experience is daily renewed. Water is at hand, but it quenches no 
thirst. Moses is near, but Moses alone is helpless. Self-upbraiding and murmurs 
abound, but deliverance comes not. World-help, human-help, self-help—all are 
inadequate. 

By what right, now, can God claim this exclusive title of helper or healer? His 
mame already, “the Lord,” implies it. “I am Jehovah’—i. e., not only the Almighty, 
to whom nothing is impossible; nor simply the Omniscient, who thoroughly under- 
stands the nature and extent of all human complaints; but also the ‘‘Faithful and 
True,” who will reveal Himself to thee—set thee apart for His people, and who is, 
even now, ready to enter into covenant with thee. 

But His deeds, as well as His name, entitle Him to this exclusive right as helper 
or healer. With an outstretched arm He had just delivered Israel from Pharaoh’s 
hand. Through the healing of the waters at Marah He had renewedly demonstrated 
that he controlled the forces of nature; and that in special needs he could provide 
special helps. And who, we may well ask, had, from the beginning, cared for the 
fallen race? Who was, even now, gradually developing the great redemptive scheme, 
by the selection and training of a particular race and people? Was it not He alone? 

But how much greater is God’s right now to this exclusive title in the text? After 
the bitter waters of sin had flooded the earth, and one generation after another had 
drank its death-draught from the polluted stream, then he selected another tree and 
put that into the waters, and the curse and wrath-producing waters of sin were con- 
verted into the streams of salvation. It was the cross of Christ, the only green branch 
on the dead tree of humanity. This did He and He alone, the Holy, the Triune God. 
Now the invitation, sweet as angel music, resounds through this wilderness world: 
“Tf any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink.” Whenever now a soul drinks 
of this fountain, opened in Christ the Lord, so that it thirsts not again—i. e., is truly 

| healed—there God has been the physician through His Son, His Word, and His 
Spirit. 

In administering the saving means, God employs, indeed, human instrumentality, 
as Moses at Marah, but the specifically efficacious healing power is always He, His 
Word, His Spirit, His Grace, His Peace.. So that, in view of all this, God can now, 
with infinitely greater reason than at Marah, stand before mankind, and assert with 
tnwonted emphasis: “I, I alone, am your healer;” and century after century of 
redemptive history responds with one loud, prolonged Yea and Amen. 

Have we learned this, and do we fully appreciate it? Physicians dislike, when, 
along with them, we secretly call in others for consultation. "The Heavenly Physician 
dislikes it as well, And yet so many “halt between two opinions;” so many human 


146 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


devices are resorted to, that the divine remedy is either greatly impeded, or rendered 
nugatory altogether. It is, therefore, no matter of astonishment that so much spiritual 
ailment abounds everywhere, and also here among you. O, my countrymen! You 
who seek deliverance by so many whom the Lord has not appointed as healers of 
your deepest sores, would that I could publish it in all your homes and hamlets, along 
all your hills and valleys, that One is your helper. High above all controversial strifes 
and animosities, He stands today before you, beholding all your secret woes and 
unmollified wounds, saying: “I am thy physician.’”” Acknowledge Him at last as your 
exclusive Savior; flee with all your sufferings and sorrows to His peace-bestowing 
wounds, and your entire restoration is accomplished. 

2. But there are yet many other springs of truth and comfort issuing from this 
Gospel of Marah. A new one is indicated in the perpetual continuance of this divine 
help. “I am,” says the Lord, “thy healer; am it always, and will continue to be it 
forevermore. Human physicians come and go for awhile, and then either death or — 
recovery ends their visits. The malady of the human race, however, as it has existed — 
from the beginning of time, and will continue to the consummation of all things, needs 
an eternally abiding help. Here all things change, except sin; it has an obstinately 
tenacious existence, and transmits its blighting life from generation to generation. © 
Hence has this little word, “I am,” not yet passed away. High above all times and 
changes, thrones, He who uttered it; before whom is no past nor future, but who 
surveys all in one eternal “‘now;’’ who was, and is, and is to come, and who, therefore, 
can always continue to say: “I am the Lord, thy healer.’”’ He was it from the begin- 
ning, is it now, and ever shall continue to be it, world without end. 

He continued to be Israel’s helper. Else why does He not say, Behold I was thy 
healer; was it just now. Why, “am?” Because He wishes to intimate that He pur- 
poses to remain such. And this our text specially confirms. There He made for them 
a statute and an ordinance; and then He proved them and said: “If thou wilt diligently 
hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in His sight, 
and wilt give ear to His commandments, then will I put none of these diseases upon 
thee, which I brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, thy healer.” It was, 
you perceive, to be an ordinance and a statute forever, including on the one hand the 
leading them fo the bitter waters from which nature recoils; but, on the other hand, 
also, the sweetening, the restorative efficacy of this water, redemption. That shall be 
a statute for God’s Israel of all times, for all His children of all ages, “who diligently 
hearken to the voice of their Lord,” so that BES may definitely reckon on the divine 
help. 

How often was this firm and unalterable statute verified in Israel’s history. Marah 
was but the beginning of the wilderness, not the end. And how faithfully did God 
continue their physician in all their wanderings! His face shone upon them from the 
pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night; it was the visible pledge of His ever 
gracious presence. And O! how comforting for them in all their needs to see and to | 
say: Yonder, in the front of the long, long procession, is the pledge of our help, the | 
Angel of the Covenant! j 

Kings and princes usually take their family physician with them on their journeys. 
Israel had its physician along, both for body and soul. It was led and accompanied 
by Him who has said, “I am and remain the Lord, thy physician.” And whenever, in 
its subsequent history, even after long-continued faithlessness and monstrous iniquity, 
Israel cried unto the Lord in its sorest needs and greatest oppressions, hecoming 7c 
obedient unto Him, the sweet truth was renewed by: “I am thy healer.” 

Is the case different at present? This holy sanctuary, this quiet Sabbath hour, thigl 
sacred volume, which, thank God, shines today like “the fiery, cloudy pillar” all along | 
our pilgrimage through this wilderness world, all demonstrate the perpetually endunng 


The Lord That Healeth Thee—Christlieb. 147 


force of this word “am.” It is felt in the healing power of the Cross today, and it will 
continue to be felt to the end of time. And when time shall be no more, this self-same 
power shall stand out in all its fullness and majesty, in glory everlasting. In all the 
history of the past, where is there a single soul that humbly sought and believingly 
applied its healing efficacy, was either disappointed or rejected? Who can count the 
hearts it has quieted, the tears it has dried, the consciences it has unburdened, the 
soul-hunger and thirst it has satisfied? 

Ah yes! This joyous news is still true. The Gospel of Marah still sounds forth 
its glad tidings. It has been clearly interpreted, graciously extended, mightily 
strengthened, amazingly deepened, and_unshakingly established by the Gospel of 
Calvary. Its expiring victim, despite thy waywardness, is still “thy Healer,” thy 
Savior. And He remains such as long as “repentance and forgiveness of sin are 
preached in His name among all nations.” His power is not limited. His arm is not 
shortened, that it cannot help. His kingdom increases, and with it the means of help. 

And mark! whether thou recognizest the fact or not, He, unseen, has attended, 
with His gracious aid, each step of thy life-journey. As in Israel’s case, thou had 
Him ever near thee. And this day thou mayst come to Him; and having been accepted, 
thou mayest come again and again. After each sin, each misstep, run to Him at once 
and say: Now Lord, more than ever, Thou, and Thou alone, art my healer. O, neglect 
not the day of grace. It lasts long, but it has its limits for each one; else thou mayest 
knock in vain for admission when once the door is shut. Only to those that obey His 
voice it lasts forever; to such it is continued through the dark valley of the shadow of 
death, and will be perpetuated in the city of our God, when the mighty Helper and 
Healer, Jesus Christ, shall lead His flock “unto living fountains of water,” and “unto 
the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.” 


8. Or does any doubt in the ability of this physician to heal just your sickness 
hinder you? Then let me disclose to you a new spring of comfort in the Gospel of 
Marah. You have always seen how copiously the streams of salvation flow from 
“Tam;” but richer, fuller still, they issue from the little word, “thy healer,’ “I am 
the Lord, thy healer;’”—a word as comforting in its general as in its specific application. 

In its general application. For whom is it intended? Beyond all controversy for 
the entire Israel of God, of both the Old and the New Testament; for all, therefore, 
who are willing to obey the voice of the Lord their God. 

Let me ask: What are your ailments from which Israel did not suffer? Insta- 
bility? Who was more unstable than Israel? Is it the diabolical trinity of this world: 
| The lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life? Who has ever excelled 
Israel in all these? Is it covetousness? Who has ever paid greater devotion at 
Mammon’s shrine than ancient or modern Israel? Is it pride, or self-righteousness? 
| Where has that bitter root ever produced more offensive blossoms and fruits than in 
ithe heart of Israel? Look only at the Pharisees of ancient time, or at the self-con- 
ceited, knowledge-inflated, culture-puffed Jew of the present. Or is it ingratitude and 
unbelief? Who fell away from God so easily and so often; and where, in all this wide, 
ide world, did the basest ingratitude of man to God ever reach such towering 
heights as when Israel led forth the Lamb of God, the embodied light of the world, 
0 be crucified? And yet it was to this people—so wayward, so lustful, so proud, so, 
hankless, so base, all the thoughts of whose heart the omniscient God knew so well— 
hat He said: “I am thy healer.” What an amazing revelation here of mercy and 
ruth, of wisdom and grace, of long suffering and infinite forbearance, in order that 
might proclaim Himself to such a people and for all time to come: “I am thy 
ealer.” And how much grace and truth, love and compassion, might and light, are 
ontained, too, in that announcement for you! Call your ailments what you please— 
€ your sins of deepest dye and blackest hue, of personal or relative nature, of family 


148 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. | 


or business character, today God announces Himself as your physician, and invites 
you thereby to become His patients; to commit yourselves to His treatment. Ye, then, 
whose hearts are becoming petrified in the service of mammon and through the deceit- 
fulness of riches; ye whom appetite and lust have bound as with chains of iron; ye 
whom the inveterate canker of self-righteousness and pride is consuming; ye whom 
Satan is beguiling with indifference, from whose faith he is stealing its strength, from 
whose love its ardor, from whose hope its brightness; who are becoming spiritual 
consumptives, being cold nor hot—lukewarm; ye, of whatever state, shade, or condi- 
tion of ailment, who are ‘full of wounds and bruises and putrifying sores; ye are 
the ones to whom the heavenly physician says: “I can and will heal you.” Oh, 
blessed amplitude! Oh, glorious universality! contained in the promise, “I am thy 
healer.” q 

Not less comforting, however, is the specific application of it. Not every 
physician is adequate to every disease. Often a patient must hear: “I am in this 
instance not your man; go to another, who has made your particular class of com- 
plaints a specialty.’ And when, then, that other can say: “Yes, I am your man; I 
understand your case thoroughly;” how comforting! 8 

This comfort, too, is contained in Marah’s gospel. “I am thy healer;” specie 
and particularly THINE. 

Sin, the great malady of the race, is in its essence and nature the same; but its 
developments are different in different men. There is, therefore, a certain degree of 
propriety in the sinner’s question: ‘‘Can this physician help me? Because He has 
helped others, does it follow thence that I can be restored by Him?” To this question 
the text replies: Yes! “Iam thy healer.” I know all about thy case. Like a faithful 
family physician, I have watched thee from infancy. I know thy constitution and all 
the mischief that lurks within thee, as no one else. Just thy peculiarity is My 
specialty. And My treatment of thy case shall demonstrate over again, that I right 
fully claim to be ‘‘The Lord, thy healer.” 

He surely was the right physician for Israel’s complaints. His wonderful display 
of wisdom, of long-suffering and loving kindness, of severity and lenity, of faithfulness 
and compassion, which characterize the whole history of Israel, furnish the competent 
demonstration that God thoroughly understood their case. \ 

And so it is with all. He knows precisely what to do and when to do it. One) 
heart He melts with love, another He breaks with severity; here He rouses one slum- 
bering conscience with the terrors of the law; there, like the good Samaritan, He, 
pours into its burning wounds the oil of the Gospel; here He subdues a haughty spirit 
with the rod of affliction; there He raises up a weeping Magdalene with tender com- 
passion. And as He fully understands the seat, compass, and virulence of the disease, | 
so He thoroughly comprehends the symptoms of its inner crises—the moment of 
conversion; and in the process of convalescence He selects, with infinite precision, 
the most approved means for the complete restoration of the patient. And as the| 
omniscient Lord of all, He knows what influence surrounding circumstances exert 
upon each one of us; He selects and orders them in such a way as may be most con- 
venient and helpful to all that have committed themselves to Him for treatment. 
Hence the checkered scenes, otherwise often inexplicable, that characterize their 
history. 

And just here, He shows Himself the master in helping and healing, that, ami 
the vast concerns of universal empire, He bestows His special care, skill, and attention 
upon every single individual that has employed Him as his physician. O, thou ailing, 
anxious, troubled soul, He that knows thee as no one else; that bruises and wounds, 
but also heals and comforts, as no one else; He is thy helper, thy healer. And 
notwithstanding all thy waywardness and infidelities, thy heedlessness and insults, 


The Lord That Healeth Thee—Christhieb. 149 


has never left thee, remains thy physician still, and will continue to be until He has 
placed thee beyond all danger. 


B 

_ 4 For He pledges Himself, in the last word of the text, to your complete restora- 
tion, when He says: “I am the Lord, thy HEALER.” And herewith I open to you 
€ll the sluices of comfort contained in Marah’s Gospel. 


God’s help is irrevocably pledged, and demands therefore otit fullest confidence. 


As a sinner, fear might naturally deter a man from committing himself to this 
‘daily care and nursing attention of God. But bear in mind, He announces Himself 
here not as Judge, but as physician. A physician comes to the patient, even though 
his disease should have been contracted by utter wantonness; he comes not to chide 
‘hor to punish, but to heal. So our Lord; as the parable of the prodigal son abund- 
-antly shows. To him, therefore, who is wont to think of God only as a Sovereign 
and Judge, He says, today: ‘My child, think of Me first as a physician. I must heal 
the mighty malady that afflicts the race; therefore, I go after the lost sheep until I find 
it; and when found, it is not to pelt and abuse it, but to bind up its wounds, and to lay 
it on my shoulders and carry it back to the fold.” Dwell upon this picture until your 
tuned heart exultingly exclaims: “My Lord and my God! Thou wilt not destroy, 
"but save me.” 

And to this fact He :s irrevocably pledged. 


He is the “faithful and true’ God, who cannot lie. And He has established this 
Statute or ordinance for all time to come. Israel found Him faithful and true in all its 
history. And this truth is even more firmly pledged in Christ Jesus, whose very name 
is Savior of His people. And the first great comfort contained in this announcement 
is, Help is possible. All other physicians may despair of your case; He does not. 
When He says, “I am thy healer,” He pledges, in that statement, His word, His honor, 
His saving name. Nor can your fears, or the inveteracy and imminent danger of your 
complaint, weigh aught against this. Dangerous cases are sometimes coveted by able 

physicians, for in them their skill and name can be made illustrious. Granted, then, 
| that yours is a desperate case; His skill and ability are equal to it. “Though your 
Sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, 
they shall be as wool.” “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Today 
he says: As Moses healed the waters of Marah by means of a tree, so I heal thee 
by My cross. Only acknowledge thy transgressions; only come unto Me for help; 
and through My wounds thou mayest be made whole. 


To the blessed assurance that help is possible, the Lord adds a second comfort, 
namely: The means of help are already prepared. And this fact gives to the little 
word, “healer,” such deep significance, and confirms the divine statute and ordinance 
$0 irrevocably, that any doubt in reference thereto becomes a flagrant wrong. 


_ Human remedies must first be provided; the Lord’s are already at hand, and they 
are thus set forth and offered us by the apostle: “God was in Christ, reconciling the 
world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed 
unto us the word of reconciliation. . . . We pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye 
reconciled to God. For He hath made Him to be sin for us, that we might be made 
righteousness of God in Him.” What countless souls have already been healed of 
their complaints by this precious truth of God’s grace in Christ Jesus! How many 
burdened, wounded consciences has it already healed, forever healed! And why not 
yours? The erected cross is the embodied will of God, that all men should be saved 
(I Tim. 2:4). And should you alone be excluded? The redeemed of all ages testify 
before the throne of God on high, that they have been healed and washed in the blood 
cf the Lamb; and should God and man, heaven and earth, history and experience, be 


H 


150 Pulpit Poiwer and Eloquence. 


insufficient to satisfy you of the firm, irrevocable pledge of the Lord, that He is your 
helper, your healer, your Savior! 


To render this help, however, available, He, as is the case with human physicians, — 
demands your confidence and obedience. And why should this demand occasion you 
any difficulty? We put confidence in a phyiscian who devotes himself conscientiously 
and entirely to the duties of his profession. And is not this true of our heavenly 
Physician? Though exalted high above all principalities and powers, the great 
redemption work is the one controlling element in the government of His vast empire, 
and everything in it is made subservient to the recovery of the human race. Extended 
experience is another element of confidence in a physician. Our “Healer” has the 


=  —— 


| 


experience of an hundred centuries on His side. Other physicians have often great — 


difficulty in ascertaining the seat and nature of a disease; they are frequently deceived, 
and select the wrong medicines, so that many a one, like the woman in the gospel, 
-suffers many things of many physicians, and is nothing better, but rather grows worse. 


But our Physician’s eye penetrates to the deepest recesses of the soul, and all things ; 
lie naked and open to His view. In His prolonged and widely extended practice, He 
has never yet lost a single case, where the patient himself did not wilfully withdraw | 


from His treatment. Is not such a physician entitled to the fullest confidence? 


More still. Ifa physician were at the same time master over the lives and deaths 
of his patients, what could be more agreeable to him or them? How would the whole 
world run after such a man! Now the Healer of Marah can say, “I am the Lord, thy 


healer.” The question of life and death is at His disposal. Says Job: “Thou hast 


granted me life, and Thy visitation preserveth my spirit.’ He holds the keys of death 


and the grave in His hands. Should not He have our implicit confidence? 


Nor can His willingness to help be questioned any more than His power. Sup- 
pose a physician, in order to save his patient, should transfer the disease of the ailing 


one to himself, and die in his stead, could anyone doubt his willingness to save his” 


patient? That is just what the Lord, thy healer, has done. “Surely, He hath borne 
our griefs, and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions; He was 
bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and by His 
stripes we are healed.’’ Such was His interest in your recovery, that He submitted to 
death itself for your sakes. 


Besides, in the employment of human physicians the rule is: the longer the | 
services the greater the bill; and no little anxiety is often occasioned by this fact. But 


how stands the case here? ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and 
he that hath no money; cous ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without 


money, and without price.” I ask, with great emphasis: Does not the “Lord, your i 
healer,’ with such ability and with such a disposition, deserve your confidence? O, 


why does not all the world run after Him? 


Why? Because there is something in His method of treatment which men 


dislike—the obedience which He demands. 

Confidence in a physician is tested by following his orders; and this for many a 
patient is not an easy matter; because so many things are prohibited to which he was 
accustomed, and in their stead so many bitter medicines are prescribed. Thus, too, 
the physician at Marah first led to the bitter waters and then to the sweet. He first 
probes the wound, then heals it. “He maketh sore, and then bindeth up; He 
woundeth, and His hands make whole.” First the bitter tears of repentance, then the | 
sweet experience of grace and peace. First into the Valley of Humiliation, then to the 
Delectable Mountains. Thus the very beginning of the Divine restorative method is 
offensive to the natural heart, and demands unquestioned confidence and obedience, 


without any consultation with the flesh and blood. a 


The Lord That Healeth Thee—Christlicb. 151 


And then the convalescent is further instructed to avoid everything that would 
cause a relapse—to walk in the new life, upon the narrow way, to crucify the flesh, to 


deny the world; all which demands steadfastness in obedience to and confidence in the 


Divine Healer, in order that, as He has commenced the good work in him, He may 


also complete it. 


Hence says God to His people at Marah: “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the 
yoice of the Lord, thy God, and wilt do that which is right in His sight, and wilt give 
ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of these diseases 
upon thee which I have brought upon the Egyptians.” What dire calamities and 
sufferings would Israel have avoided had it heeded this counsel and walked in the 
ways of its God. 

This, too, beloved, is the rule for each one of us today, who has committed himself 
to the Divine Healer for treatment; only we see clearly that the way we have to take 
is Christ and His example; the support on which we rely is Christ and His spirit; and 
the aim and object of our way is Christ and His glory. And, therefore, all the com- 
mandments to be obeyed by us are compressed into this one: “Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house.” 

My dear hearers, would you be entirely healed? Then remain in Christ’s treat- 
ment. The beginning may be bitter; the progress will become increasingly easier, 
sweeter, happier; so that, by-and-by, you will be able to say: “His commandments 
are not grievous.” Love makes them easy and clear. Should you at times not under- 
stand the mysterious ways He leads you, nor comprehend His methods of healing 
many of your complaints, run not away from Him to other physicians. Be assured 
that He knows. Should His hand seem sometimes against you, His heart is always 
for you. Your whole course of life will only become intelligible to you in the light of 
the Gospel of Marah, when, with all your heart, you have learned to believe. The 
Lord is my healer, and He seeks by all He sends me to cure my sin-sick soul. 
Humbly and confidingly submit to His direction; nor seek to restrain His hand 
should He reach for the knife to prune the branch, that it may bring forth more fruit. 

Try not, secretly, to associate with Him the world as a subordinate helper. 
Remember, He is thy healer exclusively. Many physicians are often death to the 
patient. To serve two masters is the clearest proof of the unfitness of the servant. Give 
Him not only a part, but your entire confidence. For He has irrevocably pledged to 
you complete restoration. 

After the waters of Marah had been sweetened, the invitation echoed through the 
whole camp: “Come and drink!” Doubtless, it was cheerfully, gratefully accepted. 
Let the Gospel of Marah, today, blend in the Gospel of Christ: “Whosoever thirsteth, 
let him come unto Me and drink.” For all your complaints, here is the Physician. I 
place Him before you, that He Himself may preach to you as at Nazareth, His home: 
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath annointed me to preach the 
Gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance 
to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are 
bruised.” “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ And whosoever has come to 
this fountain, and has drunk from it life and health, let him say, “Bless the Lord, O 
my soul, who healeth all my diseases,” AMEN, 


i 
\ 


152 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE JOLLY EARTHQUAKE, 


RUSSELL H. CONWELE. 


There is a curious old tradition in Japan of a great earthquake which visited and 
transformed the little Japanese island of Oshima in the year 1605 A. D. Previous to 
the earthquake this island had been a barren rock; not a green thing grew upon it, not 
a blade of grass and no fruit trees had ever been known to come forth even from the 
crevices of its mighty peaks. Its towering rocks shot high into the air, and upon that 
desert island lived only wild beasts, wild birds, and wild men—men exiled there because 
they were criminals or sent there because of some contagious disease. This fearful 
island, the abode of all that was wretched and horrible, was so changed by the earth- 
quake of 1605 as to become the very garden of all the East. Many of the wonderful 
botanics in our greenhouses, and our variegated roses, came from the same island of 
Oshima. 

This earthquake was called the “jolly” or laughing earthquake, because its coming 
was heralded by an awful laughter underneath the sea. Not only so, but up from the 
openings in the earth when the volcano burst forth there came nitrous oxide, or 


—_— 


ee ee ee a ee 


i le 


“laughing gas,’ and amid all these wonderful changes of nature,—when mountains ~ 


were thrown high into the skies and islands were swallowed up by the seething sea; 
when the continent changed its face, and all nature seemed in rack and ruin,—all man- 
kind laughed, not one person who did not take in the breath of the volcano, and who 
did not laugh. This crude and curious tradition illustrates an important thought to 
which I wish to bring your attention. 


This tradition says that there was a fisherman who lived on the shore of that — 


island and that he went out that day to fish. Suddenly sounds of demoniac laughter 
were heard to come from under the sea and little spits of steam began to rise from the 
waves. In affright he turned his boat toward the shore, but before he reached it, a 
mighty tidal wave rolled in between him and the island and hid it from view. As the 
awiul changes of nature began to be wrought around him he turned through the 
clouds of steam toward the mainland, thinking that his island was entirely destroyed. 
After the earthquake had passed and the clouds once more lifted, and the setting sun 
threw its rays across a calm sea, he looked across the waters and found that island 
there still, but the barren rocks were all gone, and in their place was an extended bank 
of sand. He turned his boat towards it with no hope of finding his loved ones; but on 


reaching the shore he found them all alive and well, and rolling over and over in the 4 


sand, convulsed with laughter, as though they had met with some absurd joke, rather 


than having passed through the fires of a fearful volcano. The fisherman gathered his | 


family and tried to find his possessions. He now discovered that a great bank of sand 


had been washed up in front of the place occupied by his cottage, and back of this the | 


low rocks had opened and revealed a vein of gold on his own private land. The 
government purchased the vein of him, gave him a title of nobility, and called his 
family to dwell at the capital, with the highest of the land. 


When I read tnat curious, weird tradition I saw in it an illustration of an everyday | 


truth that made me lie back in my chair and laugh, and laugh, far into the night. I 


have seen men like that. This fisherman had come home after an expedition, and a_ 


The Jolly Earthquake—C onwell. 153 


jolly earthquake had struck his home, and of course it had enlarged his possessions. 
How many a man has a vein of gold because a jolly earthquake has struck his house! 


Let me illustrate my thought, for perhaps you cannot catch it yet. 


I went to market one day with a basket on my arm, thinking I would buy some 
potatoes. I approached the first stall in the market and said to the young man there, 
“How much do you ask for those potatoes?” He looked at me as if I had insulted 
him and answered snappishly, ‘‘Sixty cents!” I went on. I wouldn’t have those pota- 


toes on my table; every one of them was stuffed full of yellow fever and hydrophobia, 
and every other form of contagion, and I wouldn’t poison my children. At the next 


stall I found a man perfectly indifferent; neither cross nor jolly. I said, “How much 
do you ask for those potatoes?” He replied with a drawl, “Sixty cents,” and turned 
away to attend to something else. I walked on, because I did not care for those 
potatoes. While they were not poisonous, I didn’t want to put sawdust before my 
children. In the third stall, there was a German woman, with a face like a moon in 
the last quarter. She was jolly and happy and laughed, and said, ‘Good morning!” 


| When I said, “I would like to know how much you ask for those potatoes,” the good 


German woman said, ‘‘This basket is sixty cents, and that one is eighty cents, and the 
sixty cent ones are just as good as the others, and I advise you to take the sixty cent 
potatoes.” Said I, “Madam, I will take both of them; I will take all you have.” 


Every time those potatoes came on my table every eye winked at me and suggested the 


good old German woman’s face; we ate those potatoes with happiness and digestion, 
and we have been happy ever since. I went to that same market but two years after- 
wards, and that same old German woman owned all three stalls! She bought out the 
cross young man first, and the indifferent man next, and now owns all three. Of 
course she would! George William Curtis was right in saying that some farmers 
would go up to the fence and look over at the cabbages with a face so sour that the 
cabbages would wilt right down, and some other people would go up and look at the 
corn fields with faces so bright that the corn stalks clapped their hands for joy. Ifa 
man desires to prosper in this world it is of the greatest advantage to be struck by a 
jolly earthquake, in the sense toward which I am trying to lead your minds. 

A Massachusetts cashier told me that his bank had indorsed notes for factories on 
the Connecticut, and the factories had failed. The cashier saw that if the public should 
find out how great was their indorsement there would be a run on the bank, and it 
would be obliged to close. He worried about it all night, and early in the morning 
went down to the bank, fearing terribly lest some person should get a hint of the 
matter. Pretty soon a farmer came in and presented a check for eight dollars. The 
cashier was cross, sleepy, and tired, and here, the first thing he met, was a call for 
money, while he wanted to keep all the money. He took the check, with a scowl, and 
looked at the farmer as though it was a miserable insult for him to come there for 
money. Finally he stuck the check on a spindle, drew out the bills and pushed them 
through at the farmer, as though he would like to shoot him with them. The farmer 
counted his money very carefully,—always count your money carefully when you deal 
with a man who never laughs. The man that is so pious that he: never smiles, is too 
pious to be honest. When the farmer found, to his surprise, that the money was al! 
tight he said, “What's the matter? Is the bank going to fail?” The very thing the 
cashier desired to conceal he was conspicuously revealing, When the farmer had gone 
out, this cashier walked up and down that bank, and fought one of the greatest battles 
that men ever fight in this world. He fought to get possession of himself. A man 


must ever keep himself in control. He can never control others until he first controls ° 


himself. The cashier made up his mind that he must be cheerful, and that he couldn’t 
be hypocritical about it. At last he gained the victory, and said, “I will laugh until 
everything is gone; I will laugh until they move my family into the street, until the 


154 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


mob drives me out of town. I will laugh, anyhow, whether we fail or don’t fail.” 


Soon a manufacturer from down the river came in to present a check for money. The 


cashier met him with a cheerful good morning, joked with him, paid him the amount, 


and asked him to come in and read the morning paper. While the manufacturer was 
reading, the cashier joked with him and he joked with the cashier, and at last the 
manufacturer said, “I have been thinking of transferring my account from Springfield 
to this bank. This bank is nearer to me, and then you are all so good-natured and 
cheerful, I like the atmosphere around this bank.” He filled out a check for $48,000, 
which the cashier cashed in Springfield, and came home with a great basket full of one, 
two, and five dollar bills. He stuck them up all along the front of the bank, prepared 
for any siege that might be made. At two o’clock in the afternoon the Boston paper 
came in, announcing, with great black lines, that the factories had failed, and that this 
bank was likely to fail, because of its indorsement of their notes. It wasn’t twenty 
minutes before every man in that town was running to his neighbor and saying, 
“Have you any money in that bank? If you have, get it out!’ And the rush for the 
bank was so great that the mob packed the room full. But the cashier met them with 
a smile and a joke, and passed out the money as fast as he could. When about twenty 
had received their money, and the crowd saw this great stack of bills, they said, 
“Tf you have this money, of course we don’t want it; but we thought you didn’t have 
it!’ Some of them tried to pass their money back, but the cashier wouldn’t take 
it, and then he called for the rest to come up and get theirs. Finally one man jumped 
upon a railing and called out to the crowd, ““You better get back to your work before 
they dock your pay for being absent. They’ve got more than a million of dollars 
stacked up here on the counter; this bank can buy out a dozen towns like this!” The 
cashier laughed and joked with people, and everybody was laughing at the absurd idea 
of making a run on a bank that was so strong. “Why,” they said, “you could see 
by the way the cashier acted that they had plenty of money; that was enough, just to 
see him.” They do not know in that community to this day how near that bank came 
to failure. The cashier saved the community, and saved the bank, and saved his own 
business, by getting such possession of himself as to compel himself to be cheerful 
under those severely trying circumstances. 

The tradition of the jolly earthquake stated that there was a little insane asylum— 
a one-horse insane asylum for one man—a poor maniac had been confined there for a 
long time. The earthquake tore this rocky island all to pieces; but when they came 
from the mainland searching for the survivors, they found the lunatic rolling over and 
over in the sand and laughing, but in his right mind. ’Tis a solemn thing to laugh; 
’tis a sacred thing to smile. When God made man a little lower than the angels he 
endowed him with that crown of laughter. God denied it to the animals and gave it 
only to man; and when a man ceases to laugh he becomes a beast. Twenty-five years 
ago Americans all laughed, but now a German will laugh away beyond the memory 
of a Yankee—although, of course, he does not see the joke until the next week; and 
an Englishman will laugh, and laugh, and enjoy his roast beef, and laugh again— 
though, of course, he doesn’t see the point until the next day; but he gets a great deal 
of benefit out of it after all. But these swift-going, busy Americans are ceasing alto- 
gether to laugh, and consequently in this land of ours mighty insane asylums are ris- 
ing on every hill and are seen in almost every green valley. And the greatest physi- 
cians of this land have said to me, in answer to my question, that they believe the great 
increase in insanity in this country is due to the fact that the people are getting so 
busy that they have ceased to laugh. In one asylum which I visited a man was actually 
cured of insanity by being induced to laugh. 

The importance of laughter in the healing of disease, however, is more clearly 
demonstrated than its healing of mental diseases. Dr. Clark, of the Bellevue Hospital, 


i) 


r) 


————_——— —— 


The Jolly Earthquake—Conwell. 155 


New York, in a pamphlet published in 1867, for the benefit of the Medical Society of 


New York, says that many lives might be preserved through years of usefulness if 
the medical fraternity would only give more attention to the scientific study of 
laughter. 

There comes to my mind a visit which I made upon a man in Philadelphia. The 
physicians said that he couldn’t possibly recover, and the first day I called he was 
delirious, but the next day I was allowed to see him. I went upstairs into a room, 
where they had not opened the blinds because they thought he was so near his end. I 


' went to the window and opened the shutters. Then I saw on the bed, his eyes still 


open, but so pallid, as if near to death, a man about forty-five years old. At first he 
could not speak to me at all. He struggled to whisper and at last I made out that his 
friends were all in Cromarty, Scotland, and none in this country. Something that I 
had heard occurred to me, and I said, “If you are a Scotchman from Cromarty, and 
make up your mind to get well, you will get well, in spite of all that the doctors have 
said.” He whispered, “Do you really believe I can get well when the doctors have 
given me up?” I said, “There is not a Scotchman living but what, if he makes up his 
mind, would defy all the doctors in the city.” He looked up at me doubtfully at first, 
but he soon became convinced that I meant it, and he seemed to grow stronger from 
that instant. I told him a story I had heard of a sailor who lost his oars and sculled 
himself ashore by turning the boat over and over. Every Scotchman from that town 
laughs at that story, and I felt the bed shake under me. When a man can laugh there 
is hope. So I told him two or three other Scotch stories I had heard, and then this 
dying man wanted to tell mea story, but I thought he would die before he finished it. 
He told me of a woman from Cromarty who moved to Glasgow, who was very aris- 
tocratic. When she was dying she called her husband and said, “Jamie, dinna ye bury 
me with the common people, but bury me with the gentle folk at Stravon. If ye bury 
me down with the ordinary people I canna lie still in my grave.” Her husband 


thought of the additional expense, and said, ‘Well, we'll bury ye first with the common 


people, and then if ye dinna lie still we'll bury ye at Stravon.” By that time he could 
speak quite strong. I gave him some stimulant and told him anothér story; then he 
told me another. He said there was a sailor from Cromarty who had been away 
many years, and came home very poor and picked rags for a living. One day he 
found a great mass of rags, whalebones and buttons. Such a find was a great thing 
for him, and he piled them into his bag as fast as he could. Just then a gentleman 
came along and said to him, “Sandy, what do you suppose happened here?” The beg- 
gar and sailor looked around a minute, and said, “Well, I dinna ken, but I think some 
wumman was wrecked around here!” By the time he had told me that story he spoke 
quite loud, and I said to him, “‘Made up your mind to get well, haven’t you?” He said, 
“Well, I feel wonderfully better.” I said, “Make up your mind to get well and you 
will get well.” He looked up at me and said, “You're a queer minister.” I thought I 
was myself, and I felt the rebuke very keenly. I went home and said to my wife, “I 
don’t know how I can ever enter my pulpit again if that man does not get well, after 
the way I have talked to him.” The next morning the man was better, and on the 
fourth day he was out driving, and is alive and well today. 


There are a great many valuable lives that would be saved if the minister were to 
teach people how to live, instead of trying to teach them only how to die. Never, 
never need he fear death who is always ready for the duties of life. Now when they 
tell me that a man is dying I tell him I want him to get ready to live; that he has been 
brought down to teach him a lesson which he is to get well and teach others; and in 
that way a great many live whom I should otherwise scare to death. Be more cheer- 
ful in the sick room, and you will help your loved ones to recover. 

On this island of Oshima, on that afternoon of the jolly earthquake, there was a 


156 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


government office vacant because of the death of its military ruler. A new ruler was 


on his way to the island when the earthquake came and drove him back to the shore. 
He refused the office. It is said that no other military governor would accept the 
office. Even the form of government changed when the jolly earthquake struck the 
island. The people now elect their own officers; before they were ruled by military 
dictators. Friends, did you ever know that liberty and laughter are twins? They go 
together. Laughter makes men free; freedom makes men laugh. Is there a brighter 
star in our American firmament than the name of the joker statesman, Abraham 
Lincoln? The last thing at which President Lincoln laughed, Senator Hoar has told 
us, was an illustration of the influence of laughter upon political reforms, and espe- 
cially on the advancement of human liberty. In Washington a great majority were in 
favor of the improvement of the city; but the taxpayers, the old men, were against it. 
At that time there was a society there called the Democratic Jacksonian Association 
which sent up a protest to the Senate against these improvements. A number of 
young men, finding that they could join the society by paying $1.50 a head, joined 
it in sufficient number to be a majority; then they voted the old men out of office and 
reversed the resolution and sent it with the same name to the Senate. They thought 
that now they were sure to get the large appropriation, so they ordered a great parade, 
to make a demonstration in front of the White House. The Democratic Jacksonian 
Association fell in with an immense transparency, on which they had directed the name 
of their society to be printed. But the artist found that he could not put in the whole 
of those names—The Democratic Jacksonian Association—and so he painted the 
first syllable of each word; and with that absurd transparency they took their place 
in the procession and marched out in sight of President Lincoln, who was leaning 
out of his window and laughing. As they marched up Pennsylvania avenue a lot of 
colored people made a break upon the parade and overturned the transparency, the 
police arrested several, there was a trial in the courts; and Senator Hoar said that the 
laughter at that abbreviated transparency, and consequently at the society, was so 
great that it set back the improvements in Washington for eight full years. 

If a man desires to be elected to an office he would better look very sharp. They 
told me down at Martha’s Vineyard of a “town crier” who wanted to be elected to 
office. Before the election day some people who went to his house found a notice on 
his door, “No crying for three weeks on account of death of wife.”” When they saw 
that notice they began to laugh. A joke, like dynamite, will bring death to the joker, 
if cracked too near him. That man was laughed out of office, as many another man 
has been. 

On this island of Oshima, when the earthquake came, there was a joss house, and 
on the rock where it stood there was a priest making offerings to an idol. The earth- 
quake came and tore the island asunder, destroyed the joss house, overturned the 
brick god, and after the earthquake they found the priest rolling over in the sand and 
laughing amid the debris of his offerings and his broken idol. I believe that the 
time has come in which, if men will smile more in their religious discussion, and smile 
in greater sincerity and purity of thought at their sectarian differences, we shall have 
one great denomination, and the world shall indeed come to the feet of the Savior 
Christ. Persecution builds up good and bad alike, but laughter kills the bad and 
builds up the good. The following incident is an illustration of the truth: 

' There was in Boston a young man who loved to preach politics—and partisan 
politics in the pulpit is a false religion. He held a caucus one Sunday night after the 
service, and got his church to vote for his party. He was worshiping a false god, not 
clearly in accord with the principles of Christianity. He thought that a full church 
made a successful one, but the devil never taught a bigger lie. But this young 
preacher’s party was defeated, and the following Sunday he announced, “Tonight I 


¥ 
‘ 


— 


< 


The Jolly Earthquake—Conwell. 157 


shall preach on the awful fate of the wicked.’ The people knew that he meant the 
opposing party, so that night the house was packed full. It would have been a sensa- 
tional address but for an incident providentially thrust in. He gave out one of the 


most awful texts in the Bible, and then began in his peculiar way: ‘‘Every man that. 


voted that ticket that won last Tuesday, and every woman that encouraged a man 
to vote that ticket, and every person that sympathizes with that ticket is going down to 
everlasting death!’ and he began to storm around the pulpit. Just as he said that, 
there came an alarm of fire; the bells rang, the steam engine rushed by, and people 
became very uneasy and looked at each other, and a few went out. Then this 
preacher’s father-in-law rose and said, “Brethren, please keep quiet. I will go out 
and see where the fire is, and if it is near your homes I will let you know when I come 
in, and my son can go on with his sérmon.” So the young man gathered himself up 
and began again: ‘Every man that voted that ticket, and every woman that encour- 
aged a man to vote that ticket, and every one who sympathizes with that party, that 
won last Tuesday, is going down to everlasting death!” Just then his father-in-law 
put his head in at the door of the church and shouted, “It’s a false alarm!” The 
people all laughed so heartily that it broke up the sermon, and the young man told me 
that he had never again dared to preach on politics, even indirectly, because as soon 
as he made even a reference to politics a smile went over the congregation which 
defeated entirely any attempt to move them along that line. He was laughed out of a 
wrong position, when persecution or opposition would only have strengthened him 
in it. 

I close with a most beautiful thought, which I find it impossible to secure the 
language fitly to express. In a prison on the island when the earthquake struck it, 
there was the last of the persecuted Christians. She was a widow. With her two little 
children she was condemned to death by being thrown from the rocks. That after- 
noon the cruel jailer demanded that she come forth from the prison. She hid herself 
in the darkness. He rushed in and dragged her forth by the hair, her little children 
clinging to her skirts. This rough, cruel giant caught her by the arm, lifted her up, 
and half carried her, as the children clung to her, from peak to peak, away up to the 


highest rock, and was about to throw her down from the cliff, when he saw the boats 


approaching in which were those coming to witness the execution. This very curious 
and strange tradition says that the executioner allowed this poor girl to kneel down 
upon the rock, and she lifted her hands toward the skies. Her two little children 
knelt beside her. The boats drew nearer. Suddenly there came the sound of fearful 
laughter from under the sea, and it was echoed back from the sky. Then came the 
sound of a rumble, and then a roaring, and the hot steam, and amid the bursting of 
the volcano, crashing rocks, breaking mountains, the sun turned to red as though 
it were blood, and then the clouds enveloped this whole island. Those rocks were 
lifted higher and higher, with each repeated throb of the earthquake’s throes, until at 
last the peak on which these three knelt, and on which the executioner lay prone, was 
carried far above those whirling white clouds. The setting sun gleamed across the 
clouds and transfigured them with all the hues of the rainbow. There they knelt, and 
people watching from the mainland could see these strange figures, with their hands 
raised to the sky. Then the watchers saw the cliff divide between the executioner and 
the widow. One half swung out and back again several times, and then rolled, and 
tumbled, and thundered, and crashed down into the depths of the hot volcanic sea. 
The other half was lifted one throb higher into the sky. It rested there for a moment, 
and then the receding throbs of the earthquake let that giant rock back, down into 
the white clouds, utterly out of sight. Down it still sank, deeper, until only thirty-two 
feet above the level of the sea, it rested on some firm foundation. When the sea 
became calm and the clouds were blown away, and the setting sun threw its last rays 


eS 


, 
; 
) 
| 
| 


158 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


over the great ocean, men came from the mainland to see if any person lived; and as 
they approached they heard the sound of childish laughter. Nearer they came, and 
they heard the widow laughing in prayer. I believe that there never went up to 
heaven a more acceptable tribute of praise than went up from those voices as they 
praised God for his great gift of liberty, his great blessing of life. 

If I knew a heart that was filled with gloom, if I knew a family that was divided 
by a quarrel, if I knew a town that was afflicted with great poverty, if I knew a state 


that was being oppressed by tyranny, or a nation that was still heathen, I believe that 


it would help wonderfully to make that sad heart bright, to unite that divided family, 
to bring prosperity to that poverty-stricken town, to break the shackles from the 
enslaved of that state, and to bring Christian freedom and Christian life to that heathen 
nation, if there were turned into the heart, into the family, into the town, into the 
state, into the nation, a jolly earthquake like that of Oshima, in Japan. 


[This sermon-lecture was reported for the Northfield Echoes as delivered at East 
Northfield, Mass., in 1896. 

Russell H. Conwell was born at Worthington, Mass., in 1842, studied law at Yale, 
was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in the civil war, practiced law in Minneapolis, 
immigration representative of Minnesota to Germany, foreign correspondent, and in 
1870-1879 practiced law in Boston. Ordained to the ministry in 1879, and for ten years 
was pastor of Grace Baptist Church, Philadelphia. Founded the Temple College in 
1888, Samaritan Hospital in 1890, pastor of the Baptist Temple since 1891, and con- 
sidered one of the most entertaining lecturers in the United States.] 


* 


(159) 


THE ATONEMENT IN THE LIGHT OF 
SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH. 


JOSEPH COOK, D. D. 


When a man has wilfully violated the radiant moral law, it is instinctive, if the 
eyes are open to its light, to feel that something ought to be done to bring about sat- 
isfactory relations between the rebellious spirit and the author of that insufferably 
resplendent moral enactment. What ought to be done? The soul should acquire 
similarity of feeling with God. Without that its peace is scientifically known to be a 
natural impossibility. But is that enough? Face to face with self-evident truths can 
an unfettered human spirit, which has behind it a record of disloyalty, find intelligent 
and wholly tremorless peace, even after it is delivered from the love of what ought not 
to be? When an evil man has reformed, does he have a scientifically justifiable right 
to feel that his own excellence, taken wholly alone, ought to secure his entire har- 
mony with the nature of things? What do the organic and ineradicable human 
instincts, scientifically interpreted, say on this point? 


Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare tells us, could not wash her hands white, although 
she had learned to hate her crime so as to be made insane by the memory of it. 

Doctor—Look how she rubs her hands! 

Gentleman—It is an accustomed action with her to seem thus washing her hands. 
I have known her to continue in this a quarter of an hour. 

Lady Macbeth—Yet here’s the spot. 

Doctor—Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes from her. 

Lady Macbeth—Out, damned spot! out, I say! . . . Here’s the smell of the 
blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. 

Doctor—More needs she the divine than the physician. God, God, forgive us all! 


(Macbeth, Act 5, sc. 1.) 


Is your Shakespeare a partisan, when, describing in Macbeth the laws of human 
nature, he makes him say: 


“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood 

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 

Making the green one red.” 


“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! 
Macbeth does murder sleep, —the innocent sleep, 
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, 

The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, 

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, 
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. 

Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: 
‘Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdur 
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more,’” 


160 Pulpit Power and Eloquence: 


“T could not say ‘Amen’ 
When they did say ‘God bless us.’” 


Lady Macbeth—Consider it not so deeply. 

Macbeth—But wherefore could I not pronounce “Amen”? I had 
Most need of blessing, and “Amen” 

Stuck in my throat. 

Lady Macbeth—These deeds must not be thought 

After these ways; so, it will make us mad. —Ibid., Act 2, sc. 2. 

These deeds must not be thought of after these ways; so, it will make us wise. 

Not Plato, not Aristotle, not Voltaire, not Strauss, not Renan, not Parker, can 
wash Lady Macbeth’s red right hand. 

Shakespeare describes the laws of your sleep and mine. 

Instead of great literature, do you prefer actual life to illustrate the laws of human 
nature? A schoolmate of mine lately committed murder. He was a foremost man in 
a church. He was nearly fifty years of age. Through thirty years he had suffered 
through an unhappy marriage. God knows what his trials had been. But the man 
was sane. He was in health. Not a whisper has been raised in his defense, although 
he is to be tried for his life in a few weeks. Coming home from an evening gather- 
ing, his wife and he passed into their house together, apparently at peace with each 


* 


aa 
’ 


other. Half an hour later, when she was asleep, the monster with an axe took his © 


wife’s life. 

Do not avert your gaze, my friends, from this lurid point of light. The narrative 
is of a piece with much else that has actually happened in the nights and days of our 
softly rolling globe; and yet you say it is not philosophy. I affirm that events like 
these are facts, and that philosophy must face facts of every description, or once for all 
cease to call itself scientific. This piercing gleam out of experience is blue fire, 
indeed; but not a little radiance of that sort has crept before now through the vol- 
canic crevices of the world. When by this ominous but actual lamp you gaze intently 
upon the glitter of this axe, and upon the flashing of the afterward dripping blood, 
you will find that many problems as to the peace of the soul are here exposed to 
view, under a flame intense enough to permit their scientific examination. 

Both these persons were my schoolmates. I knew each of them well, and think 
I have some reason to say that I understand what, probably, the whole interior sky 
was in this man. One of the things that proved his guilt, aside from his confession, 
which he made at the end of a week, was a remark which he curiously enough repeated 
to his neighbors months before his crime: ‘Can I not repent, even if I do 
a great wrong, and so repent as to go to heaven? Is it not taught that a man may 
repent and be saved, although he does something very bad?””’ The man was not well 
educated. He had in his mind the query, whether one might not commit some atroc- 
ity, and yet repent, and by the good grace of Almighty God, who is of too pure eyes 
to behold iniquity, be saved through the Atonement. 

Perhaps he thought heaven was a place rather than a state. 

Confucius said on the Yellow Sea, ‘‘Heaven means principle.” What if a man 
permanently loses principle, must he or must he not lose heaven? Under the law of 
judicial blindness, is it possible for a man to lose principle permanently? 

This man, befogged but not insane, took up the theory—this was proved before 
the jury—that he might commit murder, and yet afterward repent, and go to heaven. 
And he committed murder; and I think his chief temptation, aside from vexatious 
married life, was that lie whispered to him out of the very bowels of Gehenna, that 
the Atonement is enough to save a man who makes a bargain of it, and tries to cheat 


God, That man did on a large scale what it is possible you and I haye been trying A 


| 


t 


The Atonement in the Light of Self-Evident Truth—Cook. 161 


to do on a small scale. We do not commit murder; but we would, if we had our own 
_ way, very gladly cheat God of half our life at least, because we remember that we 
can repent at last, and all will come out well. Some men think that, if they repent 
after they go out of this life, all will be well; that is rather a large application of this 
principle. 
¥ Pardon me, gentlemen; but you must be shocked into due attention to the mon- 
strous caricatures of religious truth which often exist in half-educated minds, and 
Betich underlie a large part of the infidel attack on Christianity in this latest age, as 
ey have underlaid every attack in every past age. 

‘ In this kind of analysis of the actual and typical experiences of men, I find more 
philosophy that I can put into an hour’s declamation. Here is a gleam right out of 
q human nature, and from our day; and I wish you to look at it while we ask how far 
self-evident truth can teach us what the Atonement can do. I affirm that the Atone- 

‘ment must be something that does not bargain with God for a piece of life or the 
“whole of it. It must not undermine the principle. We are assured by self-evident 
truth that the Atonement, if it is to be effectual, must in some way provide for 
similarity of feeling with God. Conscience, with all its great operations, exists in us, 
and is going on into the Unseen Holy with us; and we must be at peace with all its 
multiplex lines of activity. 
3 _ This man committed murder deliberately. Perhaps he now has had grace given 
) him to loathe his crime. In his cell he sings hymns, it is said; is glad to receive 
religious solace; hopes that his execution may be the gateway to heaven; and his 
 feliance is all in the Atonement. He really has come to hate, let us suppose, all that 
_ God hates, and to love all that God loves. He has, let us grant, what is called the new 
birth. Does that erase or cover the record of the murderer? Let us be mercilessly 
E Straightforward in our answer to this question; for it touches your case and mine 
too. I am approaching a fundamental self-contradiction of the lawless and sharply 
mischievous dreaming of many, as to the nature and sequences of our refusal to say 
“TI will” when the Divine Voice says “I ought.” This man has learned to loathe the 
murder; but the record of his crime is behind him. Do you think that he is, or ought 
to be, at peace, simply because he really loathes everything that leads to murder? 
Here is a question which I put before you in the name of the scientific method, begging 
you to look on it with a love of clear ideas, and wholly apart from any conclu- 
‘sions in religious science. Do you think that human nature, with the great opera- 
tions of conscience in it, and especially with that prophetic office which anticipates 
| the continuance of the approval and disapproval which we know inevitably follow our 
acts, good and bad; that sees that this approval or disapproval is not only from our- 
Selves, but from a Somewhat and Some One who is in us, but not of us, is likely to 
allow this man, in the name of his own excellence alone, to be wholly at peace about 
‘this record of murder, even after he has reformed? Let us fasten our thoughts on this 
one phase of human experience, typical of range after range of human crime, and 
let us, if possible, attain clearness on the subject, whatever theory stands or falls. 
' “Was klar ist, wahr ist,” the Germans say—‘‘what is clear is true.” There is a whole 
range of liberal thinking which asserts that, when a man reforms, he has done enough; 
and that style of thought I wish to test—by what? By the street; by the axioms of 
self-evident truth applied by the scientific method. My schoolmate who has murdered 
his wife repented, let us say; and he is at the edge of death itself. It may be that the 
first spirit he will meet in the Unseen Holy will be that which he sent thither before its 
' time. No, not the first spirit; he will meet God there. He meets God now. In con- 
/ science, the still small voice is God’s voice. He listens to that; he remembers the 
past; he knows that he has learned to loathe his crime; but is that enough? Was it 
enough for Macbeth? Was it enough for Lady Macbeth? 


aS ve 


162 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


When a great question concerning the organization of human nature comes up," 
the best way to decide it is to notice not only the deepest literatures of the world, 
but a long range of experience in history, and see how man has acted age after age. 
Have the nations acted as if they thought reform was enough to give peace after a 
great crime has been committed? We know that heathen religions of the world have 
given large space to penance and sacrifice. I do not wish to exaggerate the amazing 
record; but there is enough to show that more than much has been done age after 
age, in history, by this desire to be at peace with conscience and with what is to be 
met behind the veil. These heathen religions have indicated in unspeakable ways | 
that peace is not attained even after reformation, The devotees of those religions have 
desired to be calm before God; and many deep teachers have taught, with more or 
less distinctness, the necessity of loving what God loves, and hating what God hates. 
But how has the human heart acted? The whole history of the race, I claim, has" 
proved that men in general have not felt ready to go before God in their own right- 
eousness even after they have reformed. My schoolmate here has learned to hate 
his murder; and now he must go before God. He has the righteousness, let us hope, 
of loving and hating what God loves and hates; but there is that past behind him. 
Conscience is in him; and now, when the operations of conscience have their free 
course, is that man, as he steps into the Unseen Holy, ready to depend on nothing 
but his own righteousness? 

Gentlemen, the greatest question in religious science is before you, and, I hope, in 
such a concrete form as to be intelligible. Keeping now your unpartisan and fathom~ 
less Shakespeare open, and not removing your thoughts from this concrete case of 
today, will you allow me to recite analytically a few self- evident truths concerning 
the Atonement? 

1. It is self-evident that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in 
the same sense. 

If transcendentalism has a cornerstone of adamant, it is this axiom—that a thing 
cannot be and not be at the same instant and in the same signification. When will a 
philosophy arise that will undermine a certainty without which philosophy itso 

cannot exist? 

2. It is, therefore, self-evident that we cannot be at once at peace and at vari- 
ance with conscience. 

3. That we cannot be at once at peace and at variance with the necon of our 
past. 

4. That we cannot be at once at peace and at variance with God. 

The supremely terrific and supremely alluring cans and cannots of the nature of 
things are all implied in the words, “God cannot deny Himself.” Here we put our 
feet upon adamant which Thor’s hammer cannot pulverize, without, at the same time, 
reducing itself to powder. The nature of things has in it no fate at all, but is the 
total outcome of God’s free choice; and His free choice is the total outcome of His 
infinite perfection. He cannot deny Himself; and so forever and forever it will be true 
that the axioms of the nature of things are adamant, not only for this world, but alsa 
for the next. 

5. It is self-evident that, while we continue to exist as personalities of the same 
plan we now exhibit in our natures, conscience will be something we cannot escape 
from. 

“The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” 


6. It is self-evident that our past is irreversible. 
Do you say that when I assert in the name of the nature of conscience, and of the 
irreversibleness of the past, that there will be regret in the universe forever and for- 


The Atonement in the Light of Self-Evident Truth—Cook. 163 


ever on account of the losses sin has occasioned, and when I affirm that some part of 
the shadow will fall on the sea of glass, and will not be invisible from the Great White 
Throne, I come near uttering blasphemy? Does the Bible utter blasphemy when it 
says there is a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world? My proposition is only 
that biblical proposition in scientific shape. No doubt all the losses sin has caused 
were foreseen; and no doubt the plan for the rescue of men existed in the councils 
_ of Omnipotence from eternity. No doubt there was, therefore, as the unsearchable 
depth of that metaphor asserts, a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. He 
whom we dare not name had sympathy from the first, for the distress He foresaw would 
result from the abuse of that gift of free will, without which there can be no virtue. 
_ Forever and forever the losses caused by what ought not to have been will continue. 
_The Scriptures, therefore, speak of a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, 
or of a shadow that is not invisible, and never has been invisible, and never 
b will be invisible,from the Great White Throne. Before you accuse scientific 
4 -spéech of blasphemy instead of biblical depth of metaphor on this theme, remem- 
o 


ber that the Atonement is not an afterthought. The plan of redemption is no insertion 
“4 into the universe to correct mistakes. It is a part of the perfect purpose of Him who 
+ was, and is, and is to come, who, in all eternities past and in all eternities future, will 
_ be faithful to the plan which was, and is, and is to come. 
a 7. It is self-evident that we cannot escape from our record. 
} 8. That we cannot escape from God. 
9. That harmonization with our environment is the indispensable condition of 
_ peace of soul. 


10. That our environment in this world and the next consists unalterably of God, 
_ conscience and our record. 
® 11. That we must be free from the love of what ought not to be before we can 
_ be at peace with the moral law which requires what ought to be. 
2 “Si vis fugerea Deo; fuge ad Deum,” says the Latin proverb. “If you wish to 
flee from God, flee to God;” for the only way to flee from Him is to flee to Him. 
4 12. It is scientifically incontrovertible that conscience produces in us a sense of 
ill-desert whenever we say “I will not” to the Divine “I ought.” 
9 13. That conscience produces in us this sense of ill-desert whenever we accurately 
_temember the record of our intelligent refusal to say “I will” to the Divine “I ought.” 


t 14. That no lapse of time lessens this sense of ill-desert, if the memory of such 
‘Tefusal is vivid and thoughtful. 


+ 


J Forty-eight hours ago we were passing through the anniversary of the assassina- 
tion of President Lincoln. Some years have elapsed since that atrocity; but have 
: our opinions changed as to the blameworthiness of the principal actor in it? If the 
assassination in 1865 ought not to have been, it will be true forever that it ought not 
to have been. It is a long time since the world had fixed opinions about Nero and 
Caligula; but we do not think of changing our opinions simply because of the passage 
of time. Do we not disapprove all that ought to be disapproved, and do so once for 
all? It is a terrible certainty that Judas Iscariot, if he ever blamed himself once justly 
Must continue to blame himself forever and forever. There is a noose that a man 
may put about his own neck and tie, but which he cannot untie. There is a irreversi- 
bility in the past; and the action which ought not to have been will always be regarded 
as such when we vividly and faithfully remember its character. It will be impossible 
for us not to disprove such an action; for conscience is a part of our nature, 
and its natural operation is to disapprove all that ought not to be. Murder 
Ought not to have been; and Macbeth will never think that it ought to have been, 
or make it ought to have been. You were born in Boston; can Omnipotence make it 
true you were not born in Boston? You have done what ought not to have becn; 


‘ 


164 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


can Omnipotence make it true that what ought not to have been ought to have been? 
Conscience is so fearfully and wonderfully made, that you must forever and forever 
disapprove what ought not to have been. When a man has had an arm amputated 
it cannot be put back; it is gone once for all. 


How evident it is that, under natural law, a man may drift on in careless esthetic 
ways till he loses the perception of the beautiful! He learns to love that which 
zsthetically ought not to be; and he blunts his esthetic sense until you say he could, by 
a long process of culture, be brought back perhaps, but never will be. You say his 
probation is over esthetically.. On every conceivable side, except the moral and 
religious, character is subject to probations, and attains permanence; but on these 
sides a whim of the luxurious ages forbids you to hear the truth which all great and 
strenuous ages have asserted, namely, that probations of course exist there as they 
do elsewhere. Undeniably there are esthetical probations, physical probations and 
intellectual probations. But now you affirm, you who assert the unity of law, that 
there are no moral probations. Do you perceive any self-contradiction in that intel- 
lectual proceeding? 


15. It is a scientifically verifiable fact of experience, that conscience, when we 
keep our eyes open to light, produces in us, besides the sense of ill-desert, a feeling 
that something ought to be done to satisfy the rightly resplendent majesty and the 
plainly unconditional and eternal authority of the violated law which says “I ought.” 

If we have agreed up to this proposition, we shall not part here. Will you 
remember who committed the murder? What were we thinking a few minutes ago, 
when I outlined before you a typical human atrocity? The man has learned to loathe 

‘his crime. Were you ready to say that he had done enough? Something ought to be 
done besides his learning to be sorry that he had murdered his wife. You were very 
sure of this face to face with the concrete case. You say that this piece of current 
history is a fact, but that I am now leading you into vapor. Well, go back to that 
scrap of red-hot iron out of the pit and touch it. It is not fog. It burns up fog. It is. 
although blue flame, destructive of all vapor. And you, face to face with the concrete © 
example, are not likely, in that man’s case, to believe that the perfumes of Arabia witt 
sweeten the hand that has driven the axe through the skull of the nearest and dearest. 
That man is not authorized to be at peace, even after he has reformed, if he depends 
only on his own excellence. That alone cannot give him peace of soul; and the 
question is, whether anything else can. One of the sceptical late schools of thought 
asserts that science knows nothing of Atonement for sin. All causes that are once put 
in action produce effects which become causes, and which must take their course. If 
we bring into existence evil causes, they will produce their natural effects; and we 
cannot erase or cover the past. The idea of a man being relieved from the natural 
results of his sin is in conflict with clear thought. These are propositions which just 
now are receiving indorsement from infidelity itself. Your old style of doubt is 
slowly undermined by the newer, I had almost said by that more Christian style, 
which is prepared to be amazed if it can be shown clearly that any great arrangement 
can deliver us from the terrors of the past. “Plato, Plato,” said Socrates, “perhaps 
God can forgive deliberate sin; but I do not see how.” 


aT 


16. It is scientifically clear from the facts of personal and general experience that, ¢ 
in the absence of satisfaction, conscience forebodes punishment. 


1 


17. It forebodes this with such pertinacity and force, that the prophetic action 
of conscience, or presentiment of penalty, according to the confession of all great 
literature and philosophy, makes cowards of us all. 

18. That it forebodes punishment, not only in this life, but in time to come 
beyond death. 


The Atonement in the Light of Self-Evident Truth—Cook. 165 


s To and fro behind the veil, conscience, in anticipation, paces up and down, oftener 
than over any path in this life. It would not thus by organic instinct pace up and 
down behind the veil, if there were nothing there. Did we anticipate nothing behind 
the veil, conscience could not make cowards of us all; for death would be release. 
19. This foreboding has done as much work in the history of religion among 
_men as any other instinct, and this has proved its strength. 
20. The foreboding does not cease when we become free from the love of sin. 
Remember Lady Macbeth’s fruitless use of water; look back to my schoolmate. 
When the hoofs of the horses of his pursuers were rattling after him on the old 
Roman pavements, Nero caused himself to be put to death; he passed out of the 
world by virtual suicide; and history says that his look was not a look, but a glare. 
He had not been misled by a Christian education. A distinguished infidel had trou- 
bles of conscience; but he attributed them to a nervous shock he received in his youth. 
Nero did not receive any nervous shock in his youth; Caligula did not. Boston may 
probably have men in it who never had a nervous shock in youth, but who have 
‘illustrated all the great laws of conscience, and who have been made afraid before a 
Somewhat or a Some One in whom it has been said there is nothing to fear. “Since 
was seven years old,” Parker affirmed, “I have had no fear of God.” 

21. It is a scientifically verifiable fact of experience, therefore, that the absence 
of the love of sin in the present does not bring us to peace when we vividly and 
thoughtfully recall our record of sin in the past, and allow our native instincts free 


What! Sin not taken off us, and put upon our Lord? Our guilt not borne by our 
Savior? No; not in the sense in which you understand guilt. Blameworthiness is 
ae transferred from us to Him, and cannot be. We know that our Lord had no sin, 
he utting it upon another. That word “guilt” is a sae unless you remember that behind 
it lie two meanings. 
WN 23. Guilt signifies, first, personal blameworthiness; second, liableness to suffer 
in order to preserve the honor of a violated law. 
hl In the former sense guilt cannot be transferred from person to person; in the 
latter it can be. Our Lord is no murderer, no perjurer. There is no divergence of 
theological opinion from self-evident truth when self-evident truth declares that per- 
‘sonal demerit is not transferable from personality to personality. Ghastliest of all 
misconceptions ever put before this city or any other is the assertion that the doctrine 
of the Atonement implies—first, that an innocent being is made guilty in the sense of 
ng personally blameworthy; and, secondly, that that innocent being is punished 
in the sense of suffering pain for personal ill-desert. Both these propositions all 
lear thought discards, all religious science condemns. We have no doctrine of the 
Atonement which declares that personal demerit is laid upon our Lord, or that, in 


blameworthiness. He had no personal blameworthiness; He was an innocent being, as 
te always will be, and never did, can, or will suffer punishment in the strict sense of 


24. Guilt in the second sense, or liability to suffering in order to preserve the 
penor of a violated law, may be removed when the Author of the law substitutes His 


166 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Redeemer and Sanctifier of the universe, that arrangement meets with exactness the 
deepest wants of man. It is the highest possible dissuasive from the love of sin; it is 
the only possible deliverance from the guilt of sin, in the sense, not of personal blame- 
worthiness, but of liability to suffering in order to preserve the honor of the violated 
law, which says “I ought.” 

27. Such a great arrangement may, therefore, with scientific exactness, be known 
to be needed, and so needed as to be called properly the desire of all nations. 

28. The Atonement which reason can prove is needed Revelation’ declares has 
been made. p 

On the slope of Beacon Hill, a New England author, who ought always to be 
named side by side with Pestalozzi, once made it a rule, in a school full of subtle 
thought, that, if a pupil violated its regulations, the master should substitute his own 
voluntary sacrificial chastisement for that pupil’s punishment. Bronson Alcott will 
allow me to say here and now, in his presence, that he has told me that this 
one regulation almost Christianized his school. The pupils were quite young, 
and for that reason the measure was effective among them. He was no 


dreamer. He would never have adopted this measure except with the sensitive. Never- 


theless, the operation of these untutored, hardly unfolded, and therefore spontaneously 
natural hearts, indicates what man is. “One day,’ says Bronson Alcott, “I called 
up before me a pupil eight or ten years of age, who had violated an important regula- 
tion of the school. All the pupils were looking on, and they knew what the rule of 
the school was. I put the ruler into the hand of that offending pupil; I extended my 
hand; I told him to strike. The instant the boy saw my extended hand and heard 
my command to strike I saw a struggle begin in his face. A new light sprang up 
in his countenance. A new set of shuttles seemed to be weaving a new nature within 
him. I kept my hand extended, and the school was in tears. The boy struck 
once, and he himself burst into tears; and I constantly watched his face and 
he seemed in a bath of fire, which was giving him a new nature. He had a 
different mood toward the school and toward the violated law. The boy seemed 
transformed by the idea that I should take chastisement in place of his punishment. 
He went back to his seat, and ever after was one of the most docile of all the pupils 
in that school, although he had been at first one of the rudest.” My friends, you know 
that I believe that law is a unit throughout the whole extent of time and space, and 
that, if you can measure a little arc of the moral law as exhibited in this school of the 
Concord philosopher, you will obtain some glimpse of the principle on which the 
Atonement operates. 

29. The definition of the Atonement is the substitution of the voluntary sacrifi- 
cial chastisement of Christ for man’s punishment. Why do I make a distinction 
between chastisement and punishment? Because the facts require me to do so. In 
this example was Bronson Alcott punished? Not at all. Was Bronson Alcott guilty? 
Not at all. Was the personal demerit of that pupil transferred to Bronson Alcott? 
Not at all. Such transference of personal demerit is an impossibility in the nature of 
things. Nevertheless, we have in Boston a school of theology and preaching, and a 
wide range of popular sentiment, which regards Christianity as teaching, in the 
doctrine of the Atonement, a self-contradiction, an absurdity; namely, the idea that 
personal demerit is transferred from one individual to another. 

James Martineau says that the idea of a vicarious Atonement is abhorrent to him, 
because it includes the idea that Christ, an innocent being, was punished. I wish to 
admit that Orthodoxy has been careless in her phrases again and again. I do not 
know how many have been thrown into the lawless license of liberalism by that mis- 
conception of the Atonement which asserts that in it an innocent being was punished, 
and personal demerit was transferred. But law is one through the universe; and I 


wr 


; The Atonement in the Light of Self-Evident Truth—Cook. 167 


have a perfect right to stand on this example of Alcott’s school. I affirm that you 
know perfectly well that Bronson Alcott, in the strict sense, did not suffer punishment. 
“He was innocent. What did happen? Bronson Alcott voluntarily accepted chastise- 
‘ment, not punishment. What is the definition of punishment? Pain inflicted for 
rsonal blameworthiness. What is chastisement? Pain suffered for the one who 
‘suffers it, or for the benefit of those who witness it. Does the latter imply guilt? Not 
‘at all. A mother has a vicious son, and she has done her duty by him, let us suppose. 
She has no remorse; for I assume she is free from all guilt for her son’s bad habits; 
but she suffers terribly. Is that pain punishment? No, chastisement. We must make 
this distinction, in Boston at least, where so long the caricature has been placarded on 
‘the highest walls, asserting that, in the Atonement, punishment is inflicted on an 
‘imnocent being and personal demerit transferred. I never was taught that Christ 
‘suffered punishment. I had to learn out of books that anyone made it an objection 
to Christianity that an innocent being was punished. If religious science will begin 
the fashion, and never use a term of importance without defining it, I for one will try 
to keep step with that fashion as one of the most blessed of all modern improvements, 
and one I should like, by the contagion of general acceptance, to force upon all who 
differ from Christian views. In defining saving faith we must distinguish chastise- 
ment from punishment: the chastisement of our offences was laid upon our Lord. 
It is nowhere presumed in the Scriptures that personal demerit. can be transferred 
from individuality to individuality. 
What happened further in the school? Suppose that boy had been called up and 
punished a second time, after the master had been chastised, would that have been 
right? Would the school have said that was right? The master has accepted chas- 
tisement voluntarily; and now you cannot call that boy up, and punish him a second 
time. The school would say that is wrong, It is against all human nature to do that. 
Why? Because justice is satisfied? No; but because it has been sufficiently honored. 
Distributive justice is waived, while general justice is satisfied. What has the master 
done? He has so substituted his own chastisement for the pupil’s punishment as to 
remove the liableness of the pupil to suffer in order to preserve the honor of the 
law of the school. But the master is not to blame? No. The master has not been 
| punished? No. Assuredly this case, on the human side, looks intelligible: I think I 
can understand that side. But do you mean to say that in the arc of that little example 
are involved principles that sweep the whole curve of the Atonement, or show in part 
how God’s chastisement was substituted for our punishment? Yes, by more than a 
glimpse; for the law is the same everywhere. 

The master paid the debt of that boy, you say. He did not pay it in the sense of 
Temoving the pupil’s ill-desert, but only in that of removing his liableness to suffer to 
preserve the honor of the law of the school. The illustration is, of course, imperfect 
On many points; but on a few it is serviceable, and I present it only to throw light on 
these. It is perfectly clear that the pupil by his own act made himself liable to suffer 
in order to preserve the honor of the law he violated. If that liableness was to be 
removed, it was necessary something should be done; and the school would have 
gone to ruin if nothing had been done to preserve the honor of its law. I understand 
perfectly, too, that, when this boy goes back, a motive has been brought to bear upon 
him that will transform him, if anything can. Nothing can take hold of human 
nature like such condescension, justice, and love. 

Would the boy have acted so if he had been a Greek boy? Any sensitive free 
being, man or angel, would have been affected as that boy was by the command to 
substitute the chastisement of the master for his own punishment. A new set of 
| shuttles would have sprung into action in an Esquimaux or a Greek boy in a similar 
case. I have seen a Greek boy whirl his top among the ruins of the Parthenon, and 


ee ee SS ee e———EEEEE—E—E—— 


168 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the Roman boy his top upon the old pavements that the chariot-wheels of Czsar had 
scarred; and I think that any boy from any quarter of the globe would have felt, in 
the case supposed, that the master had not lowered the dignity of the law of the 
school at all; that the law which had been violated had not been treated lightly; and 
that, if this boy wanted motives for loyalty, what he would need to do would be to 
remember vividly the chastisement of the master in place of his own punishment. 
In the case of that scholar, guilt meant two things—first, his own personal 
blameworthiness; second, his liability to suffer to preserve the honor and vindicate 
the authority of the law of the school. Now, guilt in the first sense never is removed 
(Hodge’s Theology, passim). It is not the doctrine of the Atonement that personal 
demerit is taken off a man by saving faith. It was always true of that scholar that he 
violated the law. His personal demerit had not been transferred to Bronson Alcott 
at all. The record of rebellion is always behind that boy. Only his liableness to 
suffering for the preservation of the honor of the law of the school has been removed. 
That latter sense of guilt is the meaning of the word when we say the Atonement 
removes man’s guilt. It is scientifically certain that, in the sense of removing his 
liableness, Bronson Alcott had power to pay the debt which that boy owed, and that 
he paid it by substituting his own chastisement for that boy’s punishment. That is a 
straight-forward, plain case, and you can teach any honest man to see that distinction. 
Hereafter, when scepticism with its long-eared hallelujahs comes to you, and says 


that the Atonement is a doctrine outgrown by all clear thought, because it teaches — 


that an innocent being was punished, and that personal demerit was transferred from 
one individual to another, and that therefore advanced thought must abandon the 
central idea of Christian culture as plainly barbaric, the result of some Platonic inter- 
fusion of thought in the early centuries, or some heathenish inheritance from Judaism, 
in short, that this scheme is self-contradictory,.or at war with, axiomatic truth, please 
ask that singer of empty anthems to be clear himself; to state what he would say in a 
human case such as I have supposed; and then whether he dare affirm, in the name of 


the unity of law, which he proclaims as the first truth of science, that, if there has — 


been any such Atonement made in the universe, it is not what we infinitely need. 


My friends, exact and cool science knows with precision that we want just this 
more than unspeakably, if anything like this has been done for us. We want it first, 
to pay our debt to the school of the universe, in the sense of removing liableness to 
suffering to preserve the honor of violated law; and, next, to give us immeasurable 
motives to loyalty. There is surely nothing that really changes the heart so quickly 
as a sight of this substitution of chastisement for punishment, whether it be in the 
human case of a school, or in the revealed case of the school of the universe. Lift 
this feeling of the poor boy into all the dignity it naturally assumes when you take it 
as a type of the moral law, a unit throughout the universe; lift that law until the are 
we can measure has become the segment of a circle large enough to reach from here 
to the galaxies; and then let all the constellations shine on the circle as you carry its 
line far past the spot over which Bootes is driving his hunting-dogs in their leash 
of sidereal fire; carry on that arc until stars fade out, and galaxies, and all the infinities 
and eternities of time past and time to come are embraced within it, and then what 
have you? One little point of light—the whole of it is no more—to hold up before the 
moon of Christ’s chastisement substituted for man’s punishment. 

You wish to be born anew? Look on the Cross. You wish to take God gladly 
as your Lord? Look on him as your Savior. You wish to drop all the heart burdens 
of slavishness, and you desire to come into the obedience of delight? Look on the 
Cross. You want glad allegiance to God as King? Look on the Cross, There is 


’ 
i 


nothing that frees us from the love of sin like looking on Him who has delivered us 4 


from the guilt of it. 


‘ 


i, The Atonement in the Light of Self-Evident Truth—Cook. 169 


Speaking philosophically, addressing you in the mood of cool precision, I affirm, 
that if the great things man wants are riddance from the love of sin, and deliverance 
from the guilt of it, we can obtain the first best, and the latter only, by looking on 
the Cross. Those old words have unfathomable depth; and he who is to be born anew 
must sit beside that pupil in Bronson Alcott’s school, must imagine the benches to be 
‘galaxies, and his human companions the angels and archangels who bow down on 
the golden floor, and on the shore of the sea of glass, and in the presence of the Great 

White Throne, and cry out, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty; Thou art worthy, 
for Thou didst so love the world that Thou gavest Thine only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” 
May I summarize the scientific truths contained in this discussion by asserting, in 
the name of the axioms of the nature of things, that it is clear?— 

1. That the master of the school was not guilty. 

2. That he suffered, in the strict sense, not punishment, but chastisement. 

3. That he had power to remove from the pupil the liability to suffer to preserve 
the honor of the law of the school. 

4. That the pupil’s peace before the law of the school is the result not of his own 
work, but of the master’s work; and not of the master’s moral influence and general 
character merely, but of his substitution of chastisement for punishment. 

5. That, nevertheless, the pupil must be loyal to the master, and thus, though 
not saved by works, cannot be saved without works, 

6. That it is not simply the moral influence, or character and general example of 
the master, which transforms the boy into the mood of loyalty. 

7. But that this substitution of voluntary sacrificial chastisement for punishment 
is the force which throws the shuttles that weave a new characer in the soul thus 
delivered from punishment; and that, although the record of disobedience cannot be 
changed, and must be remembered with regret, such memory, when loyalty is once 

- made so perfect in love and trust as to cast out fear, will be but a spur to adoration of 
the condescension shown to the released soul; and, in the multitudinous anthem of its 
gratitude, this shadow on the sea of glass will, for that spirit only, be by contrast an 
enchantment of the glory of the light on the sea of glass. 

On a summer evening, it has often been to me, on both sides of the Atlantic, a 
| solemn joy to lie down alone at a grove’s edge by the side of the ocean, and look into 
the infinite azure until the stars appear. In the rustle of the grove one may hear thus 
all the forests of all the zones of the thrifty, jubilant, wheeling world; the soul may 
touch all shores with the howling, salt, uneasy sea. As the stars come out, I love to 
lift above my thoughts Richter’s apologue, which represents an angel as once catching 
aman up into the infinite of space, and moving with him from galaxy to galaxy, until 
the human heart fainted, and called out, ‘End is there none of the Universe of God?” 
And the constellations answered, “End is there none that ever yet we heard of.” 
_ Again the angel flew on with the man past immeasurable architraves, and immensity 
after immensity, sown with rushing worlds; and the human heart fainted again, and 
cried out, “End is there none of the universe of God?” And the angel answered, 
' “End is there none of the universe of God: lo! also, there is no beginning.” But if, 
while I, thus entranced, look into the sky, you bring above my gaze the page of the 
_ gospel recording the fact of the Atonement, all other revelations of the divine glory 
appear in contrast but chaff and dust. 


[A lecture by Joseph Cook, delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, April 16, 1878. 
This sermon is taken from the Volume of Monday lectures on Orthodoxy, by 
| permission. It is considered one of the strongest of the course of lectures that attracted 
the keenest intellects of America, and were held in high reputation all over the world. 
| Joseph Cook was born at Ticonderoga, N. Y., in 1838, and died there in 1901. 
| He was a graduate of Harvard and Andover, and studied for several years in Europe, 
and made a lecture tour around the world. His Monday lectures continued 20 years.] 


(170) 


THE CROSS OF JESUS GHIRiSae 


J. H. M. DDAUBIGNE, D. D. 


“But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
—Gal. 6:14. 


My brethren, God has not intended that men should be deprived of all boasting. 
A disposition to boast is one of the propensities most peculiar to our nature, and 
which we find in all classes of society and among all varieties of the human race. From 
him who stands on the highest elevation in the world down to the most unknown; 
from the inhabitant of our cities, whose spirit towers on high, down to the very 
savage, whose reason is scarcely observable; all find something of which they believe 
that they may boast. And what is it then?—a ridiculous plaything, of which they 
should blush, instead of making it the object of their pride. Oh! sad spectacle of our 
vanity, which proves with the greatest precision that the human race has lost that in 
which it could glory, that it has come short of the glory of God (Rom. 3: 28); and that 
in this great need it stretches out its hand to the first plaything that it finds to put it in 
the place of the reality which it wants. Thus the inhabitant of a city in the utmost 
state of famine seizes with desire the loathsome food, from the very sight of which at 
another time all his senses would have revolted. 


God would give men an object in which they could better glory. He has given 


them the cross of Jesus Christ. 

“God forbid that I should glory,” says St. Paul in our text, “save in the cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ.” And through these words he pronounces the sentence of 
condemnation against all deceitful things, which are in general our idols; he com- 
mands all men to cease from their vain endeavors, and he exalts the cross of Jesus 
Christ, as the only object worth glorying in for all intelligent beings till the end of 
time. But when the apostle says in the cross of Christ, think not that he understands 
thereby the wood, the outward sign, the figure with which one meets so frequently in 
many regions of Christendom, and which has been so often abused by superstition. 
He intends to denote thereby the death of the Son of God, which took place when the 
fulness of the time was come for the remission of our sins. But he uses the expression 
the cross only to remind us that this kind of death was held as accursed among all 
people, that the death in which we ought to glory was full of humiliation, shame and 
ignominy, and even accursed of God. (Gal. 3: 13). 

See then here, my brethren, the glorying which’ God your Creator allows you, and 
which He himself would give you. The d&y which we now commemorate is the only 
ground of greatness which can be within the reach of the human race. Never would 
man have been really able to glory if the hill of Calvary had not 1800 years ago dis- 
played the spectacle which we see on it; if man had not there crucified this Jesus, who 
had previously been sent by Pilate to Herod and by Herod to Pilate; if he had not 
been there suspended on the tree, “a reproach of men, and despised of the people” 
(Ps. 22: 6); and if the terrible sentence had not fallen on the only innocent head that 
ever lived on earth. This is the day on which the great contest was engaged in, on 
which the great deed was finished which won for us honor and immortality. This is 
the day on which our eternal nobility was registered in the book of life. 


yj 


5 The Cross of Jesus C hrist—D’ Aubigne. t7t 


h “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Let 
the present meditation be devoted to the examination of this new object of glorying. 
_ There are two opinions concerning this object; one is the apostle’s; we will sup- 
‘port it. The other is the world’s; we will refute it. Or, we will first state the dignity 
Be ihe cross of Christ, and then test our feelings thereby. When we have defended 
the truth and combatted error, our work is done. 
___ And do Thou, Lord our God, what Thou hast to do! Give the beginning and the 
end, and thus all. Show us how in the cross of Jesus Christ there is hidden all the 
‘wisdom of God and all the power of God! Amen. 


I. The Opinion of the Apostle.- 

The Apostle of the Gentiles proclaims, as we have seen, the cross of Jesus Christ 
as the only object of his boasting. And the first reason which moved him to do so 
iecctainly this, that he sees in the cross the mind and glory of God developed in 
their full splendor. St. Paul had learnt to know God in his early years; but the 
zeal which impelled him before his conversion so violently to persecute the disciples 
of the Nazarene, shows sufficiently of what nature this knowledge was. The cross of 
Jesus Christ had now been revealed to him, and it made him acquainted with a God 
of whom he had learnt nothing in the school of Gamaliel, and he boasts of that to 
which he owed this wonderful knowledge. Yes, this cross is the only teacher which 
reveals to us the living God. Ili we even exhaust our knowledge, we shall not truly 
know God if the cross of Jesus Christ have given us no instruction. Without it even 
‘nature and conscience speak in dark sayings, and what is most important for us to 
know remains veiled from our eyes. Where will you come to the knowledge of God's 
holiness, His unutterable abhorrence of sin, which gives you such earnest warnings? 
Conscience says something to you; but if you would have quite a different idea of it, 
‘come to the cross of Jesus Christ—see Him in whom awells all the fullness of the God- 
head bodily, fastened to the cross on account of sin, and because unrighteousness 
‘dwells on the earth. Will you then still retain unsettled views of the holiness of God? 
Will you still doubt whether God has given the world a telling proof of His holiness? 
_ Where will you arrive at the knowledge of God’s love, this infinite mercy which 
‘should be the ground of all your joy? Nature will teach you something here also; 
but if you would hear this subject spoken of with power, concerning which nature 
seems only to stammer, hasten to the cross of Jesus Christ; see the well-beloved Son 
of the Father humble Himself unto death, even the death of the cross, that the world 
might have life. Is that not a deed of love? ‘For scarcely for a righteous man will 
one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God 
lcommendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for 
us.” (Rom. 5:7, 8.) 

_ Where will you discover the glory of God? What is the place, O my Lord and 
my God! where I can find Thee in all Thy glory? Shall I seek Thee in the midst of 
the worlds which Thou hast formed, or in an inaccessible light, surrounded afar off 
by all the angels bowing their heads to the ground? I can find no spot in the whole 
universe which would answer to Thy glory. Everything is so little in comparison 
with Thee, everything is so small side by side with Thy infinity! But no; I know a 
spot which answers to all Thy glory, and this is an accursed tree, on which Thou art 
fastened. There I recognize Thee in all thy sublimity, much more than when sur- 
ounded by those thousands of thousands who form the guard of Thy throne. (Dan. 
:10.) All these ideas of angels, archangels and cherubim, which bow their heads 
efore Thee, are but slight representations, borrowed from what man calls greatness; 
ut O Thou who was fastened on a cross for our sin! Thy glory is infinite. I see 
herein not even the slightest human feature; Thou hast there a splendor altogether 
eculiar to Thee; Thou appearest in a thoroughly divine light. Oh! I envy not the 


*y 


172 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


angels and archangels who declare to Thee their unworthiness when Thou sittest on 
Thy heavenly throne. To us men is it given to worship Thee on a far more glorious 
throne—Thy cross. They forsook the heavens when Thou was fastened on the cross, 
because the earth presented to them a spectacle which had never been seen in heaven. 
Only and solely at the foot of this cross will I linger, recognizing Thee, and making 
my boast—‘‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus 
Christ.” ‘ 


But St. Paul glories in the cross of Christ not only because it reveals to him the 
glory of God, but also because it causes him to see his own wretchedness. What must 
man’s state be, when such a deed has to be accomplished in order to free him from it? 
Certainly there are voices enough as well outside of us as in us to remind us of our 
nothingness; but how skilfully we can reason away their decisions and withdraw our- 
selves from their judgments! In what a deceitful righteousness does man wrap 
himself up as long as the cross of Christ is a strange thing to him; on what a height 
he places himself until the cross abases him! The cross of Jesus Christ is the great 
writing of accusation which God hath set forth before the eyes of the whole earth. 
No one can fix his eyes on it without being at the same moment convinced. It is truly 
foolishness for a man to believe himself still guiltless, since the Son of God was offered 


up for his sin. Come, my brethren, for the cross of Jesus Christ shows you the wounds 
of your soul; it reveals to you your entire desert of condemnation, teaches you the — 


entire extent of your sin, and extinguishes in you the very last spark of pride. 

O thou who thinkest thou dost still possess so great worthiness in the sight of 
God, come, in order to have this idea destroyed, to the cross of Christ; come there in 
order to be able to know thine own deserts; the Son of God was obliged to shed His 
blood there in order to save thee from death. O thou who boastest of thy virtues, 
come and consider them a little in the light of this Cross, there they will pale away, 
there they will become obscured, and thou wilt find them all infected with a selfishness 
and with a pride which make them objects of the divine abhorrence. Let even the 
most excellent of men approach; I place him at the foot of that cross which was 


erected even for his salvation, and what will then become of his pride? The cross — 
breaks in pieces this deceitful glass through which we look upon ourselves as greater 


than we are; it annihilates us. And why then does St. Paul glory in it? Because he 
knows that in his state the sense of his wretchedness is his highest dignity. And to 
us, my brethren, it is not allowed to have another boast than that of the Apostle; none 
of us will be great before God if we have not felt our own nothingness before Him. 
Oh! blessed be this cross which has assigned us our right place, and which causes us 
to find in the feeling of our nothingness the commencement of our glory. 

But when Paul glories in the cross of Christ because it had hurled him down from 
his vain greatness, he boasts also chiefly of it because it raises him to true greatness. 


The great object of his glorying is that such a price has been paid for the salvation of : 


his soul, that the Son of God died even for the sin which he committed, that the blood 


shed on the cross made a full atonement for all his guilt, and procured for him immor- — 


tality. And what, my dear hearer, is thy glory if not the forgiveness of sins? How 


wouldst thou lift up thy head if One had not died for thee, if He who died for thee ~ 
were not He who made all things, and who preserves all things by the word of His © 
power. (2 Cor. 5:14; John 1:3; Col. 1:16, 17; Heb. 1:2, 3, 10.) Thou exertest thyself — 
to draw glory and honor out of the smallest offering which a dying man brings to thee, — 


and out of the smallest trouble which he puts himself to on thy account; and wilt thou 
not glory in this, that the Lord of all things, having appeared in flesh, has shed His 
blood on the cross for thee? It was not on account of His own sins that He was 
pierced, for “I find no fault in Him,” said even His judge. (John 19:4.) The power 
of men was not the cause of His death; for could He not have prayed His Father to 


‘ 


See oe > Be 


— 


The Cross of Jesus Christ—D’ Aubigne. 173 


send Him more than twelve legions of angels? (Matt. 26:53.) Why was He then 
fastened on the cross? It was necessary on thy account, my dear brother: this is the 
only way of accounting for it that is left to us. 
a Yes, the only cause which slew the Son of the living God on the cross was the love 
_ which He had for thy soul, the determination which He had formed to save thee. If 
He carried out his intention, if pain did not cause Him to waver, if He did not shun 
i _ the terrible hour: it was all in order to save thy soul. If He shed all His blood for 
% thee, if He had_to cry out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” if He 
endured an anguish of heart, which far exceeds our ideas: the only cause was the 
salvation of thy soul. If He fought out on the cross a great conflict, if He overcame 
sin, the world, death, and hell: He did it to win thy soul. 
Re He died—all is accomplished. He has cancelled with His own blood the debt 
i, which thou couldst never have paid; thou art reconciled; thy offences are taken away: 
Paice i is now, for all them that obey Him, the Author of eternal salvation, (Heb. 5: 9.) 
0 wonderful death of the only Son of the Father! An event which will ever be unique 
b in the history of the world! Unsearchable depth of Deity, before which the angels 
_ bow their heads to the earth, without being able to sound its depths! And shouldst 
thou, my brother, for whom this took place, shouldst thou be the only one whom it did 
not move? Shouldst thou alone draw no glory from it? What more wonderful event 
: than this could proceed from heaven to earth? At what price wouldst thou be 


redeemed if this, which has been paid, does not suffice for thee? How high dost thou 
place thyself if thou slightest the blood of the world’s King? What kind of a gift 
_wouldst thou receive if an eternity of glory has so little value for thee? Oh! when 
- thou wilt stand before the judgment-seat of God, and when the eye of the Judge will 
, examine the transgression of thy soul, oh! what will be then thy hope? What will be 
then thy glory? What can then calm thy heart if thou canst not then say, in presence 
of the Judge and of all those who stand before Him: ‘Christ died for my sins.” 
| (1 Cor. 15: 3.) Yes, my brethren, only the unbeliever can fix his eye on this cross 
| without finding there his glory, because it has, indeed, none for him; but the believer 
: discovers therein an infinite glory. My Lord and Savior, it is truly so, the lower Thy 
cross is, the more we glory in it; for what must that dignity be which is shown to us 
| through such an humbling, what must that glory be which is promised to us by such an 
_ abasement? 
But observe especially the ground which the Apostle himself presents: “God 
; forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the 
world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” That is, indeed, an exceedingly 
great advantage which the cross of Jesus Christ bestows; for therein consists the 
great wretchedness of man, that he cannot free himself from the present world, to 
become a citizen of the future one; and the cross of Jesus Christ works this miracle. 
‘It crucifies man to the world, and the world to man. What an expression of power! 
It crucifies you to the world, that is, it crucifies the sin in you which causes you to live 
for the world. Should you not hate sin, knowing that Christ died on account of sin? 
Will you not fight against all the motions which it begets in your heart? Yes, the 
Redeemer’s death is the only means of infusing into us a lively hatred of our sinful 
nature. It is the only medicine for our wounds. But what is still more, the cross of 
Jesus Christ will crucify the world to you; that is, it will annihilate all allurements to 
the vanities of the world. You cannot love Christ and the world at the same time. 
What can the pageantry of the present world be worth to him for whom the cross of 
Christ has won all the treasures of the world to come? Will he not hate the world 
violently; for if sin was the cause of his Redeemer’s death, the world with its passions 
and excesses was the instrument! The cross crucifying man to this world makes him 
a citizen of the world to come; killing in him the old man of this earth, it forms the 


174 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


new man which is of heaven. Where Christ is, there is also His treasure and His 
heart; he is risen with Christ. (Col. 38:1.) In this manner the cross works the great 
change which man needed, and makes him whom it found in the dust a citizen of 
heaven. In this manner the cross accomplishes through its power what no law or 
human wisdom could perform. ‘'God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ!” 

But the last motive which moved St. Paul, as he travelled through Asia, Greece 
and Italy, and passed over all seas, to cry out that he desired to glory in nothing else, 
was certainly the thought of the power of this cross and the triumphs which await it, 
This great apostle knew that it is sufficient to bestow immortality even on those who 
have -already sunk into the deepest abyss. He knew what a large number it had 
already redeemed as well in the cities of Galatia to which he wrote, as those in Greece, 
and at Rome, and Jerusalem. He knew the future destiny of the cross; that kings and 
people would come and cast themselves down before it; that the nations would bring 
their sons in their arms; and that all the ends of the earth would become its inherit- 
ance. (Is, 49:22.) And we can see that in part fulfilled, which the apostle could only 
foreknow. This unknown cross has raised itself from Calvary, and rulés already over 
half the earth. The prediction of Him who was fastened on it has not ceased to be 
fulfilled: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.” 
(John 12:32.) How many millions of souls in so many centuries have fixed their 
gaze upon it, as the Israelites of old did on the brazen serpent, and been saved 
(Num. 21: 5-9); what a great multitude, won out of the kingdom of darkness, celebrate 
now, before the throne, the salvation that has come to them through the Lamb! 
(Rev. 7:9, 10.) All old things have passed away, and everything has become new. A 
new breath of life has floated around this orb for 1800 years. The cross of Jesus Christ 
has already conquered multitudes of adversaries: slavery, barbarism and effeminacy 
have been obliged to give way before it; for in saving individuals it becomes the true 
power of nations. It accomplishes in its progress the redemption of the world; the 
powers of darkness fly before it, and let go their hold of us; at the same time, strug- 
gling with superstition which is bent on putting human wretchedness in its place or 
close by it, and with unbelief which is bent on annihilating it, and which would make 
men believe that heaven has not opened to save the earth; struggling with these, it 
direets"its blows right and left against those abominable enemies. Not content with 
extending its old conquests, it hastens through the midst of the heaveris to carry on 
the work of regeneration. It is the standard which the Lord of hosts set up to the 
people.” (Is. 49:22.) Its victories multiply; it assembles men from all sides, whose 
dispersion was caused by their sins; and we, trusting on its almighty power, can 
espy the time when it will be said: Now is the whole world our God’s and his Christ’s. 
Oh! God forbid that we should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. If 
the world tread thee even under its feet, thou art nevertheless that by which it is 
saved. A drop of Thy blood, O Lord, is more precious to us than all the riches of the — 
universe. 


II. The Opinion of the World. 

Is this your language, my brethren? If that is the opinion of St, Paul, what is 
yours? There is scarcely a truth which could have more opponents in the world than : 
this, about which our text speaks to us. How many are there who practically say, I 
glory in all other things than in the cross of Jesus Christ. Are ye of this number? 
Oh, that your conscience testified to you on this day, the day of triumph for the cross, 
that you yourselves, since you entered this sacred house, and commenced to lend me 4 
your attention, have neither in your understanding nor in your heart cherished feel- 
ings or thoughts which are opposed to those of St. Paul. q 

Perhaps you say:—Is it then necessary, to think so much about this cross? There — 


The Cross of Jesus Christ—D’ Aubigne. 175 


la 
if 
4! are so many other objects in religion which are much more important than this! More 
important than the cross? I could here point you back to what I have just now said, 
put I prefer to refute you by means of yourself. You would set the cross aside as a 
_ thing of small account, and yet you say almost at the same moment this cross, this 
atoning death of the only begotten Son of God is incomprehensible, and our reason is 
thereby brought to nought. How are such opinions to be reconciled? How can the 
"cross be considered at the same time so insignificant and yet so wonderful? If it thus 
vi surpasses your ideas, whence comes the low value which you assign to it? This must 
i be made clear to you. The cross of the Son of God cannot exist and yet be insignifi- 
_ cant; it is either credible or a lie. If it is deserving of credit and true, it is the greatest 
_ thing in the world, and you must come and recognize it, and in spirit bow before it. 
4 If it is false and a lie, you must declare it to be the greatest of all cheats, with all our 
- sacred books which proclaim it, and with the whole of Christianity of which it is the 
_ substance. You must, like the first apostates of the Church, trample it under your feet, 
and then swear by the gods of the world. One of the two the cross must be to you, 
_ either divine wisdom or hellish lies. It must either be your ruin or your salvation. 
_ There is no middle way; you cannot be indifferent about it. 
But that is just what holds us back from it, you will say. If the cross is true, all 
’ other things fall at once, and we can then seek our glory only in Him. But is it true? 
Is it true that the Son of God shed His blood on the tree to procure for us eternal 
: life? Yes, my brethren, and the witness which should convince us is God Himself, 
who is the truth, and who, through His apostle (Eph. 2: 16), declares that Jesus Christ 
: reconciled both in one body by the cross. But without seeking testimony in heaven, 
_ will not the earth itself suffice for us? Call back to remembrance the greatest deeds of 
__ antiquity, there is no longer any trace of them in existence, and only the old historical 
books which relate them to us bear testimony that they have taken place. But it is 
__ mot so with the atoning death of Christ: this event lives in the world. The present 
__ condition of the earth gives evidence of it. From the blood which flowed down from 
the height of the cross, all the nations have proceeded which have exalted this holy 
banner upon the earth which they rule. Everything in these nations speaks to you of 
| the cross. Yes, the cross of Christ is beyond your reach, you cannot shatter it. This 
_ truth, on which eighteen centuries rest, cannot so easily be set aside, as if it were a 
short-lived dogma, which has been formed in the brain of him who preacKes it. 
_ Opposed in-all ages, and by all the power of men, it has nevertheless permeated ail 
: _ times without having been cast down. It has expressed itself by its own poWer, both 
against unbelief and against superstition. And this fact of an offering which once was 
finished for the sin of all is ever present in the world, and proclaimed as the greatest 
act of love to men. 


But could such an act have taken place? What astonishment does this doctrine 

cause us! What can we especially discover in it, if it is not foolishness? My brethren, 
let us not ask whether such a deed could have been completed when we know that it 

| did take place. To investigate whether what has actually happenéd could have taken 
place is a ridiculous play of men of reason; and those must keep silence when the cross 

of the Son of God is spoken of. You are astonished, you say. But according to what 
tules, then, should the plummet of your understanding search the depths of Deity? 
if God, in giving life to a plant, does something which surprises us, should we think 
that when He reconciles the world to Himself He should do nothing astonishing? Man 
is astounded at it, because he has never had an idea anything like it. In fine, know 
that God in this matter thinks as you do, and‘that He calls the cross foolishness. 

_ ( Cor. 1:21.) But should we not learn from this that if we dare to contend with 
Him, what we called wisdom would be proved foolishness, and what we considered 
foolishness would be declared wisdom. A little of the foolishness of the cross is 


- 


176 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


sufficient to put to shame all our philosophy. This cross, which alone reveals all God’s 
attributes, and alone satisfies all man’s wants, is the real sum of the wisdom of the 
world. All buildings of human pride are thereby one after another annihilated. It has 
already rendered many defenceless, and will not cease to disarm others. He who is a 
stranger to it is mistaken, for a time will come when he will be astonished to have 
passed it by without paying attention to it; and when Christ, having spoiled the princi- 
palities and powers of human wisdom, which still rule in the present century, and 
having made a show of them openly, will triumph over them Himself in this cross. 
(Gols 15): ; 

But if this cross of Christ is not now your glory and your wisdom, what are you 
then? To what religion do you then belong? Are you Christians? Christians without 
the cross! What a new Christianity is that, in what school is it taught? Verily, you 
can even learn from unbelievers what you do not seem to know. Go to the children 
of Israel, make your way to a, follower of the false prophet; ask one of them what the 
Christianity is which you profess. Certainly he who does not believe, but for that 
very reason is free from prejudice, will tell you. He will say that Christians are a 
people who recognize Jesus of Nazareth born at Bethlehem as the only begotten Son 
of God, and believe that the death which He suffered under Pontius Pilate is the 
sacrifice which reconciles the sinful and rebellious human race to God! Do you then 
not know your religion even so well as those who live without it? They abuse this 
cross of Jesus, they who do not pretend to believe in it; and you who publicly. confess 
it, you are ashamed of it, like them! Not to glory in the cross, is not to belong to 
the Christian church. We see in every century all those who have followed the steps 
of St. Paul, and whose names are noted down in the Book of Life, glorying in the 
cross. In it the heroes of the Reformation especially gloried, whom we honor as our 
fathers in the faith. God keep you from being able to turn away from their example, 
and from glorying in anything else than in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ! 

Ah, my brethren, shall we say why you do not glory in it alone? Because you 
believe that you do not need it. And that is just the last point to which everything 
comes back. We seize with joy a help which we consider necessary, but we despise it 
as soon as we believe that it is unnecessary. The cross of Jesus Christ professes to be 
what alone can give eternal salvation; but you believe you are able to secure it through 
yourself. The cross of Jesus Christ professes to be what alone can give holiness; but 
you imagine you are able to attain to it of yourself. What have you then still to do with 
it? Ifyou reject it, that appears to me intelligible. The question is just this, Which is 
right, the cross of Jesus Christ which places salvation in itself, or you who seek it in 
yourself? This is the question which, if not soon decided in your case, that day will 
answer which will determine and reveal all things. 

But you say, perhaps, and certainly there are many who can say it: “I deny not 
the cross of Christ.” Quite true, you believe it, but only the half of it. You deny not 
the event, but you shun it. You venture not with a full and free faith to persuade 
yourself that the Son of God was fastened on the tree for you; and hence it comes that, 
in respect of influence on your heart, this event is nothing. Ah, cast far away from you 
this littleness of faith, give up this half Christianity which precipitates you into destruc- ? 
tion. All Christianity in which the central point is not the crucified Messiah, to whom — 
everything runs, and from whom everything proceeds, is a false Christianity. Why will 
you not believe as St. Paul believed? The cross of Jesus Christ is just as nigh to you 
as it was to him. I offer you the Christ who was crucified for you, just as St. Peter 
offered Him to those who had fastened Him on the cross. (Acts 3:26). His blood 
is before your eyes as it was before theirs; you can wash yourselves therein from your ; 
misdeeds just as clean as they could. Oh, what day calls you to this, if the Present — 


- 


7 


j 


The Cross of Jesus Christ—D’ Aubigne. 177 


‘does not? What moment would you choose, if not this solemn moment when the Son 
‘of God was slain on Golgotha for you? 

Yea, Lord and Savior! I raise myself this hour and approach Thy cross! Thou 
didst bring there an offering for me; I come and bring mine to Thee. I come, Lord, 
and strip myself of everything, and declare to Thee that there is nothing in the 
world of which I boast but only the cross, on which I see Thee fastened. At Thy feet 
TI cast all my pretended greatness; Thy cross eclipses and annihilates it. I offer up to 
‘Thee all in which I have heretofore gloried. I tread my righteousness under my feet; 
because I know that what I called my righteousness was nothing but unrighteousness. 
I tread my holiness under my feet; because I know that what I called holiness was 
nothing but shame. I tread my meritorious works under my feet; because I know that 
‘among them there is not one to be found pure, and that those things by which I 
believed life could be merited deserve for me only condemnation. There remains for 
me nothing, O Lord! See me here as Thou wilt have me, see me in the dust, see 
me wretched, poor, blind and naked before Thee. Give me Thy gold, purified in the 
fire, that I may be rich! Give me the white robes of Thy righteousness, that I may 
clothe myself, and that the shame of my nakedness may not appear. (Rev. 3:17, 18.) 
Oh! Thy cross gives me again all that I have lost, and in a quite different degree. 
For me, my Lord! for me Thou wast fastened on the cross. Thy blood, which Thou 
didst shed, is my peace; I wash myself therein diligently from all spots; it atones before 
my Judge for all my offences; it brings me nearer to Him again; it unites me with 
Him afresh; it speaks better than the blood of Abel. (Heb. 12:24.) Thy cross 
becomes my wisdom, my righteousness, my holiness, my redemption. Behold, I am 
now rich, Lord! I have found this ground of glorying which will open to me the 
gates of heaven and set me upon an eternal throne. “God forbid that I should glory, 
$ave in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 


Ah! how do all these bonds of unbelief now discover themselves to us which 
century after century have poured out their blasphemies against the cross of our Lord 
Jesus Christ! We fear them in no wise. We repeat it, to them: It is this cross, this 
crucified Lord, that we worship, and in whom we glory. Ah! wretched and proud 
| world! Ah! wisdom, greatness and folly of this time! We know that at the foot of the 
| cross of Jesus Christ thy reproach awaits us! But, clothed with this reproach, we 
despise thy glory, we make a mock of thy splendor, and point with the finger at thy 
| greatness. We esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of 
Egypt. (Heb. 11:26.) Every word of thy reproach is a title of honor to our glory, 
and crushing under our feet everything that can produce thy pride, we still repeat with 
the apostle: “God forbid that we should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus 


Christ!” 


I have yet only a word to say to you: Abide by this cross. You have responded 
| to our voice, you have come and placed yourselves at the foot of the cross of Christ; 
| give thanks to him who has led you there; but this is still not enough, you must not in 
future leave it; nothing in the world should be able to separate you from it. 

Abide by this cross. Lament there the time of your ignorance; regret with a 
| bitter pain every moment that you have lost through not discovering its power and 
| glory. And having lived so many years in the world without it and without God, 
repeat, in the enjoyment of a present salvation, these words of one of His old servants: 
“I have too late come to a knowledge of Thee, I have too late come to love Thee.” 
(Augustine. ) 

Abide by this cross, because you find there true greatness; sacrifice there all false 
glory; sacrifice there with joy this pride, which is infused into you by the superiority 
of your mind, or the knowledge which distinguishes you, or your envied reputation in 
society, or your worldly calling, or the riches that you are in possession of, or your 


— 


———- -$ — 


178 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


course of life which exalts you above others, or the admiration which surrounds you 
this splendor which is extended over you, or by the ridiculous praises which are pre- 
sented to you. How can I reckon up all the sources of this childish pride which yot 
have to sacrifice before the cross? 

Abide by this cross. Abide there in your trials. Take comfort; the cross has 
rescued you, salvation is procured for you, eternal life awaits you; not even all the 
storms of life united can sadden the peace which has been won for you. Yes, the view 
of the punishment which fell upon the Holy and Righteous One in your stead, wil! 
cause you to find the burden which you bear light. Rejoice to be led on the way of 
pain which led Jesus to glory. 

Abide by this cross. And when sin is again stirred up in your flesh, when the 
world begins to entice you, and the fiend to spread his nets, when your soul has begur 
to reel like a drunken man, then consider Jesus, in order that the view of what He 
suffered for your sins may fill your soul with a holy horror of them, and kindle agair 
in your heart the extinguished flames of love. 

Abide by this cross. And even should everything unite against it, yea, shoul¢ 
men afresh surround it, blaspheming and shaking their heads (Matt. 27: 39); then be 
this your glory, boldly to confess this cross before all; “For whosoever shall confess 
Me before men,” saith the Lord, “him will I confess before My Father who is ir 
heaven. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My 
Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 10: 32,33.) The day will come when the veil whic 
still covers it will be entirely removed, and when its light and its glory will stream 
forth upon every one who has not been ashamed of it. 

May God give us grace to be confessors of the cross of Christ in our lives. May 
God give us grace to become confessors of the cross of Christ in our death. “I will 
not blot out his name out of the Book of Life,” saith the Lord. (Rev. 3:5.) Amen, 


[Through the kindness of Porter & Coates, Philadelphia, this sermon is repro: 
duced from ‘Sunday Half Hours With the Great Preachers,” the most valuable collec: 
tion of sermons the editor has found in his researches for the present work. 

Jean Henri Merle D’Aubigné, D. D., came from a French Huguenot stock, thai 
accounted life well spent in upholding evangelical religion. His great-grandfather hac 
to fly to Geneva at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; and his grandfather was 
exiled to the same city in old age. Here Jean was born, August 16th, 1794. Hi: 
theological studies, commenced at Geneva, were completed at Berlin, under the cele 
brated Neander. After a pastorate in Hamburg, and later in Brussels as chaplain te 
King William, he returned to Geneva in 1830. At once he was appointed president o 
its new theological seminary, and vice-president of the Evangelical Society. His grea 
work is, “History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century,” of which nearly a hal 
million copies have been sold. His appearance was noble and commanding; hi 
vivacity keen, and energy exhaustless. He died in Geneva, October 21st, 1872.] 


———— eee 


(179) 
/ 
: 
: 
. THE DYING GRAIN OF WHEAT. 
' REV. A. C. DIXON, D. D. 
$ 
x “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die 
it bringeth forth much fruit.”—John 12: 24. 


The Greeks came to Philip, saying, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Philip and 
Andrew tell Jesus of their desire, and the words of the text form a part of His reply. 
He did not say, “Bring the Greeks along, that they may see me,” but He answered, 
“The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto 
you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone.” In other 
words, if the Greeks had seen Jesus as He then was, they would not have seen the real 
Jesus at all; they would have seen the perfect man according to the flesh, truly divine, 
but only the one of whom Paul afterward said, “I will know Him no more after the 
flesh.” The real Jesus can be seen only as He is seen in the process of dying; until we 
behold the Lamb of God, we have not really seen Jesus at all. A grain of wheat 
falling into the ground and dying is a true picture of the real Jesus, and this gives us 
the process and principle of Christian growth. 

_ The process is death by means of life. After the grain of wheat has fallen into 
the ground, the life in it hastens its death. It was the life of Christ (only another 
word for love) which prompted Him to die. He gave himself a willing sacrifice. It 
was death through life. So, in every Christian, there is a process of mortification by 
means of the Christ-life which he receives at the new birth. We must mortify the 
deeds of the body, crucify the works of the flesh. Paul said, “I die daily,” and in 
proportion as we live in Christ we die to sin, self, and the world. Death means failure; 
physical death a failure of the body. After the grain of wheat has fallen into the 
ground and dies, it is worthless. A week after a hundred bushels have been sown, if 
you were to dig it up, you could not sell it for five cents, but the failure is in order to 
success ; it must fail, that it may bring forth a harvest. So every Christian must fail 
in himself before he can succeed in God; he must truly die to his own strength, mental, 
oral, or spiritual, in order that Jesus, who is the real life, may live in him. Such 
lure, like the death of the wheat, is prophetic of success, and, until we have failed 
, we shall never truly succeed. 
The second step in the process of dying through life is aetupranur As soon 
s the wheat begins to die, because it has begun to live, it appropriates everything 
ithin reach for which it has a taste; it takes in the sunlight, heat, air, moisture, earth; 
hile it rejects foreign substances for which it has no taste. Whatever else the new 
irth may be, it is certainly the imparting of a new taste. “If so be ye have tasted 
hat the Lord is gracious.” This taste may be cultivated or vitiated. The Israelites 
the wilderness did not like the manna; they said it was light food. Now, I believe 
at manna was the best dish this world ever saw. God made it and He knows how 
make a good thing. It was a whole bill of fare in one dish, nutritious and whole- 
me, just what the Israelites needed in their open air journey. Nevertheless they 
}ad no taste for it. The trouble with them was that down in Egypt their taste had 
een vitiated by eating leeks, garlic, and onions. When a man likes onions, he is 
rtain not to like manna, When one of my members absents himself from prayer 


wet . 


180 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


meeting and ceases to take delight in Christian worship and work, I take it for granted 
that he has been to Egypt and had a square meal of onions, and, of all the distasteful 
dishes that can be imagined, a mixture of manna and onions is the worst. An Egyp- 
tian dog would hardly eat it, and yet, that is the kind of fare with which some Chris- 
tians are vitiating their tastes. Instead of keeping to the manna of God’s word and 
work, which really satisfy the soul, they would mix with it the onions of worldly 


indulgence, and the result is that their experience is insipid and joyless. ‘The Christ- 


life in us gives us taste for what is Christly, and it should be our constant care to 
cultivate this taste, so that it may appropriate to the fullest extent the light of God’s 
Word. 

The third step in the process of the dying and living is assimilation. The dying 
grain not only takes in light, heat, air, water, and earth, but it makes all these a part 
of itself. It weaves them into the very texture of its being. So every Christian should 
not only appropriate the truth, but live the truth; he should be like Christ, incarnate 
truth. The Christ-life within him makes truth into character. 

The fourth step in the process is transformation. As the grain of wheat dies, 
appropriating and assimilating everything for which it has taste, there goes on a 
process of transformation. The golden harvest field is transformed earth, light, heat, 
air, and water. ‘“‘Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renew- 
ing of your minds.” As we mortify the bad, appropriate and assimilate the good, we 
are transfigured into the image of Christ. 

The fifth step is multiplication. As a result of its death with the life that appro- 
priates, assimilates, and transforms, the grain of wheat is multiplied, “some thirty, 
some sixty, some an hundredfold.” A farmer keeps a bushel of wheat with great care 
for many years. It is good wheat and he doesn’t want to injure it, so he protects it 
from wind and weather, but it does not increase in weight or quantity—some seeds 
have been preserved in the catacombs of Egypt for thousands of years. But another 
farmer takes a bushel of wheat into the field and sows it broadcast, then harrows it in, 
and after a few days his wheat, in the process of dying and living, is worthless; but he 
is the wise farmer, he waits until the harvest and then he receives it back many fold 
He loses his wheat, that he may gain it in larger measure. Every grain of it has laid 
down its life that it may live in a hundred other grains. It is the mission of every 
Christian to multiply himself by winning another to Christ. “The good seed are the 
children of the kingdom.” No child of God should be willing to abide alone. 

The sixth step in the process of the grain of wheat dying, while it lives, is glorifi. 
cation. The harvest is the glory of the seed sowing. The yellow grain in the autumr 
is the golden crown of spring and summer. “Herein is my Father glorified that y: 
bear much fruit.” Christ said, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” The vine bear: 
fruit only through the branches. The glory of God can shine only through our fruit 
fulness. In praying that we may glorify God, as we so often pray, we are simply 
asking for the privilege of yielding a harvest of souls. The mortification of the flesh 
the appropriation and assimilation of truth, the transformation of character and th 
multiplication of converts, are all for the glorification of Christ in fruit bearing. 

The principle which underlies the process of mortification, appropriation 
assimilation, transformation, multiplication, and glorification is self-sacrifice. “Excep 
a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abideth alone.” If we truly “presen 
our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is our reasonabl 
service,” we have fulfilled the condition. A complete surrender of all that we hav 
and are to Jesus Christ is the one essential. Are you striving to mortify some fleshh 
appetite like the thirst for drink? You can sot do it by will power; your resolution 
will amount to little. I have heard of a man who, in order to keep himself from drinl 
while the thirst was burning within him, locked himself in a room and threw the ke; 


; 


The Dying Grain of Wheat—Dixon. i8t 


olit of the window. Before the day closed, he kicked the door down and went for 
i his drink. That same man became interested in saving other drunkards, and gave his 
life to that work. It has been easy for him to keep sober while sacrificing himself for 
the good of others. Our friend, S. H. Hadley of New York, could never have 
- conquered his thirst for drink by remaining locked up in a station house cell. He 
has conquered by giving himself to Christ with all his strength, time, and money to 
the saving of other drunkards. 
/ So with appropriation and assimilation of the truth; we do not gain a heart 
knowledge of God’s Word by simply reading it; we must put it into practice. If we 
would know the will of God, we must do it. The truth becomes a part of us only as 
_we die to self and live to Christ. Doing is knowing, and without the doing, which 
comes through self-surrender and self-sacrifice, there can be no real knowledge. 
Retaining the word in the memory is one thing; making it a part of the character is 
another. The Scripture memorized must be translated into life by obedience. With- 
out self-sacrifice there can be no transformation of character. The man who has 
no Calvary in his life will never have a Mount of Transfiguration. The glory of the 
harvest cannot come, unless the grain of wheat goes through the repulsive process 
of dying. The men and the women whose characters shine through darkness of 
selfishness in this world, like the body of Christ on the Mount, are those who have 
truly put themselves on God’s altar for self-sacrificing service. 

Multiplication also comes through self-sacrifice. Jesus, by His death on the 
cross, has multiplied Himself a million fold, and every one who manifests the spirit of 
Christ on Calvary cannot fail to win others to trust and love Him. A young man 
by the name of Westrup went as a missionary to Mexico, and was murdered while on 
a journey, and his body thrown upon a cactus plant to decay in the sun. A student 

in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, hearing of this, wrote to the missionary 
_ secretary, saying that he did not have much strength of mind or body, but all that he 
had he would like to give to the cause, and if God wanted some one to go to Mexico 
and take Westrup’s place, he was ready to go, though it might be to give his life for 
‘Christ. Thus, through the death of Westrup, W. D. Powell was led to Mexico, and 
through the sacrificing spirit of Powell hundreds have been won to Christ. If 
Westrup had gone to Mexico and spent his time in self-seeking, no one would have 
desired to be like him or to take his place. 


: 


There is nothing in this world more beautiful than self-sacrifice; we admire it 
wherever we see it. Grasping greed is ugly. The ugliest thing I ever saw was a devil 
fish in an aquarium at Naples. It had tentacles for taking in everything within reach, 
but no hands for giving out. I could but say as I saw the ugly thing reaching out 
for the fish and bread which the guide had thrown down to it, “I have seen you before, 
but in America you walk on two feet, with hands only to grasp and take in, but no 
hands to give out.”” The monster in the aquarium and the man on two feet are equally 
ugly and repulsive, because they have nothing of the significance of Calvary in their 
mature. As you look at the Dead Sea you think of perdition, of which it is the 
symbol, because it has a hand to take in the Jordan but no hand to give it out. It 
is the octopus of geography. As you look at the Sea of Galilee nestling among the 
hills, filled with life and beauty, you may think of Paradise, of which it is a fitting 
symbol, because it takes in the Jordan with one hand and pours it out with the other. 
The Dead Sea is ugly and repulsive because it has in it nothing of Calvary; the Sea 
of Galilee is beautiful and attractive because it sacrifices for the country below it what 
it has received from above. A little boy said, “I love to give mamma the largest piece 
of candy.” Now, that is beautiful, isn’t it? “Because,” he continued, “she always 
Says, ‘thank you,’ and hands it back,” and by one stroke the picture of beauty is 
turned into ugliness, Self-sacrifice is always beautiful and attractive; self-seeking is 


183 Puipit Power and Eloquence. 


always ugly and repulsive. At the World’s Fair there was a picture entitled, “Breaks 
ing Home Ties.” There was always a crowd gathered about it; it seemed to be the 
most attractive picture in all the gallery, and the secret of its attraction was the self- 
sacrifice which was portrayed; the father and mother giving up their boy to go from 
home to school or to business; the boy sacrificing home comforts that he might do 
what was thought to be best; the dog standing by seemed to show in his features 
self-sacrifice in giving up his young master. That picture drew the people to it, 
because it had in it something of the spirit of Christ on the cross. We can understand 
now more clearly the words of our Lord, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto me.” Jesus on the cross is magnetic with the self-sacrificing love which touches 
all hearts by its beauty. The externals of the crucifixion, its blood, broken flesh, 
agony, dying, are repulsive, just as the externals of the battle of Bunker Hill, with its 
blood and torn flesh, agony and dying, are repulsive, but a grateful nation has erected 
a granite monument on the spot where this repulsive battle took place. Beneath the 
repulsion there is the attraction of self-sacrifice. The men who died there gave their 
lives for others, and we forget the external repulsion while we gaze at the beauty of 
patriotic self-sacrifice which the monument commemorates. As you walk Broadway 
near the postoffice in New York City you come in view of a bronze statue; the arms 
are pinioned, the feet are tied, the shirt collar is thrown open, and, as you look into 
the handsome, sad face, you are reminded of an execution when a human being was 
hanged, and there is nothing attractive in the thought; but read on the pedestal: “I 
regret that I have but one life to give for my country—Nathan Hale;” and now you 
forget the repulsion of the hanging while you gaze at the beautiful picture of patriotic 
loyalty unto death. 

And beauty tends to multiply itself. It is the beautiful paintings and statues in 
the galleries that are copied, beautiful music that is reproduced, beautiful character 
that is imitated. Put into one picture all the beauty of painting, statuary, and music, 
add to it everything else on earth that is beautiful, and you will not excel in attractive 
beauty the picture of Jcsus Christ dying upon the cross for His enemies. We are 
truly beautiful only as we are like Him in His self-sacrifice, and people will desire to 
be like us in proportion as they see the beauty of self-sacrifice in our character. 

Christ on the cross is the glory of this age, as Christ on the throne will be the 
glory of the age to come. ‘God forbid,” says Paul, “that I should glory, save in the 
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Time was when I urged people to go beyond the 
cross. I shall never use that expression again. In heaven itself they do not get 
beyond the cross. ‘‘The Lamb as it has been slain’ is in the midst of the throne, 
and the redeemed saints sing, ‘‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” Jesus said: “If 
any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” 
We do not go beyond or leave behind what we take up. It is our glorious privilege 
to believe in the risen Lord and to walk with Him day by day, but even that risen 
Lord carries in His hands, feet, and side the marks of the cross. Amid the glory of 
the Transfiguration, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus talked together of His death; Paul 
preached at Athens, “Jesus and the resurrection.” “Jesus” means a suffering 
Savior. The death of Christ and His resurrection are married in Scripture, “and 
what God hath joined together let not man put asunder.” My heart is cheered by 
the blessed hope of Christ’s second coming. I am not looking for death, nor desiring 
it. It is probable that I shall die in body, and, if death comes, I will take it as a dose, 
just as I crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York, paying for the privilege, 
though I knew that I should be sick most of the time, because on this side were home 
and loved ones whom I was anxious to see. On the other side of the waters of death 
are many who will welcome me, and I am willing to die if it be God’s will, that I may 
be with Christ and those I love. Nevertheless, I am not looking for death—I am 


i 


The Dying Grain of Wheat—Dixon. 183 


¥ 
| looking up into the sky for the coming King. While I am looking up, I may fall into 


a grave but, like Dr. Gordon, I will shout “Victory” as I fall. While, however, I am 
king for the coming of Christ, I would not allow the glory of that coming to make 
e forget the glory of His cross. What this world needs most now is to know Jesus 
rist and Him crucified. Calvary projected into the lives of all men would settle 
ery question that now agitates the public mind, make every home happy and every 
church prosperous. 

If employer and employee were both filled with the self-sacrificing spirit of Jesus 
the cross, a strike would be impossible, and the war between capital and labor 
ould come to an end. If husband ministered to wife and wife to husband, children 
to parents and parents to children, brother to sister, sister to brother, with the spirit 
Tren crucified Lord, domestic unhappiness would be at an end. If all our church 


‘members had the cross of Jesus in its true meaning in their hearts, debt would never 
embarrass our missionary boards, for their self-sacrificing spirit would pour money 
‘into the treasury of the Lord. The grain of wheat dying cannot abide alone; it must 
bring forth much fruit, 


& 
' 
fy 


} 
’ 


ee aaaaEEOEOEeeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeeEeeEeEeEeEeEeeEeE—EeEEEEEE—EOEEEeEeEeEEee 
”, —_ . * 


184 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE SOWER. 


MARCUS DODS, D. D. 
Matt. 13: 1-9, 18-23; Luke 7: 4-15. 


This parable had to be spoken. It gave expression to thoughts which burdened 
the mind of Jesus throughout His ministry. On the day he uttered it, He had left the 
house and was sitting by the seaside, “and there were gathered unto Him great 
multitudes.” He had no difficulty in finding an audience. It is one of the greatest 
pieasures to listen to a good speaker. It is a pleasure which attracts young and old, 
rich and poor, educated and uneducated. A good speaker is always sure of an 
audience, and especially where he has not to encounter the rivalry of books. But as 
Jesus watched the crowd assembling, and perceived the various dispositions with 
which the people came, He could not but reflect how much of what He had to say 
must certainly be lost on many. He knew He had that to tell men which, if received, 
would change the face of society, and turn the wilderness into a garden. He was 
conscious of that in His own mind which, could it only be conveyed into the minds 
of those pressing around Him, would cause their lives to flourish with righteousness, 
beauty, love, usefulness, and joy. He had “many things to say” to them, things that 
never yet had fallen and never again could fall from human lips; and yet who, of 
the thousands that listened, would believe? They came, some out of curiosity, some 
saying within themselves, ‘‘What will this sower of words say?” some out of hatred, 
seeking occasion against Him; but all thinking themselves entitled to hold and 
express an opinion regarding the importance or worthlessness of what He said. They 
needed to have their critical faculty exercised upon themselves, and to be reminded 
that in order to benefit by what He had to say, they must bring certain capacities. 

The parabolic form of teaching is pleasant to listen to; it is easily retained in the 
memory; it stimulates thought, each man being left to find an interpretation for 
himself; and it avoids the offensiveness of direct rebuke. To the crowd Jesus speaks 
only of the sower in the fields, and makes no explicit reference to Himself or to them. 

The object of this parable, then, is to explain the causes of the failure and success 
of the gospel. Apart from experience, it might have been supposed that our Lord had 
only to proclaim His kingdom in order to gather all men to His standard. If it were 
so that God desired all men to enter into everlasting joy, did not this remove every 
difficulty, and secure the happiness of all? Conld such a messenger and such a 
message fail to move every one who came in contact with them? Alas! even after 
so many centuries Christianity is not the only religion men believe in; and even where 
it is professed, it is most inadequately understood and received. Why, then, is it so? 
Why, to so lamentable an extent does every agency for the extension of Christ’s 
kingdom fail? It fails, says our Lord, not because the claims of the kingdom are 
doubtful, not because they are inappropriately urged—these causes may no doubt 
sometimes operate—but the kingdom fails to extend because the fructification of the 
seed of the word depends upon the nature of the soil it fale peu aa a 
Soil is often impervious, often shallow, often dirty, The seed is not in fault, the 
sowing is not in fault, but the soil is faulty—a statement of the case as little accepted 
by those in our own day who discuss Christ’s claims, as it was by our Lord’s 
contemporaries. ; 


| 
| 
| 
: 
: 


The Sower—Dods. 185 


1, The first faultiness of soil our Lord specifies in the words, “Some seeds fell 
by the wayside, and the fowls came and devoured them up;” and the interpretation 
or spiritual analogue He gives in the words, ‘““‘When any one heareth the word of the 
kingdom and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one and catcheth away 
that which was sown in his heart.” The beaten footpath that crosses the corn field, 
and that is maintained year after year, or the cart-track along the side of the field, 
may serve a very useful purpose, but certainly it will grow no corn. The hard surface 
does not admit the seed; you might as well scatter seed on a wooden table, or a pave- 
ment, or a mirror. The seed may be of the finest quality, but for all the purposes of 
sowing you might as well sprinkle pebbles or shot. It lies on the surface. This state 
of matters then represents that hearing of the word which manages to keep the word 
entirely outside. The word has been heard, but that is all. It has not even entered 
the understanding. It has been heard as men listen to what is said in a foreign 
language. The mind is not interested; it is roused to no enquiry, provoked to no 
contradiction. You have sometimes occasion to suggest a different course of action to 
a friend; and, in order to do so, you mention a fact which should be sufficient to alter 
his purpose, but you find he has not apprehended its significance, has not seen its 
bearing—it has not fructified in his mind as you expected, and you say to yourself, 
“He does not take it in.” So says our Lord; there are hearers who do not take in 
what is said; they do not see the bearings of the word they hear; their understanding 
is impervious, impenetrable. 

Are there such hearers? Surely there are. There are persons on whom the seed 
of the word falls as by accident, and who have neither prepared themselves to hear 
it, nor make any effort to retain it. They are members of a church-going family, or 
they have formed a church-going habit of their own; they have perhaps their reason 
for being found side by side with those who hear with profit, but they do not come 
for the sake of hearing; they are not anxious to hear, thoughtful about what they 
hear, careful to retain it. There are careless persons who hear the word not as the 


result of a decision that it is to be heard; not as they would, on beginning the study 


of chemistry or of philosophy, seek out certain teachers and certain books; but as 
the hearing of the word happens to be the employment of the hour, they submit to 
this social convention, and they allow the seed of the kingdom to fall upon them with 
no more expectation than that with which they hear the passing salutation of a friend 
on the street, knowing that whether he says it is a fine day or not, it is equally without 
significance. This hearing of the word has come to be one of the many employments 
with which men fill up their time, and this hearer has never thought why, nor whether 
it does him any good or no. He has never considered why he personally should listen 
to this special kind of word, nor what he personally may expect as the result of it. 


They are, in short, persons who, either from preoccupation with other thoughts 


and hopes, have their minds beaten hard and rendered quite impervious to thoughts 


of Christ’s kingdom, or from a natural slowness and hard frostiness of nature, hear 
the word without admitting it even to work in their understanding. They do not 


ponder what is heard, they do not check the statements they hear by their own 
thought; they do not consider the bearings of the gospel on themselves. When you 
propose to a farmer who is paying too high a rent to go to some part of the country 
where rents are lower, the idea will probably find entrance into his understanding. 
He may not ultimately adopt it, but it will stir a great many hopes and thoughts of 
various kinds in him, and he will find his mind dwelling on it day after day, and hour 
by hour, so that he can speak of little else. But the proposals made to the wayside 
hearer suggest nothing at all to him. His mind throws off Christ’s offers as a slated 
roof throws off hail. You might as well expect seed to grow on a tightly-braced 


_ drum-head as the word to profit such a hearer; it dances on the hard surface and the 
slightest motion shakes it off. 


186 . Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


The consequence is, it is forgotten, When seed is scattered on a hard surface it 
is not allowed to lie long. The birds devour it up. Every hedge, every tree, every 
' roof contributes its eager few, and shortly not a corn remains. So when not even 
the mind has been interested in Christ’s word, that word is quickly forgotten; the 
conversation on the way home from church, the thought of tomorrow’s occupations, 
the sight of some one on the street—anything, is enough to take it clean away. Insome 
persons the word is admitted though it does not at once bring forth the fruit. As in 
the old fable the words spoken unheard in the Arctic circle were thawed into sound 
and became audible in warmer latitudes; so when a man Passes into new circum- 
Stances and a state of life more congenial to the development of Christian discipline- 
ship, the word, which has apparently been lost for years, begins to stir and make itself 
heard in his soul. But it cannot be so with the wayside hearer, for in him the word 
has never found any manner of lodgment. 


2. The second faultiness of soil our Lord enumerates is shallowness. What we 
commonly understand by “stony ground” is a field thickly strewn with small stones; 
not the best kind of soil, but quite available for growing corn. This is not the soil 
meant here. Our Lord speaks rather of rocky ground, where a thin surface of mould 
overlies an impenetrable rock. There is a mere dusting Of soil on the surface; if you 
put a stick or a spade into it, you come upon the rock a few inches below. On such 
ground the seed quickly springs, there being no deepness of earth to allow of its spend- 
ing time in rooting itself. And for the same reason it quickly withers when exposed to 
the fierce heats which benefit and mature strongly-rooted plants. Precocity and rapid 
decay. The oak that is to stand a thousand years does not shoot up like the hop or 
the creeper. an whose age is seventy years has a slowly growing infancy and youth, 
while the insect grows up in a day and dies at night or at the week’s end. The shallow 


hearer our Lord distinguishes by two characteristics; he~Straightway receives the 
Sic et tee 


word, and he receives it with joy. The man of deeper character receivés the word 
with deliberation, as one who has many things to take into account and to weigh. 
_He-receives it with seriousness, and. reverence, and trembling, forseeing the trials he 
“ will be subjected to, and he cannot show a light-minded joy. The superficial character 
responds quickly because there is no depth of inner life. Difficulties which deter men 
of greater depth do not stagger the superficial. While other men are engaged in 
giving the word entrance into all the secret places of their life, and are confronting it 
with their most cherished feelings and ways, that they may clearly see the extent of the 
changes it will work; while they are pondering it in the majesty of its hope and the 
vastness of its revelation; while they are striving to forecast all its results in them and 
upon them; while they are hesitating because they are in earnest, and would receive 
the word for eternity or not at all, and would give it entrance to the whole of their 
being, or exclude it altogether—while others are doing this, the superficial man has 


settled the whole matter out of hand, and he who yesterday was a known scoffer is 


today a loud-voiced child of the kingdom. | ~-—~~ 


These men may often be mistaken for the most earnest Christians; indeed they 
are almost certainly taken to be the most earnest; you cannot see the root, and what 
is seen shown in greatest luxuriance by the superficial. The earnest man has much 
of his energy to spend beneath the soil, he cannot show anything till he is sure of the 
root. He is often working away at the foundation while another is at the copestone. 
But the test comes. The very influences which exercise and mature the well-rooted 
character, wither the superficially rooted. The same. shallowness of nature which 
made them susceptible to the gospel and quickly responsive, makes them susceptible 
to pain, suffering, hardship, and easily defeated. It is so in all departments of life. 
The superficial are taken with every new thing. The boy is delighted with a new 
study or a new game, but becomes proficient in neither. The youth is charmed with 
volunteering, but one season of early rising is more than he can stand; or he is 


‘ 


+ 


‘ 
¥ 


The Sower—Dods. 187 


fascinated with the idea that history is an extremely profitable kind of reading; but 
_ you know quite well when he asks for the loan of the first volume of Gibbon or Grote, 
- that he will never come to you for the last. The action of the shallow man is in every 
case hasty, not based on a carefully considered and resolutely accepted plan;_he is 


f 


; ~fesults and “consequences. “Accordingly, when ‘consequences have to be faced, he is 
not prepared and gives way. 

But, how, then, carethe” shallow man be saved? Is there no provision in the 
Gospel for those who are born with a thin, poor nature? This question scarcely falls 
to be answered here, because the parable presents one truth regarding shallow natures, 
which is verified in thousands of instances. Men do thus deal with the word, and 
‘thus make shipwreck of faith, and that is all we have here to do with. But passing 
beyond the parable, it may be right to say that a man’s nature may be deepened by 
the events, and relationships, and conflicts of life. Indeed, that much deepening of 
character is constantly effected, you may gather from the fact that while many young 
persons are shallow, the old persons whom you would characterize as shallow are 
comparatively few. 


3. The third faultiness of soil which causes failure in the crop is what is tech- 
_nically known as dirt. The soil is not impenetrable, nor is it shallow; it is deep, good 
"land, but it has not been cleaned—there is seed in it already. Sometimes you see a 
field of wheat brilliantly colored throughout with poppies; or a field of oats which 
' it is difficult to cut on account of the dense growth of thistles, and of rank grass. 
-But the soil can only feed a certain amount of vegetation, and every living weed 
_ means a choked blade of corn. This is a worse case than the others. No crop can 
‘be looked for on a beaten road; not much can be expected from a mere peppering of 

soil upon rock; but here there is rich, deep, loamy mould, that must be growing 
- something, and would, if cared for, yield a magnificent harvest, and yet there is little 
or nothing but thorns. 


This is a picture of the preoccupied heart of the rich, vigorous nature, capable of 
_ understanding, appreciating, and making much of the word of the kingdom, but 
_ occupied with so many other interests that only a small part of its energy is available 
for giving effect to Christ’s ideas. These ideas are not excluded from the thoughts, 
_ they are welcomed; the mind is full of intelligent interest in Christian truth, and the 
_ heart has a real and profound sympathy with the work of Christ in the world and with 
_ His spirit, and yet, after all, little practical good proceeds from the man—Christian 
_ principle does not come to much in his case—the life shows little result of a specially 
Christian kind. The reason is that the man is occupied with a multitude of other 
views, and projects, and cares, and desires, and the peculiarly Christian seed does not 
get fair play. It influences him, but it is hindered and mixed up with so many other 
_ influences that the result is scarcely discernible. The peculiarity of a good field of 
wheat is not the density of the vegetation, but that the vegetation is all of one kind, 
ds all wheat. Leave the field to itself, you will in a short time have quite as dense a 
_ Vegetation, but it will be of a multifarious kind. That the field bears wheat only, is the 
result of cultivation—not merely of sowing wheat, but of preventing anything else from 
being sown. The first care of the diligent farmer is to clean his land. 

_ And as there is generally some one kind of weed to which the soil is congenial, 
nd against which the farmer has to wage a continual war, so our Lord‘ here specifies 
as specially dangerous to us “the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches.” 
The care of this world has been called the poor man’s species of the deceitfulness of 
riches, and the deceitfulness of riches a variety of the care of this world. There are 
‘poor men who have no anxiety, and rich men who are not misled by their riches 
either into dependence on their wealth, or desire to make it more. But among rich 
‘men and poor men alike you will find some or many who would be left’ without any 


5 


pean = 


188 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


subject of thought, and any guiding principle in action, if you took from them 
anxiety about their own position in life. It is this form which all the fruit they bear 
springs. Take the actions of a year, the annual outcome or harvest of the man, and 
how much of what he has produced you can trace to this seed—to a mere anxiety 


_about income and_position.. This is really the seed; this is all that is required to 


account for a large part of many men’s actions. 


Our Lord therefore warns us that if the word is to do its work in us, and produce 
all the good it is meant to produce, it must have the field to itself. It will not do 
merely to give attention to the word while it is preached; the mind may be clean on 
the surface, while there remain great knots of roots below, which will inevitably spring 
up, and by their more inveterate growth choke the word. This is the mistake of many. 
It is proper, they know, to hear the word—proper to give it fair play. They do 
make an effort to banish worldly and anxious thoughts, and to give their attention 
to divine things, but even though they succeed in putting aside for the time distracting 
thoughts, what of that if they have not the care of the world up by the roots? Cutting 
down won’t do; still less, a mere holding aside of the thorns till the seed be sown. 
What chance has the seed in a heart from which these eager thoughts and hopes are 
merely held back for the hour? The cares of the world will just swing over again 
and meet above the good seed, and shut out the day and every maturing influence. 
You receive today good impressions, you give the good seed entrance, and it begins 
to spring in you, it prompts you to reasonable generosity and self-denial. Tomorrow 
morning the tender blade of a desire to purify and prepare your spirit by some real 
and devout converse with God has sprung up in you, but the habitual craving to be at 
your work and lose no moment from business crushes and chokes the little blade, and 
it can no more lift its head. Or the seed has produced even the green ear of a growing 
habit of living under God’s eye, of walking with God and bringing all your transac- 
tions before His judgment—mature fruit seems on the point of being produced by 
you, when suddenly the promise of a rich harvest is choked by the old coarse thorn 


of a fondness for rapid profits, which leads you to ambiguous language, and reserva-— 


tions, and unfair dealings, such as you feel separate you from God, and dash your 
spiritual ardor, and make you feel like a fool and a knave both, when you speak of 
your citizenship being in heaven, It is vain, then, to hope for the only right harvest 
of a human life if your heart is sown with worldly ambitions, a greedy hasting to be 
rich, an undue love of comfort, a true earthliness of spirit. One seed only must be 
sown in you, and it will produce all needed diligence in business, as well as all fervor 
of spirit. 


These, then, are the three faulty soils to which our Lord chiefly ascribes the failure 
of the sowing. The question arises, does the result follow in the moral sowing and in 
the world of men as uniformly and inevitably as it follows in the sowing of corn in 
nature? In nature some soils are irreclaimable; vast tracts of the earth’s surface are 
as useless as the sea for the purposes of growing grain. They may indirectly 
contribute to the fruitfulness of corn lands by influencing the climate, but no one 
thinks of cultivating these tracts themselves, of sowing the sands of Sahara or the 
ice-fields of Siberia. But the gospel is to be preached to every creature, because in 
man there is one important distinction from material nature; he is possessed of free 
will, of the power of checking to some extent natural tendencies, and preventing 


_—- 


natural consequences. Accordingly, we cannot just accept the bare teaching of the © 
parable as the whole truth regarding the operation of the gospel in man’s heart, but — 
only as one part of the truth, and that a most important part. The parable enters into — 


no consideration nor explanation of how men arrive at the spiritual conditions here 


enumerated; but, given those conditions—and they are certainly common however 


arrived at—given those conditions, the result is failure of the gospel. 


In contrast, then, to these three faults of impenetrability, shallowness and dirt, — 


The Sower—Dods. 189 


we may be expected to do something towards bringing to the hearing of the word a 
soft, deep, clean soil of heart, or, as Luke calls it, ‘tan honest and good heart.” There 


are differences in the crop even among those who bring good hearts; one bears thirty- 


fold, one sixty, one an hundred-fold. One man has natural advantages, opportunities 


of position, and so forth, which make his yield greater. One man may have had a 


larger proportion of seed; in his early days and all through his life he may have been 
in contact with the word, and in favoring circumstances. But wherever the word is 
received, and held fast and patiently cared for, there the life will produce all that God 
cares to have froin it. 


_Honesty is a prime requisite in hearing the word, and a rare one. Men listen 
honestly to a lecture on science or history, from which they expect information; but 
where conduct is aimed at, or a vote is concerned, men commonly listen with minds 
already made up. It is notorious that men vote as they meant to vote, no matter what 
is said. If a Liberal were found voting with Conservatives on any important point, 
some mistake would be supposed. The last thing thought of would be that his 
conviction had been altered by the speaking. But if we are to hear the word as we 
ought, we must bring an honest heart, we must not listen with a mind already made 
up against the gospel, with no intention whatever of being persuaded, cherishing 


purposes and habits, alongside of which it is impossible the word should grow. On 


the contrary we should consider that this is the seed proper to the human heart, and 
which can alone produce what human life should produce—the word of God, which 
we must listen to gratefully, humbly, sincerely, greedily, and with the firm purpose 
of giving it unlimited scope within us. But where is the attentive, painstaking 
scrutiny of the heart which this demands? Where is the careful husbandry of our 
souls, which would secure a kind reception for the word? Where is the jealous 
challenging of every sentiment, habit, influence, association, that begs for a lodging 
within us? For where this is, and not elsewhere, we may expect the fruit of the 
kingdom. But even this is not enough. The fruitful hearer must not only bring an 
honest and good heart, he must keep the word. The farmer’s work is not finished 
when he has prepared the soil and sown the seed. If pains be not taken after the 
sowing, the seed that has fallen on good soil may be taken away as utterly as that 
which has fallen on the beaten path. The birds scatter over the whole field. We 
must therefore set a watcher; we must send the harrow over to cover in the seed, and 
the roller to give the plant a better hold on the soil. The word must not be allowed 
to take its chance, once it has been heard. Mere hearing does not secure fruit; it goes 
for nothing. Your labor is lost unless your mind goes back upon what you hear, and 
you see that it gets hold of you. All of us have already heard all that is necessary 
for life and godliness; it remains that we make it our own, that it secure a living root 
and place in us and in our life. In order to do this we must keep the truth; we 
must bear it in mind, so that whatever else comes before the mind throws new light 
on it, and give it a further hold upon us. We must not let the events of the world 
and the occurrences of our day thrust it from our minds, but must confront it with 
these, and test it by these, so that thus it may become more real to us, and have a vital 
influence. One truth received thus, brings forth more fruit than all truth merely 
understood. It is not the amount of knowledge you have, but the use you put it to— 
it is not the number of good sayings you have heard and can repeat, that will profit 
you, but the place in your hearts you have given them, and the connection they have 
with the motives, and principles, and ruling ideas of your life. 

And, therefore, meditation has always been, and must always be, reckoned among 
the most indispensable means of grace. Since ever saints were, their saintliness has 
been in great part due to a habit of meditation. Without it, the other means of grace 
remain helplessly outside of us. The word does not profit except the mind be actively 


_ Bppropriating God’s message and revolving it. Prayer is but a deluding form, that 


190 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


means nothing, expects nothing, and receives nothing, if meditation has not provided 
its material. Unless a man think upon his life and try his ways, his profession can 
but remove the scum from the surface, leaving the heart burdened and polluted; for 
the graver sins do not float, but sink deep and must be dragged for with patience 
and skill, if not descried through a very rare natural clearness and simplicity of 
character. It is in the stillness and quiet of our hours of reflection, when the gusts 
of worldly engagements and desires have died down, that the seeds of grace are 
deposited in our souls. It is then that our thoughts are free to recognize reasons of 
humility and causes of thankfulness. It is then that the thought of God resumes its 
place in our souls, and that the unseen world reasserts its hold upon us. It is then 
only that the soul, taking a deliberate survey of its own matters, can discover its 
position and necessities, can assert its claims and determine its future, can begin the 
knowledge of all things by knowing itself. So that, “if there is a person, of whatever 
age, or class, or station, who will not be thoughtful, who will not seriously and 
honestly consider, there is no doing him any good.” : 

But there is probably no religious duty so distasteful as meditation to persons 
whose habits are formed in a state of society like our own. We are, for the most 
Part, infected by the hastiness amd overdone activity of the business world. The 
rapidity and exactness of mechanical action rule and regulate all our personal move- 
ments. We are learning to value only what gives us speedily and uniformly achieved 
and easily appreciated results. We are civilized so nearly to one common level, and 
are in possession of so many advantages which hitherto have been the monopoly of 
one class, that competition is keener than eyer before; and all our time and energy 
are demanded for the one Purpose of holding our own in things secular. But the 
dissatisfaction with slow Processes, and the desire to get a great deal through our 
hands, must be checked when we come to the work of meditation. There are processes 
in nature which you can’t hurry. You must let your milk stand, if you wish cream. 
And meditation is a process of mind whose necessary element is the absence of hurry. 
We must let the mind settle and discharge itself of all irritating distractions and 
fevering remembrances or hopes; we must reduce it to an equable state, from which it 
can look out dispassionately upon things, and no longer see the one engrossing object, 
but all that concerns us in due Proportion and real position. The soul must learn 
to turn a deaf ear to the importunate requirements of the daily life, and turn leisurely 


‘and with an unpreoccupied mind to God. Were it only to keep the world at bay, 


and teach the things of it their subordinate place, these meditative pauses of the soul 
were of the richest use. 

A third and last requisite for the fructification of the seed is, according to Luke, 
patience. The husbandman does not expect to reap tomorrow what he sowed today. 
He does not incontinently plough up his field again, and sow another crop, if he 
does not at once see the ripe corn. He watches’and waits, and through much that is 
disappointing and unpromising, nurses his plants to fruitfulness. We also must learn 
with patience to bring forth fruit; not despairing because we cannot at once do all 
we would; not sinking under the hardship, sacrifices, failures, sorrows, through which 
we must win our growth to true fruit-bearing, but animating and cheering our spirits 
with the sure hope that the seed we have received is vital, and will enable us to produce 
at last the sound and ripe fruit our lives were meant to yield. We must have patience 
both to endure all the privations, all the schooling, all the trial of various kinds which 
may be needful to bring the seed of righteousness to maturity; and also to go on 
zealousy yielding the perhaps despised fruits which are alone possible to us now, and 
striving always to strike our roots deeper and deeper into the true life. 


[This sermon is from Parables of our Lord, by Hodder & Stoughton. 


_ Marcus Dods, D. D., was Free Church professor of New Testament Theology, 
Edinburgh, since 1889. Extensive contributor to Expositors’ Bible and Encyclopedia 
Brittanica.] 


4 193) 


THE CHANGED LIFE. 


* : HENRY DRUMMOND. 


a 


P THE GREATEST NEED OF THE WORLD. 


z God is all for quality; man is for quantity. The immediate need of the world at 
this moment is not more of us, but, if I may use the expression, a better brand of us. 
_ To secure ten men of an improved type would be better than if we had ten thousand 


more of the average Christians distributed all over the world. There is such ‘a thing. 


in the evangelistic sense as winning the whole world and losing our own soul. And 
_ the first consideration is our own life—our own spiritual relations to God—our own 
likeness to Christ. And I am anxious, briefly, to look at the right and the wrong way 
of becoming like Christ—of becoming better men; the right and the wrong way of 
sanctification. 
Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding, some processes in vogue already 
for producing better lives. These processes are far from wrong; in their place they 
__ may even be essential. One ventures to disparage them only because they do not 
turn out the most perfect possible work. 


1. The first imperfect method is to rely on Resolution. 

In will power, in mere spasms of earnestness, there is no salvation. Struggle, 
_ effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as we shall see; but this is not 
___ where they come in. 

! In mid-Atlantic the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped. Something 
had gone wrong with the engines. There were five hundred able-bodied men on 
board the ship. Do you think that if we had gathered together and pushed against 
the mast we could have pushed it on? 

When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to make his boat go 
by pushing against the mast. He is like a drowning man trying to lift himself out of 
the water by pulling at the hair of his own head. 

Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when He said, “Which of you by 
taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?” Put down that method forever as 
being futile. 

The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this—that those who 
try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the goal. 


2. Another experimenter says: “But that is not my method. I have seen the 
folly of a mere wild struggle in the dark. I work ona principle. My plan is not to 
waste power on random effort, but to concentrate on a single sin. By taking one at a 
time and crucifying it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all.” 

To this, unfortunately, there are four objections: For one thing, life is too short; 
the name of sin is legion. For another thing, to deal with individual sins is to leave 
the rest of the nature for the time untouched. In the third place, a single combat 
with a special sin does not affect the root and spring of the disease. If you dam up 
a stream at one place, it will simply overflow higher up. If only one of the channels 
of sin be obstructed, experience points to an almost certain overflow through some 
other part of the nature, Partial conversion is almost always accompanied by such 


192 Pulpit Power und Eloquence. 


moral leakage, for the pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point, and the last 
state of that soul may be worse than the first. In the last place, religion does not 
consist in negatives, in stopping this sin and stopping that. The perfect character can 
never be produced with a pruning knife. 


3. But a third protests: ‘So be it. I make no attempt to stop sins one by one. 
My method is just the opposite. I copy the virtues one by une.” 

The difficulty about the copying method is that it is apt to be mechanical. One 
-can always tell an engraving from a picture, an artificial flower from a real flower. 
To copy virtues one by one has somewhat the same effect as eradicating the vices one 
by one; the temporary result is an overbalanced and incongruous character. Some 
one defines a prig as ‘‘a creature that is over-fed for its size.” One sometimes finds 
Christians of this species—over-fed on one side of their nature, but dismally thin and 
starved looking on the other. The result, for instance, of copying Humility, and 
adding it on to an otherwise worldly life, is simply grotesque. A rabid temperance 
advocate, for the same reason, is often the poorest of creatures, flourishing on a single 
virtue, and quite oblivious that his Temperance is making a worse man of him and 
not a better. These are examples of fine virtues spoiled by association with mean 
companions. Character is a unity, and all the virtues must advance together to make 
the perfect man. 

This method of sanctification, nevertheless, is in the true direction. It is only in 
the details of execution that it fails. 


4. A fourth method I need scarcely mention, for it is a variation on those already 
named. It is the very young man’s method; and the pure earnestness of it makes it 
almost desecration to touch it. It is to keep a private note-book with the columns 
for the days of the week, and a list of virtues, with spaces against each for marks. 
This, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and for a 
time, at nightfall, the soul is arraigned before it as before a private judgment bar. 

This living by code was Franklin’s method; and I suppose thousands more could 
tell how they had hung up in their bedrooms, or hid in locked fast drawers, the rules 
which one solemn day they drew up to shape their lives. 

This method is not erroneous, only somehow its success is poor. You bear me 
witness that it fails. And it fails generally for very matter-of-fact reasons—most likely 
because one day we forget the rules. 

All these methods that have been named—the self-sufficient method, the self- 
crucifixion method, the mimetic method, and the diary method—are perfectly human, 
perfectly natural, perfectly ignorant, and as they stand perfectly inadequate. It is not 
argued, I repeat, that they must be abandoned. Their harm is rather that they distract 
attention from the true working method, and secure a fair result at the expense of the 
perfect one. What that perfect method is we shall now go on to ask, 


I, THE FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 


A formula, a receipt for Sanctification—can one seriously speak of this mighty 
change as if the process were as definite as for the production of so many volts of 
electricity? 

It is impossible to doubt it. Shall a mechanical experiment succeed infallibly, 
and the one vital experiment of humanity remain a chance? Is corn to grow by 
method, and character by caprice? If we cannot calculate to a certainty that the 
forces of religion will do their work, then is religion vain. And if we cannot express 
the law of these forces in simple words, then is Christianity not the world’s religion, 
but the world’s conundrum. 

Where, then, shall one look for such a formula? Where one would look for any 
formula—among the text-books. And if we turn to the text-books of Christianity we 


; 


FO 


The Changed Life—Drummond. 193 
y 

5 shall find a formula for this problem as clear and precise as any in the mechanical 
sciences. If this simple rule, moreover, be but followed fearlessly, it will yield the 
result of a perfect character as surely as any result that is guaranteed by the laws of 


nature. 
ne The finest expression of this rule in Scripture, or indeed in any literature, is 
_ probably one drawn up and condensed into a single verse by Paul. You will find it 
in a letter—the second to the Corinthians—written by him to some Christian people 
_ who, in a city which was a byword for depravity and licentiousness, were seeking the 
higher life. To see the point of the words we must take them from the immensely 
_ improved rendering of the Revised translation, for the older Version in this case 
Fs greatly obscures the sense. They are these: 
he “We all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are trans- 
i formed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord, the Spirit.” 
i Now observe at the outset the entire contradiction of all our previous efforts, in 
the simple passive: ‘We are transformed.” 
BA We are changed, as the Old Version has it—we do not change ourselves. No 
man can change himself. Throughout the New Testament you will find that wherever 


f these moral and spiritual transformations are described the verbs are in the passive. 
Presently it will be pointed out that there is a rationale in this; but meantime do not 
_ toss these words aside as if this passivity denied all human effort or ignored intelligible 
law. What is implied for the soul here is no more than is everywhere claimed for the 
body. In physiology the verbs describing the processes of growth are in the passive. 
_ Growth is not voluntary; it takes place, it happens, it is wrought upon matter. So 
_ here. “Ye must be born again’’—we cannot born ourselves. “Be not conformed to 
_ this world, but be ye transformed’’—we are subjects to transforming influence, we do 
_ not transform ourselves. Not more certain is it that it is something outside the 
thermometer that produces a change in the thermometer, than it is something outside 
the soul of man that produces a moral change upon him. That he must be susceptible 
to that change, that he must be a party to it, goes without saying; but that neither his 
aptitude nor his will can produce it, is equally certain. 
Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling revelation. 
The change we have been striving after is not to be produced by any more striving. 
It is to be wrought upon us by the moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch 
ascends, and the bud bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences 
from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under invisible pressures from 
‘without. The radical defect of all our former methods of sanctification was the attempt 
to generate from within that which can only be wrought upon us from without. 
According to the first Law of Motion, every body continues in its state of rest, or of 
uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it may be compelled by impressed 
forces to change that state. This is also a first law of Christianity. Every man’s 
character remains as it is, or continues in the direction in which it is going, until it is 
compelled by impressed forces to change that state. Our failure has been the failure 
to put ourselves in the way of the impressed forces. There is a clay, and there is a 
Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould the clay. 

Whence, then, these pressures, and where this Potter? The answer of the formula 
is—‘By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord we are changed.” But this is not 
very clear. What is the “glory” of the Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and 
how can that act as an “impressed force’ in moulding him to a nobler form? The 
word “glory’—the word which has to bear the weight of holding those “impressed 
forces” —is a stranger in current speech, and our first duty is to seek out its equivalent 
in working English. It suggests at first a radiance of some kind, something dazzling 
or glittering, some halo such as the old masters loved to paint round the head of their 


194 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some unseen 
thing. What is that unseen thing? It is that of all unseen things the most radiant, the 
most beautiful, the most divine, and that is Character.” On earth, in heaven, there is 
nothing so great, so glorious as this. The word has many meanings; in ethics it can 
have but one. Glory is character, and nothing less, and it can be nothing more. The 
earth is “full of the glory of the Lord,” because it is full of His character. The 
“Beauty of the Lord” is character. ‘The effulgence of His Glory” is character. “The 
Glory of the Only Begotten” is character, the character which is “fullness of grace and 
truth.” And when God told His people His name, He simply gave them His charac- 
ter, His character which was Himself: “And the Lord proclaimed the name of the 
Lord. . . . the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and 
abundant in goodness and truth.” Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, 
or transcendental. If it were this, how could Paul ask men to reflect it? Stripped of 
its physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty infinitely 
real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and infinitely communicable. 

With this explanation read over the sentence once more in paraphrase: We all 
reflecting as a mirror the character of Christ are transformed into the same Image 
from character to character—from a poor character to a better one, from a better one 
to a little better still, from that to the one still more complete, until by slow degrees 
the Perfect Image is attained. Here the solution of the Problem of Sanctification is 
compressed into a sentence: Reflect the character of Christ, and you will become like 
Christ. You will be changed, in spite of yourself and unknown to yourself, into the 
same image from character to character. 


(1.) All men are reflectors—that is the first law on which this formula is based. 
One of the aptest descriptions of a human being is that he is a mirror. As we sat at 
table tonight the world in which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was 
focused in the room. What we saw when we looked at one another was not one 
another, but one another’s world. We were an arrangement of mirrors. The scenes 
we saw were all reproduced; the people we met walked to and fro; they spoke, they 
bowed, they passed us by, did everything over again as if it had been real. When we 
talked, we were but looking at our own mirror and describing what flitted across it; 
our listening was not hearing, but seeing—we but looked on our neighbor’s mirror. 

All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections. I meet a stranger in a railway 
carriage. The cadence of his first words tells me he is English and comes from York- 
shire. Without knowing it he has reflected his birthplace, his parents, and the long 
history of their race. Even physiologically he is a mirror. His second sentence 
records that he is a politician, and a faint inflection in the way he pronounces The 
Times reveals his party. In his next remarks I see reflected a whole world of expe- 
riences. The books he has read, the people he has met, the companions he keeps, the 
influences that have played upon him and made him the man he is—these are all regis- 
tered there by a pen which lets nothing pass, and whose writing can never be blotted 
out. What I am reading in him meantime he also is reading in me; and before the 
journey is over we could half write each other’s lives. Whether we like it or not, we 
live in glass houses. The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber panelled 
with looking-glass. And upon this miraculous arrangement and endowment depends 
the capacity of mortal souls to “reflect the character of the Lord.” 


(2.) But this is not all. If all these varied reflections from our so-called 
secret life are patent to the world, how close the writing, complete the record 
within the soul itself! For the influences we meet are not simply held for a 
moment on the polished surface and thrown off again into space. Each is retained 
where first it fell, and stored up in the soul forever. This Law of Assimilation is the 


The Changed Life—Drummond. 195 


second, and by far the most impressive truth which underlies the formula of sanctifi- 
_ cation—the truth that men are not only mirrors, but that these mirrors, so far from 
being mere reflectors of the fleeting things they see, transfer into their own inmost 
substance, and hold in permanent preservation the things that they reflect. 

No one knows how the soul can hold these things. No one knows how the 
miracle is done. No phenomenon in nature, no process in chemistry, no chapter in 
-mecromancy can ever help us to begin to understand this amazing operation. For, 
think of it, the past is not only focused there, in a man’s soul, it is there. How could 
it be reflected from there if it were not there? All things that he has ever seen, known, 
felt, believed, of the surrounding world are now plain within him, have become part of 
him, in part are him—he has been changed into their image. He may deny it, he may 
resent it, but they are there. They do not adhere to him, they are transfused through 
him. He cannot alter or rub them out. They are not in his memory, they are in him. 
His soul is as they have filled it, made it, left it. These things, these books, these 
events, these influences are his makers. In their hands are life and death, beauty and 
deformity. When once the image or likeness of any of these is fairly presented to 
the soul, no power on earth can hinder two things happening—it must be absorbed 
- into the soul and forever reflected back again from the character. 

% Upon these astounding yet perfectly obvious psychological facts, Paul bases his 
_ doctrine of sanctification. He sees that character is a thing built up by slow degrees, 
that it is hourly changing for better or for worse according to the images which flit 

across it. One step further and the whole length and breadth of the application of 
Pi _ these ideas to the central problem of religion will stand before us. 


, II. THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 
| 


' If events change men, much more persons. No man can meet another on the 
street without making some mark upon him. We say we exchange words when we 
f meet; what we exchange is souls. And when intercourse is very close and very 
~ frequent, so complete is this exchange that recognizable bits of the one soul begin to 
_ show in the other’s nature, and the second is conscious of a similar and growing debt 
to the first. 
y Now, we become like those whom we habitually reflect. I could prove from 
_ Science that applies even to the physical framework of animals—that they are 
_ influenced and organically changed by the environment in which they live. 
F This mysterious approximating of two souls, who has not witnessed? Who has 
‘Not watched some old couple come down life’s pilgrimage hand in hand, with such 
Geentle trust and joy in one another that their very faces wore the self-same look? 
ese were not two souls; it was a composite soul. It did not matter to which of the 
two you spoke, you would have said the same words to either. It was quite indifferent 
_which replied, each would have said the same. Half a century’s reflecting had told 
“upon them; they were changed into the same image. It is the Law of Influence that 
we become like those whom we habitually reflect; these had become like because they 
i habitually reflected. Through all the range of literature, of history, and biography 
this law presides. Men are all mosaics of other men. There was a savor of David 
ut Jonathan, and a savor of Jonathan about David. Metempsychosis is a fact. 
George Eliot’s message to the world was that men and women make men and women. 
iL Family, the cradle of mankind, has no meaning apart from this. Society itself is 
thing but a rallying point for these omnipotent forces to do their work. On the 
doctrine of Influence, in short, the whole vast pyramid of humanity is built. 
_ But it was reserved for Paul to make the supreme application of the Law of 
Influence. It was a tremendous inference to make, but he never hesitated. He 
himself was a changed man; he knew exactly what had done it—it was Christ. 
On the Damascus road they met, and from that hour his life was absorbed in His. 


196 Pulpit Power and Eloquence: 


The effect could not but follow—on words, on deeds, on career, on creed. The 
“impressed forces” did this vital work. He became like Him whom he habitually 
loved. “So we all,” he writes, ‘reflecting as a mirror the glory of Christ, are changed 
into the same image.” 

Nothing could be more simple, more intelligible, more natural, more supernatural. 
It is an analogy from an every-day fact. Since we are what we are by the impacts of 
those who surround us, those who surround themselves with the highest will be those 
who change into the highest. There are some men and some women in whose com- 
pany we are always at our best. 

While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words. 
Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity. All the best stops in our 
nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was 
never there before. Suppose even that influence prolonged through a month, a year, 
a lifetime, and what could not life become? Here, even on the common plane of life, 
talking our language, walking our streets, working side by side, are sanctifiers of 
souls; here, breathing through common clay, is heaven; here, energies charged even 
through a temporal medium with the virtue of regeneration. If to live with men, 
diluted to the millionth degree with the virtue of the Highest, can exalt and purify the 
nature, what bounds can be set to the influence of Christ? To live with Socrates— 
with unveiled face—must have made one wise; with Aristides, just. Francis Assisi 
must have made one gentle; Savonarola, strong. But to have lived with Christ must 
have made one like Christ: that is to say, a Christian. 

As a matter of fact, to live with Christ did produce this effect. It produced it in 
the case of Paul. And during Christ’s lifetime the experiment was tried in an even 
more startling form. A few raw, unspiritual, uninspiring men, were admitted to the 
inner circle of His friendship. The change began at once. Day by day we can almost 
see the first disciple grow. First there steals over them the faintest possible adumbra- 
tion of His character, and occasionally, very occasionally, they do a thing or say a 
thing that they could not have done or said had they not been living there. Slowly 
the spell of His life deepens. Reach after reach of their nature is overtaken, thawed, 
subjugated, sanctified. Their manner softens, their words become more gentle, their 
conduct more unselfish. As swallows who have found a summer, as frozen buds the 
spring, their starved humanity bursts into a fuller life. They do not know how it is, 
but they are different men. 

One day they find themselves like their Master, going about and doing good. To 
themselves it is unaccountable, but they cannot do otherwise. They were not told 
to do it, it came to them to do it? But the people who watch them know well how to 
account for it—‘‘They have been,” they whisper, “with Jesus.” Already even, the mark 
and seal of His character is upon them—‘‘They have been with Jesus.” Unparalleled 
phenomenon, that these poor fishermen should remind other men of Christ! Stupen- 
dous victory and mystery of regeneration that mortal men should suggest God to the 
world! 

There is something almost melting in the way His contemporaries, and John 
especially, speak of the influence of Christ. John lived himself in daily wonder of 
Him; he was overpowered; over-awed, entranced, transfigured. To his mind it was 
ea inte for any one to come under this influence and ever be the same again. 
“Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not,’ he said. It was inconceivable that he — 
should sin, as inconceivable as that ice should live in a burning sun, or darkness 
coexist with noon. If any one did sin, it was to John the simple proof that he could | 
never have met Christ. “Whosoever sinneth,” he exclaims, “hath not seen Him, 
neither known Him.” Sin was abashed in this Presence. Its roots withered. Its 
sway and victory were forever at an end. Gc ea 


The Changed Life—Drummond. 197 


But these were His contemporaries. It was easy for them to be influenced by 
Him, for they were every day and all the day together. But how can we mirror that 
which we have never seen? How can all this stupendous result be produced by a 
memory, by the scantiest of all biographies, by One who lived and left this earth 
eighteen hundred years ago? How can modern men today make Christ, the absent 
Christ, their most constant companion still? 

The answer is that friendship is a spiritual thing. It is independent of matter, or 
space, or time. That which I love in my friend is not that which I see. What influ- 
ences me in my friend is not his body but his spirit. He influences me about as 
much in his absence as in his presence. It would have been an ineffable experience 
truly to have lived at that time— 


“T think when I read the sweet story of old, 
How when Jesus was here among men, 
He took little children like lambs to His fold, 
I should like to have been with Him then. 


“T wish that His hand had been laid on my head, 
That His arms had been thrown around me, 

And that I had seen His kind look when He said, 
‘Let the little ones come unto me.’” 


And yet, if Christ were to come into the world again, few of us probably would 
_ ever have a chance of seeing Him. Millions of her subjects in the little country of 
_ England have never seen their own Queen. And there would be millions of the sub- 
jects of Christ who could never get within speaking distance of Him if He were here. 
We remember He said: “It is expedient for you (not for Me) that I go away;” 
because by, going away He could really be nearer to us than He would have been if 
He had stayed here. It would be geographically and physically impossible for most 
of us to be influenced by His person had He remained. And so our communion with 
Him is a spiritual companionship; but not different from most companionships, which, 
when you press them down to the roots, you will find to be essentially spiritual. 

All friendship, all love, human and divine, is purely spiritual. It was after He 
was risen that He influenced even the disciples most. Hence, in reflecting the charac- 
_ ter of Christ, it is no real obstacle that we may never have been in visible contact with 
Himself. 

There lived once a young girl whose perfect grace of character was the wonder of 
_ those who knew her. She wore on her neck a gold locket which no one was ever 
Pu allowed to open. One day, in a moment of unusual confidence, one of her companions 

| _ was allowed to touch its spring and learn its secret. She saw written these words— 

id “Whom having not seen I love.” 

That was the secret of her beautiful life. She had been changed into the Same 


the difference in the process, as well as in the result, may be as great as that between 
a photograph secured by the infallible pencil of the sun, and the rude outline from a 
school-boy’s chalk. Imitation is mechanical, reflection organic. The one is occa- 
sional, the other habitual. In the one case, man comes to God and imitates Him; in 
the other, God comes to man and imprints Himself upon him. It is quite true that 
there is an imitation of Christ which amounts to reflection. But Paul’s term includes 
all that the other holds, and is open to no mistake. 
What, then, is the practical, lesson? It is obvious. ‘Make Christ your most 
constant companion”—this is what it practically means for us. Be more under His 


1 
| Image. 
| Now this is not imitation, but a much deeper thing. Mark this distinction, for 


198 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


influence than under any other influence. Ten minutes spent in His society every day, 
ay, two minutes if it be face to face, and heart to heart, will make the whole day 
different. Every character has an inward spring—let Christ be it. Every action has 
a key-note—let Christ set it. 

Yesterday you got a certain letter. You sat down and wrote a reply which almost 
scorched the paper. You picked the cruelest adjectives you knew and sent it forth, 
without a pang to do its ruthless work. You did that because your life was set in the 
wrong key. You began the day with the mirror placed at the wrong angle. 

Tomorrow at day-break, turn it towards Him, and even to your enemy the fashion 
of your countenance will be changed. Whatever you then do, one thing you will find 
you could not do—you could not write that letter. Your first impulse may be the 
same, your judgment may be unchanged, but if you try it the ink will dry on your pen, 
and you will rise from your desk an unavenged, but a greater. and more Christian 
man. Throughout the whole day your actions, down to the last detail, will do homage 
to that early vision. 

Yesterday you thought mostly about yourself. Today the poor will meet you, and 
you will feed them. The helpless, the tempted, the sad, will throng about you, and 
each you will befriend. Where were all these people yesterday? Where they are 
today, but you did not see them. It is in reflected light that the poor are seen. But 
your soul today is not at the ordinary angle. “Things which are not seen” are visible. 
For a few short hours you live the Eternal Life. The eternal life, the life of faith, is 
simply the life of a higher vision. Faith is an attitude—a mirror set at the right angle. 

When tomorrow is over, and in the evening you review it, you will wonder how 
you did it. You will not be conscious that you strove for anything, or imitated any- 
thing. You will be conscious of Christ; that He was with you, that without 
compulsion you were yet compelled; that without force, or noise, or proclamation, the 
revolution was accomplished. You do,not congratulate yourself as one who has done 
a mighty deed, or achieved a personal success, or stored up a fund of “Christian 
experience’’ to ensure the same result again. What you are conscious of is “the glory 
of the Lord.” And what the world is conscious of, if the result be a true one, is also 
“the glory of the Lord.” In looking at a mirror one does not see the mirror, or think 
of it, but only of what it reflects. For a mirror never calls the attention to itself— 
except when there are flaws in it. 

Let me say a word or two more about the effects which necessarily must follow 
from this contact, or fellowship, with Christ. I need not quote the texts upon the 
subject—the texts about abiding in Christ. ‘He that abideth in Him sinneth not.” 
You cannot sin when you are standing in front of Christ. You simply cannot do it. 
Again: “If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and 
it shall be done unto you.” Think of that! That is another inevitable consequence. 
And there is yet another: “He that abideth in Me, the same bie forth much 
fruit.” Sinlessness—answered prayer—much fruit. 

But in addition to these things, see how many of the highest Christian virtues and 
experiences necessarily flow from the assumption of that attitude toward Christ. For 
instance, the moment you assume that relation to Christ you begin to know what the 
child-spirit is. You stand before Christ, and He becomes your Teacher, and you 
instinctively become docile. Then you learn also to become charitable and tolerant; 
because you are learning of Him, and He is ‘‘meek and lowly in heart,” and you catch 
that spirit. That is a bit of His character being reflected into yours. Instead of being 
critical and self-asserting, you become humble and have the mind of a little child. 

I think, further, the only way of learning what faith is is to know Christ and be in 
His company. You hear sermons about the nine different kinds of faith—distinctions 
drawn between the right kind of faith and the wrong—and sermons telling you how to 


a 


i 


\ 


The Changed Life—Drummond. 199 


get faith. So far as I can see, there is only one way in which faith is got, and it is the 
same in the religious world as it is in the world of men and women. [I learn to trust 
you, my brother, just as I get to know you, and neither more nor less; and you get 
to trust me just as you get to know me. I do not trust you as a stranger, but as I 
come into contact with you, and watch you, and live with you, I find out that you are 
trustworthy, and I come to trust myself to you, and to lean upon you. But I do not 
do that to a stranger. 

The way to trust Christ is to know Christ. You cannot help trusting Him then. 
You are changed. By knowing Him faith is begotten in you, as cause and effect. To 
trust Him without knowing Him as thousands do, is not faith, but credulity. I believe 
a great deal of prayer for faith is thrown away. What we should pray for is that we 
may be able to fulfill the condition, and when we have fulfilled the condition, the faith 
necessarily follows. The way, therefore, to increase our faith is to increase our 
intimacy with Christ. We trust Him more and more the better we know Him. 

And then another immediate effect of this way of sanctifying the character is the 
tranquility that it brings over the Christian life. How disturbed and distressed and 
anxious Christian people are about their growth in grace! Now, the moment you 
give that over into Christ’s care—the moment you see that you are being changed— 
that anxiety passes away. You see that it must follow by an inevitable process and by a 
natural law if you fulfill the simple condition; so that peace is the reward of that life 
and fellowship with Christ. 

Many other things follow. A man’s usefulness depends to a large extent upon his 
fellowship with Christ. That is obvious. Only Christ can influence the world; but 
all that the world sees of Christ is what it sees of you and me. Christ said: “The 
world seeth Me no more, but ye see Me.” You see Him, and standing in front of 
Him reflect Him, and the world sees the reflection. It cannot see Him. So that a 
Christian’s usefulness depends solely upon that relationship. 

Now, I have only pointed out a few of the things that follow from the standing 
before Christ—from the abiding in Christ. You will find, if you run over the texts 
about abiding in Christ, many other things will suggest themselves in the same 
relations. Almost everything in Christian experience and character follows, and 
follows necessarily, from standing before Christ and reflecting His character. But the 
supreme consummation is that we are changed into the same image, “even as by the 
Lord the spirit” That is to say, that in some way, unknown to us, but possibly not 
more mysterious than the doctrine of personal influence, we are changed into the 
image of Christ. 

This method cannot fail. I am not setting before you an opinion or a theory, but 
this is a certainly successful means of sanctification. ‘We all, with unveiled face, 
reflecting in a mirror the glory of Christ (the character of Christ) assuredly—without 
any miscarriage—without any possibility of miscarriage—are changed into the same 
image.” It is an immense thing to be anchored in some great principle like that. 
Emerson says: “The hero is the man who is immovably centered.” Get immovably 
centered in that doctrine of sanctification. Do not be carried away by the hundred 
and one theories of sanctification that are floating about in religious literature of the 
country at the present time; but go to the bottom of the thing for yourself, and see the 
rationale of it for yourself, and you will come te see that it is a matter of cause and 
effect, and that if you will fulfill the condition laid down by Christ, the effect must 
follow by a natural law. 

What a prospect! To be changed into the same image. Think of that! ‘That is 
what we are here for. That is what we are elected for. Not to be saved, in the 
common acceptation, but “whom He did foreknow He also did predestinate to be 
conformed to the image of His Son.” Not merely to be saved, but to be conformed to 


. 


B adel 


200 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the image of His Son. Conserve that principle. Arid as we must spend time in culti- 
vating our earthly friendships if we are to have their blessings, so we must spend time 
in cultivating the fellowship and companionship of Christ. And there is nothing so 
much worth taking into our lives as a profounder sense of what is to be had by living 
in communion with Christ, and by getting nearer to Him. It will matter much if we 
take away with us some of the thoughts about theology, and some of the new light 
that has been shed upon the text of the Scripture; it will matter infinitely more if our 
fellowship with the Lord Jesus become a little closer, and our theory of holy living a 
little more rational. And then as we go forth, men will take knowledge of us, that 
we have been with Jesus, and as we reflect Him upon them, they will begin to be 
changed into the same image. 

It seems to me the preaching is of infinitely smaller account than the life which 
mirrors Christ. That is bound to tell; without speech or language—like the voices 
of the stars. It throws out its impressions on every side. The one simple thing we 
have to do is to be there—in the right relation; to go-through life hand in hand with 


Him; to have Him in the room with us, and keeping us company wherever we go; to 


depend upon Him and lean upon Him, and so have His life reflected in the fullness 
of its beauty and perfection into ours. 


Ill. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 


Then you reduce religion to a common friendship? A common friendship—who 
talks of a common friendship? There is no such thing in the world. 

On earth no word is more sublime. Friendship is the nearest thing we know to 
what religion is. God is love. And to make religion akin to friendship is simply to 
give it the highest expression conceivable by man. But if by demurring to “a 
common friendship” is meant a protest against the greatest and the holiest in religion 
being spoken of in intelligible terms, then I am afraid the objection is all too real. 
Men always look for a mystery when one talks of sanctification, some mystery apart 
from that which must ever be mysterious wherever spirit works. It is thought some 
peculiar secret lies behind it, some occult experience which only the initiated know. 
Thousands of persons go to church every Sunday hoping to solve this mystery. At 
meetings, at conferences, many a time they have reached what they thought was the 
very brink of it, but somehow no further revelation came. Poring over religious books, 
how often were they not within a paragraph of it; the next page, the next sentence, 
would discover all, and they wotild be borne on a flowing tide forever. But nothing 
happened. The next sentence and the next page were read, and still it eluded them; 
and though the promise of its coming kept faithfully up to the end, the last chapter 
found them still pursuing. 

Why did nothing happen? Because there was nothing to happen—nothing of the 
kind they were looking for. Why did it elude them? Because there was no ‘“‘it.” 
When shall we learn that the pursuit of holiness is simply the pursuit of Christ? 
When shall we substitute for the “it” of a fictitious aspiration, the approach to a Living 


Friend? Sanctity is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm 


humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul. 

And yet there are others who, for exactly a contrary reason, will find scant satis- 
faction here. Their complaint is not that a religion expressed in terms of friendship 
is too homely, but that it is still too mystical. To “abide” in Christ, to “make Christ 


our most constant companion,” is to them the purest mysticism. They want some- — 


thing absolutely tangible and absolutely direct. ‘These are not the poetical souls who 


4 


seek a sign, a mysticism in excess, but the prosaic natures whose want is mathematical — 


definition in details. Yet it is perhaps not possible to reduce this problem to much 
more rigid elements, The beauty of friendship is its infinity. One can never evacuate 


N 


i 
i 


i 


The Changed Life—Drummond. 201 


life of mysticism. Home is full of it, love is full of it, religion is full of it. Why 
ble at that in the relation of man to Christ which is natural in the relation of man 
9 man? 

If any one cannot conceive or realize a mystical relation with Christ, perhaps all 


How do I know Shakespeare or Dante? By communing with their words and 
Many men know Dante better than their own fathers. He influences them 


, who left great words behind Him, who has greater works everywhere in the 
world now, should not also instruct, inspire and mould the characters of men? I do 
not limit Christ’s influence to this: it is this, and it is more. But Christ, so far from 
resenting or discouraging this relation of friendship, Himself proposed it. “Abide in 
Me” was almost His last word to the world. And He partly met the difficulty of those 
who feel its tangibleness by adding the practical clause, “If ye abide in Me, and My 
words abide in you.” 
_ Begin with His words. Words can scarcely ever be long impersonal. Christ 
himself was a Word, a word made Flesh. Make His words flesh; do them, live them, 
“and you must live Christ. “He that keepeth My Commandments, he it is that loveth 
Me.” Obey Him and you must love Him. Abide in Him, and you must obey Him. 
sultivate His friendship. Live after Christ, in His spirit, as in His presence, and 
it is difficult to think what more you can do. Take this at least as a first lesson, as 
introduction. 
If you cannot at once and always feel the play of His life upon yours, watch for 
talso indirectly. ‘The whole earth is full of the character of the Lord.’ Christ is the 
ight of the world, and much of His light is reflected from things in the world—even 
clouds. Sunlight is stored in every leaf, from leaf through coal, and it comforts 
s thence when days are dark and we cannot see the sun. Christ shines through men, 
through books, through history, through nature, music, art. Look for Him there. 
ery day one should either look at a beautiful picture, or hear beautiful music, or 
a beautiful poem.” The real danger of mysticism is not making it broad enough. 
Do not think that nothing is happening because you do not see yourself grow, or 
the whir of the machinery. All great things grow noiselessly. You can see a 
ushroom grow, but never a child. Paul said for the conforming of all slowly 
ing souls that they grew ‘from character to character.” “The inward man,” 
says elsewhere, ‘“‘is renewed from day to day.” All thorough work is slow; all 
ie development by minute, slight and insensible metamorphoses. The higher the 
structure, moreover, the slower the progress. As the biologist runs his eye over the 
ong ascent of life, he sees the lowest forms of animals develop in an hour; the next 
ove these reach maturity in a day; those higher. still take weeks or months to 
; but the few at the top demand the long experiment of years. If a child and 
an ape are born on the same day, the last will be in full possession of its faculties 
nd doing the active work of life before the child has left its cradle. Life is the cradle 
of eternity. As the man is to the animal in the slowness of his evolution, so is the 
biritual man to the natural man. Foundations which have to bear the weight of an 
ernal life must be surely laid. Character is to wear forever; who will wonder or 
ge that it cannot be developed in a day? 

To await the growing of a soul, nevertheless, is an almost divine act of faith. 
low pardonable, surely, the impatience of deformity with itself, of a consciously 
sspicable character standing before Christ, wondering, yearning, hungering to be 
e that! Yet must one trust the process fearlessly and without misgiving. ‘(The 
ord the Spirit” will do His part. The tempting expedient is, in haste for abrupt or 


; 


202 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


visible progress, to try some method less spiritual, or to defeat the end by watching 
for effects instead of keeping the eye on the cause. A photograph prints from the 
negative only while exposed to the sun. While the artist is looking to see how it i: 
getting on he simply stops the getting on. Whatever of wise supervision the soul ma} 
need, it is certain it ¢an never be over-exposed, or that, being exposed, anything els: 
in the world can improve the result or quicken it. The creation of a new heart, the 
renewing of a right spirit, is an omnipotent work of God. Leave it to the Creator, 
“He which hath begun a good work in you will perfect it unto that day.” 

No man, nevertheless, who feels the worth and solemnity of what is at stake wil 
be careless as to his progress. To become like Christ is the only thing in the worl 
worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly, and all lower 
achievement vain. 

Those only who make this quest the supreme desire and passion of their lives can 
ever begin to hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has seemed up to this point as if all 
depended on passivity, let me now assert, with conviction more intense, that all 
depends on activity. A religion of effortless adoration may be a religion for an angel, 
but never fora man. Not in the contemplative, but in the active, lies true hope; not in 
rapture, but in reality lies true life; not in the realm of ideals, but among tangible 
things, is man’s sanctification wrought. Resolution, effort, pain, self-crucifixion, 
agony—all the things already dismissed as futile in themselves, must now be restored 
to office, and a tenfold responsibility laid upon them. For what is their office? 
Nothing less than to move the vast inertia of the soul, and place it, and keep it where 
the spiritual forces will act upon it. It is to rally the forces of the will, and keep the 
surface of the mirror bright and ever in position. It is to uncover the face which is 
to look at Christ, and draw down the veil when unhallowed sights are near. 

You have, perhaps, gone with an astronomer to watch him photograph the 
spectrum of a star. As you enter the dark vault of the observatory you saw him begin 
by lighting a candle. To see the star with? No; but to adjust the instrument to see 
the star with. It was the star that was going to take the photograph; it was, also, the 
astronomer. For a long time he worked in the dimness, screwing tubes and polishing 
lenses and adjusting reflectors, and only after much labor the finely focused instrument 
was brought to bear. Then he blew out the light, and left the star to do its work upon 
the plate alone. 

The day’s task for the Christian is to bring his instrument to bear. Having done 
that he may blow out his candle. All the evidences of Christianity which have brought 
him there, all aids to Faith, all acts of worship, all the leverages of the church, all 
prayer and meditation, all girding of the Will—these lesser processes, these candle- 
light activities for that supreme hour, may be set aside. But, remember, it is but for 
an hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his candle; the wisest he who 
never lets it out. Tomorrow, the next moment, he, a poor, darkened, blurred soul, 
may need it again to focus the image better, to take a mote off the lens, to clear the 
mirror from a breath with which the world has dulled it. 

No readjustment is ever required on behalf of the Star. That is one great fixed 
point in this shifting universe. But the world moves. And each day, each hour, 
demands a further motion and readjustment for the soul. A telescope in an observa- 
tory follows a star by clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the Will. 
Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the Lord, the Will in intense 
activity holds the mirror in position lest the drifting motion of the world bear it 
beyond the line of vision. To “follow Christ” is largely to keep the soul in such 
position as will allow for the motion of the earth. And this calculated counteracting 
of the movements of the world, this holding of the mirror exactly opposite to the 
mirrored, this steadying of the faculties unerringly through cloud and earthquake, fire 


The Changed Life—Drummond. 203 


nd sword, is the stupendous co-operating labor of the Will. It is all man’s work. 
It is all Christ’s work. In practice it is both; in theory it is both. But the wise man 
say in practice, “It depends upon myself.” 

_ Inthe Gallerie des Beaux Arts in Paris there stands a famous statue. It was the 
ast work of a great genius, who, like many a genius, was very poor and lived in a 
arret, which served as a studio and sleeping-room alike. When the statue was all 
ut finished, one midnight a sudden frost fell upon Paris. The sculptor lay awake in 
he fireless room and thought of the still moist clay, thought how the water would 
eeze in the pores and destroy in an hour the dream of his life. So the old man rose 
om his couch and heaped the bed-clothes reverently round his work. In the morn- 
ng when the neighbors entered the room the sculptor was dead, but the statue was 
ved! 

_ The Image of Christ that is forming within us—that is life’s one charge. Let 
y project stand aside for that. The spirit of God who brooded upon the waters 
housands of years ago, is busy now creating men within these commonplace lives of 
‘Ours, in the image of God. “Till Christ be formed,” no man’s work is finished, no 
religion crowned, no life has fulfilled its end. Is the infinite task begun? When, how, 
are we to be different? Time cannot change men. Death cannot change men. Christ 
an. Wherefore put on Christ. 


_ [Henry Drummond was born at Stirling, Scotland, in 1851. He was appointed 
rofessor of natural history and science in the Free Church College, Glasgow, in 1879. 
is greatest work, and one that attracted a great deal of discussion, was Natural Law 
in the Spiritual World. 

‘ This address has been printed in hundreds of editions, but we include it here for 
convenient reference, and for preservation. It is reproduced by permission of Fleming 


H. Revell Co.] 


. me 


‘, 


204 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


CHIEF END OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 


ALEXANDER DUFF. 


“God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause His face to shine upon us. Tha 
Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all ‘nations.’ ’—Psaln 
67: 1, 2. 


The royal Psalmist, in the spirit of inspiration, personating the ‘Church of th 
redeemed in every age, and more especially under its last and most perfect dispensa 
tion, here offers up a sublime prayer for its inward prosperity, and outward universa 
extension. All is in the order of nature and of grace. Knowing full well that he whi 
has not obtained mercy from the Lord, cannot be a fit bearer of it to others,—that h 
who has obtained no blessings himself, can dispense none,—that he who enjoys n 
light, can communicate none—he first of all, with marked and beautiful propriet: 
begins with the supplication of personal and individual blessings: “God be mercifu 
unto us,’ forgiving and pardoning all our sins: “and bless us,” conferring every gif 
and every grace really needful for time and eternity: ‘“‘and lift up the light of th 
countenance upon us,’ cheering us with the smile of reconciliation and love, an 
causing the Sun of Righteousness to arise on our darkened souls with healing in hi 
beams. 

But does the Psalmist stop here? Does he for a moment intend that he and hi: 
fellow-worshippers, as representatives of the visible Church of the Living God, shoul 
absorb all the mercy, all the blessing, and all the light of Jehovah’s countenance? Ol 
no! Having thus fervently prayed for evangelical blessings to descend upon himself 
and every member of the Church, he immediately superadds, in the true evangelisti: 
or missionary spirit, “That thy way,” or, as it is given in our metrical version, “Tha 
so thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.” 

How significant the connection here established between the obtainment and thi 
distribution of evangelical favors! ‘“‘God be merciful unto us, and bless us.”—Why 
only that we ourselves may be pardoned and sanctified, and thereby attain to tru 
happiness? No. There is another grand end in view, to the accomplishment of whicl 
our being blessed is but a means. “God be merciful unto us, and bless us, that so thy 
way may be known on earth,’—that so—that thus—that in this way—that by ow 
instrumentality—that by our being blessed, and having the light of thy countenance 
shining upon us, “thy way’—thy way of justification through the atoning righteous 
ness of the Redeemer,—thy way of sanctification by His Holy Spirit,—“may be made 
known on earth, and thy saving health among all nations.” 

And then; seized with true prophetic fire at the grandeur of the Divine design ir 
reference to “all nations,” and hurried away by the magnificence of the vision of the 
latter-day glory, does “the sweet singer of Israel” break forth into heroic a 
sublimer far than any ever strung on Grecian or Roman lyre:— 


“Let people praise Thee, Lord: “Then shall the earth yield her increase, 
Let people all Thee praise: God, our God, bless us shall; 
Oh let the nations be glad, God shall us bless, and of the earth f 
And sing for joy always. The ends shall fear Him all,” , 


4 


: 


Chief End of the Christian Church—Duff. 205 


| Here the two grand characteristics of the true Church of God,—the evangelical, 
and evangelistic or missionary,—are written as in a sunbeam:—the evangelical, in the 
possession of all needful gifts and graces out of the plenitude of the Spirit's fulness: 
he evangelistic, in the instant and perpetual propension which that possession ought 
fo generate and feed, instrumentally to dispense these blessings among all nations. As 
f to confound lukewarm and misjudging professors throughout all generations, these 
haracteristics are represented by the Spirit of inspiration itself, as essential to the very 
existence and well-being of the Church, and in their very nature inseparable. The 
srayer of the Church, as dictated by the Divine Spirit, is directed to the obtainment of 
b essings, not as an end, merely terminating in herself, but as a means towards the 
promotion and attainment of an ulterior end of the sublimest description—the enlight- 
ment and conversion of all nations! Hence it follows, that when a Church ceases to 
e evangelistic, it must cease to be evangelical, and when it ceases to be evangelical, it 
es cease to exist as a true Church of God, however primitive or apostolic it may be 


n its outward form and constitution! 

There is no mystery here. If, in the common affairs of life, a servant besought and 
tained an increased portion of goods, that he might proceed to a distant city or 
reign nation, and lay out the whole for the advancement of his master’s interest; and 
ee of acting in the terms of his own requisition, and agreeably to the express 
design of his kind and munificent employer, he chose to remain at home, and appro- 
priate all for his own private ends, what judgment would the world pronounce on such 
a man? Would he not be condemned as an unprofitable servant, who dishonestly 
attempted to embezzle the property of another? And would not the master be more 
than justified in taking away from him even all that he had? 


t 


q] 


Precisely similar is the position and attitude of the petitioning Church, and con- 
uently, of all petitioning believers, as portrayed by the pencil of the Divine Spirit in 
the words of our text. Believers are there taught to pray, and all who have ever read 
_ or sung this precious psalm in a believing frame of mind have actually prayed, for the 
E spiritual blessings:—for what purpose? that they themselves may enjoy the 
' 


comforts and consolations of piety in this life, and a meetness for the heavenly inheri- 
tance hereafter? Doubtless this is the first end, and must be implied and included in 
the object of the petition. But so little does this appear in the eye of the Spirit, to be 
the only or even the chief end, that it is actually left altogether unexpressed! There is 
another end present to his omniscient view, of a nature so transcendently exalted, that 
the former is, as it were wholly overlooked, because eclipsed by the surpassing glory 
of that which excelleth. And that other end of all-absorbing excellence is, the impar- 
tation of God’s saving health to all nations. So pre-eminent in importance does this 
end appear to the mind of the Spirit, that believers are taught to implore spiritual 
blessings, expressly, and even chiefly, that they may thereby have it in their power the 
more effectually to promote it throughout the world! 


If, then, in answer to such prayers, spiritual blessings should be conferred from on 
high; and if, instead of employing them for the promotion of their Divine Master’s 
interest, by causing his saving health to be made known to all nations, believers should 
sit down in ease, and appropriate all to themselves, and their own friends immediately 
around them,—what judgement must be pronounced upon them in the court of 
heaven? Must they not be condemned as guilty of a breach of faith—guilty of a 
dereliction of duty to their Lord and Master—guilty of a dishonest attempt to em- 
bezzle the treasures of His grace? And if so, must not their sin, if unrepented of, 

bring down its deserved punishment? And what can the first drop from the vial of 
Divine wrath do less than expunge from the spiritual inventory of such worthless 
_ stewards all that they have already so gratuitously and undeservedly obtained? What 
a resistless argument does the Spirit of God here supply in favor of the missionary 


206 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


enterprise! Who can peruse the words of his own inspiration, without being over. 
whelmed with the conviction that, in his unerring estimate, the chief end for which the 
Church ought to exist—the chief end for which individual church-members ought te 
live, is the evangelization or conversion of the world? 

But lest any shade of dubiety should exist as to the incontrovertible legitimacy o| 
this conclusion, the same momentous truth may be established by other and inde- 
pendent evidence, 


The spirit of prophecy speaking, through Isaiah, had long announced the Messiah 
~ Himself, not only as King and Priest, but as the great Prophet and Evangelist of the 
world. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” says the Divine Oracle, “because the 
Lord hath appointed me to preach good tidings to the meek: he hath sent me to bind 
up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the 
prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord; to appoint 
unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for 
mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” And lest any might 
suppose that the exercise of the functions here described was to be limited to the Jews, 
the natural seed of Abraham, God’s chosen people; or the Zion here named was meant 
exclusively to denote the literal local Zion at Jerusalem, and not rather, in type and 
figure, the true Catholic Church throughtout the world—it is almost immediately 
added, “For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake will I not 
rest until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof 
as a lamp that burneth: and the Gentiles shall see Thy righteousnees, and all kings 
Thy glory.” The prophetic import and design of these words can admit of no doubt. 
For when, on one occasion, our blessed Savior stood up in the Synagogue, and, 
opening the book of the Prophet Esaias, read the former of these passages, He dis- 
tinctly appropriated the application of it to Himself, saying, “This day is this Scripture 
fulfilled in your ears.” 

Again, if it was prophesied that the Messiah would “raise up the tribes of Jacob, 
and restore the prescribed of Israel,” it is immediately added, “I will also give thee 
for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation to the ends of the earth.” 
And again, “Men shall be blessed in Him; all nations shall call Him blessed.” 

In strict accordance, not only with the substance, but almost the very words of 
these and many other prophecies, we find the announcement of the heavenly host to 
the shepherds of Bethlehem: “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which 
shall be to all people; for unto you is born this day a Savior, which is Christ the 
Lord.” The introductory salutation of the Baptist, the Messiah’s forerunner: “Behold 
the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,’—And, lastly the solemn 
declaration of the Apostle John: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 
That was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” 

Now, during our Savior’s ministry, He conveyed many significant intimations to_ 
His disciples that He intended to transfer to them, and through them to the body of © 
believers in every age, those high functions which primarily and rightfully belonged to 
Himself as the world’s Evangelist. ‘Ye are,” said He, “‘‘the salt,’ not of Judea or 
Jerusalem, but ‘of the earth.’” One of the brightest of His own prophetic titles was 
“the light of the Gentiles:” or, in the paraphrase of the Apostle, “the light that lighteth © 
every man that cometh into the world.” And this very title He transfers to His disci- , 
ples, saying, “‘Ye are the light,’ not of Judea or Jerusalem, but ‘of the world.’ ” 3 

And when about to withdraw His visible presence from the earth, He formally : 
transferred the whole of His visible evangelistic functions to His professing disciples f 
or Church, to be exercised and administered by it in His name and stead, till the end _ 
of time. “All power,” said He, “is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, — 
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the { 


‘ 


he 


Chief End of the Christian Church—Duff. 207 


Son, and of the Holy Ghost—teaching them (i. e., all nations) to observe all things 


administration of gospel ordinances, and the exercise of spiritual authority. These 
high functions in the Royal Head were original and underived, as transferred to His 
body, the Church, they are, of necessity, derivative and vice-regal. As Christ, there- 
Dre, was proclaimed by prophets and apostles, as well as by Himself, in His appropria- 
tion of prophetic announcements, to be the world’s Evangelist; in His personal ab- 
ence during the present dispensation, He was pleased solemnly to appoint and con- 
Stitute the Church to be His delegated representative as the world’s Evangelist; and, 
along with the evangelistic functions, He conveyed the power and authority indis- 
pensable for their exercise. 
_ That this was the interpretation put upon this original gospel commission by the 
fimitive disciples, is evident, not only from the whole tenor of their conduct, but 
also from the most express declarations scattered throughout the book of the Acts, 
as well as the Apostolic Epistles. 
e It thus appears abundantly manifest from the multiplied Scripture evidence, that 
the chief end for which the Christian Church is constituted—the leading design for 
L re she is made the repository of heavenly blessings—the great command under 
which she is laid—the supreme function which she is called on to discharge—is, in the 
e and stead of her glorified Head and Redeemer, unceasingly to act the part of 
an evangelist to all the world. The inspired prayer which she is taught to offer for 
‘spiritual gifts and graces, binds her, as the covenanted condition on which they are 
bestowed at all, to dispense them to all nations. The divine charter which conveys 
to her the warrant to teach and preach the gospel at all, binds her to teach and preach 
it to all nations. The divine charter which embodies a commission to administer 
gospel ordinances at all, binds her to administer these to all nations. The divine 
charter which communicates power and authority to exercise rule or discipline at all, 
inds her to exercise these not alone or exclusively, to secure her own internal purity 
and peace, union and stability, but chiefly and supremely, in order that she may 
hereby be enabled the more speedily, effectually and extensively to execute her grand 
vangelistic commission in preaching the gospel to all nations. 

If, then, any body of believers, united together as a Church, under whatever form 
external discipline and polity, do, in their individual, or congregational, or cor- 
porate national capacity, wilfully and deliberately overlook, suspend or indefinitely 
ostpone the accomplishment of the great end for which the Church universal, in- 
dhuding every evangelical community, implores the vouchsafement of spiritual 
Teasures—the great end for which she has obtained a separate and independent con- 
titution at all—how can they, separately or conjointly, expect to realize, or realizing, 
ct to render abiding, the promised presence of Him who alone hath the keys of 
he golden treasury, and alone upholds the pillars of the great spirtual edifice? If any 
hurch, or any section of a Church, do thus neglect the final cause of its being, and 
iolate the very condition and tenure of all spiritual rights and privileges, how can it 
xpect the continuance of the favor of Him from whom alone, as their divine fount 
nd spring-head, all such rights and privileges must ever flow? And if deprived of 
is favor and presence, how can any Church expect long to exist, far less spiritually 
o flourish, in the enjoyment of inward peace, or the prospect of outward and more 
xtended prosperity? 

_And what is.the whole history of the Christian Church but one perpetual proof and 
Illustration of the grand position,—that an evangelistic or missionary Church is a 


208 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


spiritually flourishing Church; and, that a Church which drops the evangelistic o: 
missionary character, speedily lapses into superannuation and decay! 

The most evangelistic period of the Christian Church was, beyond all doubt, th 
primitive or apostolic. Then, the entire community of saints seemed to act under at 
overpowering conviction of their responsible duty, as the divinely appointed evange 
lists of a perishing world. No branch or offset from the apostolic stock at Jerusalen 
had, in those days, begun to surmise that, not only its first but chief, and almos 
exclusive duty, was to witness for Christ in the city, or district, or province, o1 
kingdom, in which it was itself already planted—in other words, to surmise that th 
most effectual mode of vindicating its title to the designation of apostolic, was tc 
annihilate its own apostolicity! For what can be named, as the most peculiar anc 
discharge the functions of a missionary. All, all seemed moved and actuated towarc 
shining aspect of salvation which it held forth towards all nations? No, no. In thoss 
days, the Church’s prayer, as breathed by the inspired Psalmist, seemed to issue from 
every lip, and kindle every soul into correspondent action. The Redeemer’s parting 
command seemed to ring in every ear, and vitally influence every feeling and faculty 
of the renewed soul. Every man and woman, and almost every child, through the 
remotest branches of the wide-spreading Church seemed impelled by a holy zeal tc 
discharge the functions of a missionary. All, all seemed moved andgactuated towarc 
a guilty and lost world, as if they really felt it to be as much their duty to disseminate 
the gospel among unchristianized nations, as to pray, or teach, or preach to those 
within the pale of their respective churches—as much their duty to propagate the 
knowledge of salvation among the blinded heathen, as to. yield obedience to any com. 
mandment in the Decalogue. And were not those the days.of*flourishing Christianity: 
Has not the spiritual beauty and brightness of the primitive Church been the theme 
of admiration and praise to succeeding generations? But no sooner did the Church 
in any of its subdivisions, begin to-contract the sphere of its efforts in diffusing abroa¢ 
the light of the everlasting gospel—nomsooner did it begin to settle down with the 
view of snugly enjoying the glorious prerogatives conferred by its Great Head—for- 
getful of the multitudes that were still famishing for lack of knowledge, to all of whom 
it was bound by covenant to announce the glad tidings of salvation; in a word, ne 
sooner did the Church, in contravention of heaven’s appointed ordinance, begin te 
relax in the exercise of its evangelistic function towards the world at large, than its 
sun, under the hiding of Jehovah’s countenance, and the frown of His displeasure, 
began to decline and hide itself amid the storms of wrathful controversy, or sink 
beneath a gloomy horizon laden with freezing rites and soul-withering forms. 


It may be thought that the history of the Reformation tends to contradict this 
general view. So far from this, it is to that very period, as compared with the times 
immediately succeeding, that we would appeal for one of the most striking illustrations 
of its truth. Doubtless the Pagan world was not included within the immediate 
sphere of the Reformers’ labors. Its miserable condition was then scarcely, if at all, 
known in its real horror; the very existence of the great Western Continent was but 
recently discovered; and in comparison with present times the facilities of intercom- 
munion with distant parts of the globe were so circumscribed as to appear to us 
hardly conceivable. 


Still the work of the Reformation was itself a grand evangelistic work. God, by 
His Spirit, put it into the hearts of an enlightened few to arise and make an 
“aggressive movement” on the unenlightened many, by whom they were everywhere 
surrounded. Their first and paramount object was to rescue the Bible itself—the great 
instrument of the world’s evangelization—from the dormitory of dead and unintelli- 
gible languages; to emancipate its doctrines from the superincumbent load of Popish 
traditions and Aristotelian subtleties; to vindicate the rights of conscience in the 


Chief End of the Christian Church—Duff. 209 


' perusal and interpretation of that Magna Charta of all civil and religious liberty; and, 
finally, to bring out, and separate from idolatrous Rome, a true Church, that might 
forever protest against all doctrines, and rites whatsoever, that infringed, by one jot 
or tittle, on Christ’s supremacy, as the sole and all-sufficient Savior of lost sinners— 
a witnessing Church, that might reassume the great evangelistic function of preaching 
he gospel as a testimony to all nations. 
; This struggle with anti-Christian Rome was, indeed, a long and terrible one—a 
struggle which, as regards the extent of the field, the might of the combatants, the 
imperishable interests contended for, apd the momentous consequences dependent 
thereon, has no parallel in history, except the dreadful. conflict of primitive Chris- 
a with Pagan Rome. But if the struggle was tremendous, proportionally 


Hf Look at the Biiestint Church of this land at the close of the Reformation era. 
It would seem as if the very windows of heaven had been opened, and the showers of 
grace had descended in an inundation of spiritual gifts and graces, converting the 
parched lands into pools of water, and the barren wilderness into gardens that bloomed 
and blossomed as the rose. 
Look at the same Church in less than a generation afterwards. What a poor, 
_torpid, shrunken, shrivelled thing! As if the heavens were of brass, and the earth of 
on, and no dew descending, the very waters of the sanctuary became stagnant, and 
red and sent forth a teeming progeny of heresies, schisms, and dissents. Ah, how is 
the beauty of Israel effaced in our high places! How are the mighty fallen! Whence 
the cause of so sad a discomfiture? 


* 


oe: 


. 
| 
: 
r “It was not in the battle; 
bi No tempest gave the shock.” 
hs No—it was the blight and mildew of Jehovah’s displeasure, on account of a 
‘neglected and unfaithful stewardship! 
| 4 The active principle in man, which though often sluggish, and oftener still 
‘strangely misdirected, is never wholly extinguished, was aroused by the Reformation 
into unwonted energy. And most legitimately was it then made to expend its force, 
in the awful struggle with anti-Christian Rome. But, on the total cessation of hostili- 
ties, and the restoration of general peace, how ought the awakened energy of the 
Reformed Church to have been directed and expended? Plainly, and incontrovertibly, 
it ought to have found its constant and determinate object—its divine intended 
employ—in extending the triumphs of Protestant, that is, primitive Christianity over 
the realms of Paganism. But, instead of this, the Church, soon casting aside her 
weapons of aggressive warfare, settled down, in inglorious ease, to enjoy the conquests 
she had won. What then? Did her active energy abate or sink into torpid quies- 
cence? No; as a proper outlet was denied to it, in assaulting the enemy without, it 
recoiled with a vehement rebound, on the heads of the negligent and slothful within. 
That mighty force which should have been rightfully exerted in demolishing the 
heathenism of the nations, soon found ample vent for itself in fomenting intestine 
discords and unhallowed speculation, idle impertinences and heretical controversy— 
thus proving, when left undirected to its proper object, through lukewarmness and 
treasonable neglect, at once the scourge of the faithless professor, and the unhappy 
instrument of the Church’s distraction and decay. 
We have comparatively little or no guilt, in this respect, to charge home upon 
the Reformers. The great work assigned to them by heaven they executed in a 
manner that far exceeds “all Greek, all Roman fame.’ It is at the door of their 
successors—for whom the battle had been fought and victory won—that the blame 
must be laid, for which we can find no palliation. 
_ When, after the Reformation, the Protestant Church arose, as by a species of 


210 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


moral resurrection, with new-born energies, from the deep dark grave of Popish 

ignorance and superstition—then was she in an attitude to have gone forth in the 

spirit of her own prayers, and, in obedience to the Divine command, on the spiritual 
conquest of the nations—and, in the train of every victory, scatter as her trophies the 

means of grace, and as her plentiful heritage, the hopes of a glorious immortality. 
But instead of thus fulfilling the immutable law of her constitution—instead of going 
forth in a progress of outward extension and onward aggression, with a view to 
consummate the great work which formed at once the eternal design of her Head, 
and the chief end of her being—the Church seemed mainly intent on turning the whole 
of her energies inward on herself. Her highest ambition and ultimate aim seemed to 
be to have herself begirt as with a wall of fire that might devour her adversaries—to 
have her own privileges fenced in by laws and statutes of the realm—to have her own 
immunities perpetuated to posterity by solemn leagues and covenants. 

All well, admirably well, had she only borne distinctly in mind that she was thus 
highly favored, not for her own sake alone, but that, by her instrumentality, the glad 
tidings of salvation, through a crucified Redeemer, might be made known to the utter- 
most ends of the earth. All well, admirably well, had she only borne in mind that 
her candlestick was not rekindled solely for her own use—but that the light of the 
gospel might largely emanate therefrom, and be-diffused throughout the nations. All 
well, admirably well, had she only borne in mind that she possessed no exclusive 
proprietary right to the blessings of the covenant of grace—but that, like every other 
branch of the true Church of Christ, she held these in commission for the benefit of a 
whole world lying in wickedness. Ah, had the Church of these lands, in the day of 
her glorious triumph and undivided strength, gone forth in accordance with the letter 
and spirit of her own heaven-inspired prayers—as the Almoner of Jehovah's bounties 
to a perishing world—how different might have been her position now! Instead of 
being compelled to act on the defensive—instead of being reduced to the necessitous 
condition of a besieged city, around which the enemy is drawing his lines of circum- 
vallation, threatening to demolish her towers, dismantle her bulwarks, and erase her 
palaces—leaving her brave sons no alternative but that of raising the desperate war-cry 
of beleaguered valor, “No surrender! No surrender!”—she might all along have been 
acting on the offensive, against “principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in 
high places.” And, after having made the circuit of the globe, she might this day 
have been displaying her standard, engraven with a thousand victories, in front of 
some of the last strongholds of heathenism, and rending the air with the conqueror’s 
shout of “Unconditional submission!” 

Is it, then, too late to retrieve our past errors and criminal neglect? No; blessed 
be God, it is not yet too late. In answer to the prayers of a faithful remnant in this 
land, the Lord hath been pleased once more to regard with special favor that branch 
of the Holy Catholic Church to which we more immediately belong. He hath been 
pleased to look down from heaven, and visit this vine, and the vineyard which His own 
right hand once planted. And now, if ever, is the time to exhibit, not only the model 
of a Gospel Church, but a complete model in full operation. We are placed in very 
different circumstances from those of the early Reformers. We have not, like them, to 
begin anew. We have not, like them, to reckon up our Protestants by units. We have 
not, like them, to struggle on for years in attempting to new-create, as it were, a true 
Church from the dark womb of Popish superstition. We have not, like them, to 
resist unto blood for many years more in establishing the platform of a pure ecclesi- 
astical constitution. No. We at once count our hundreds of thousands of members 
united together as a Church, under one of the noblest, and purest, and most apostolic 
constitutions which the world has ever seen. We have the entire machinery ready 
made, We have only to arise, and, in the strength of our God, set all the parts of it 


Chief End of the Christian Church—Duff. 211 


in motion—and thus, at once, and simultaneously, discharge all the functions, not 
‘merely of an evangelic, but of an evangelistic Church. 
y That Church, which, notwithstanding many acknowledged weaknesses, and even 
alleged deformities, must be regarded as our venerable parent still, may already have 
passed through the different stages of existence. From the feebleness of infancy, she 
ay have speedily risen to the giant vigor of maturity—and, passing the meridian of 
4 er power, may at length have sunk enervated under a load of years. But what of all 
‘this, if, in answer to the prayer, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe 
“upon these dry bones, that they may live’—we behold everywhere a moving and a 
aking amongst them? And if, already, we behold her beginning to exhibit cheering 
‘symptoms of a revival—to exchange the hoariness and withered features of 
age for the greenness and blooming freshness of youth—if, by the new quickening 
of all her powers, she has now resolved to roll back the dark tide of corruption, 
‘which is said to have swollen to mountainous heights with the lapse of time; 
and begun to emulate the purity and ardor of her Reformation faithfulness— 
oh! let her not again be guilty of committing the egregious, the fatal, and it may be, 
the irremediable blunder and sin of attempting to grasp and appropriate all religious 
rights, blessings, and privileges; as if these were a special monopoly, exclusively 
intended for herself and her children, and not rather, what they truly are in the Divine 
purpose and design, a sacred deposit, committed to her for the enriching of the 
famished nations! On the contrary, let her newburnish all the lamps of her noble 
institutions; let her add to these by hundreds—not to dispel the darkness within her 
own territory alone, but for the kindling of a flame that shall rise, and spread, and 
brighten till it illumine the world. Let her revive the golden age of the Christian 
Church, when professing believers, not satisfied with showers of words that con- 
trast so ominously with barren practices, were ever prepared to testify, not only 
the sincerity, but the height and depth, and length and breadth of their gratitude and 
love for the blessed Redeemer, by submitting to the amplest sacrifices of comfort, and 
life, and all—when the Christian treasury was replenished to overflowing by the free- 
will offerings and self-denying, God-honoring people—and when a general assembly 
of apostles and prophets met at Jerusalem, to select and set apart, not the young and 
inexperienced, but the greatest and most redoubted champions to go forth and shake 
the strongholds of error to their basis, by sounding the gospel trump of jubilee. Let 
| the Protestant Church of these lands, in this day of her incipient revival, thus nobly 
| resolve to assume the entire evangelistic character, and implement the Divine con- 
| dition of preservation and prosperity, by becoming the dispenser of gospel blessings, 
not only to the people at home, but as speedily as possible to all the unenlightened 
nations of the earth. And, if there be truth in the Bible—if there be a certainty in 
Jehovah’s promises—if there be reality in past history—she may yet arise and shine, 
fair as the moon, bright as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners. 
Again, we say, the field of Divine appointment is not Scotland or England, but 
“the world”—the world of “all nations.” The prayer of Divine inspiration is, “God 
bless and pity us”—not, that thy way may be known in all Britain and thy saving among 
all its destitute families—but, “that thy way may be known on all the earth, and thy 
saving health among all nations.” The command of Divine obligation is not, “Go 
to the people of Scotland, or of England,” but, “Go into all the world, and preach the 
gospel to every creature.” And if we take our counsel from those blind and deluded 
guides, that would, in spite of the Almighty’s appointment, and in derision of our own 
Prayers, persuade us, altogether, or for an indefinite period onwards, to abandon the 
proper Bible field, and direct the whole of our time, and strength, and resources to 
home; if, at their anti-Scriptural suggestions, we do thus dislocate the Divine order 
f proportion; if we do thus invert the Divine order of magnitude; if we daringly 


| 


212 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


presume to put that last, which God hath put first; to reckon that least which God 
hath pronounced greatest; what can we expect but that He shall be provoked, in sore 
displeasure, to deprive us of the precious deposit of misappropriated grace, and 
inscribe “Ichabod” on all our towers, bulwarks, and palaces? And if He do—then, 
like being smitten with judicial blindness, we may hold hundreds of meetings, deliver 
thousands of speeches, and publish tens of thousands of tracts, and pamphlets, and 
volumes, in defence of our chartered rights and birthright liberties—and all this we 
may hail as religious zeal, and applaud as patriotic spirit. But if such prodigious 
activities be designed solely, or even chiefly, to concentrate all hearts, affections, and 
energies, on the limited interests of our own, own land; if such prodigious activities 
recognize and aim at no higher terminating object than the simple maintenance and 
extension of our home institutions—and that, too, for the exclusive benefit of our own 
people—while, in contempt of the counsels of the eternal, the hundreds of millions of a 
guilty world are coolly abandoned to perish; oh! how can all this appear in the sight 
of heaven as anything better than a national outburst of monopolizing selfishness? 
And how can such criminal disregard of the Divine ordinance, as respects the evange- 
lization of a lost world, fail, sooner or later, to draw down upon us the most dreadful 
visitation of retributive vengeance? 

Thus it was with the Jews of old. Twice, after the creation and the flood, was 
the true religion universal; and if, subsequently, it was contracted in its sphere, and 
shut up within the narrow bounds of a favored locality, it was out of mercy and loving 
kindness to man. It was, that it might not be wholly swept away and lost in the 
swelling tide of an apostasy, which threatened to rise and overwhelm all the kindreds 
of the nations. But, in the Eternal decree, it was ordained—and by the mouth of the 
prophets who spoke in successive ages, as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, it was 
clearly foretold that, in the fullness of time, the true religion should once more become 
universal—that out of Jerusalem the law should go forth to the ends of the earth. 
The inhabitants of Jerusalem, however, resolved that beyond the bounds of Judea, 
their own beloved home, it should not go—and thus dared the Omnipotent to hostile 
collision. And never, never did any people put forth efforts, of a nature so absolutely 
volcanic, in defence of their heaven-ordained institutions. But it was all in order that 
they might wholly monopolize the advantages of these to themselves. Calamitous 
monopoly! Insane opposition! Preservation of the types and shadows for their own 
exclusive benefit was the Jewish watchword. Preservation of the substance in new, 
extended, and remodelled forms for the benefit of the “world” was the Divine watch- 
word. Who could for a moment doubt which must in the end prevail? Surely the 
people that could not presume to contend, in unequal strife, with the full thunder of 
Jehovah’s power, must have been more than ordinarily infatuated! And seized they 
verily were with a judicial infatuation, out of which they were not, and would not, be 
awakened till the tempest of Divine wrath burst upon them with exterminating 
violence! | 

And thus, assuredly, will it be with us, if we do not arise, and speedily resolve to 
discharge all those high Catholic and evangelistic functions that. devolve upon us, as 
a Protestant Church and Protestant nation. Or, shall we blindly and perversely 
determine, alike to scorn the counsels of heaven, and brave the warnings of Provi- 
dence? Then let us only try the fatal, the disastrous experiment! Let us try, if we 
will, and overloo’ wholly, or in great measure, heaven’s irrevocable law, and our own 
plighted obligations to save a lost world—let us try, if we will, and maintain the war- 
fare in defence of our home institutions, altogether or chiefly, for our own benefit 
and that of our children—and as sure as Jehovah’s purposes are unchangeable our 
doom is sealed. By unparalleled exertions we may arrest, for a season, the day of 
national calamity. We may retard, but shall not be able finally to arrest, the progres§ 


6 


; 


Chief End of the Christian Church—Duf. 213 


f 
of national disorganization and decay. The chariot wheels of destruction may be 
_ made to drag more heavily as they roll along the fatal declivity. But nothing, nothing 
shall effectually prevent the ultimate awful plunge of all our institutions—social, civil, 
and religious—into the troubled waters, where they shall be dashed to pieces, amid 
‘rocks and quicksands, in a hurricane of anarchy! 
' To avert a catastrophe so fell and so terrible, oh! let us all imbibe into our inmost 
‘souls the Church’s heaven-inspired prayer—‘‘Lord, bless and pity us, shine on us with 
Thy face.” In order to prove the sincerity wherewith the prayer is uttered, let us put 
forth the mightiest exertions in the endeavor to repair all the ancient channels, and 
open up hundreds of new ones, through wh‘ch the blessing may be expected to 
descend, in refreshing streams, into every congregation, every household, and every 
heart in our own land. But oh! let us not, in blind, and narrow-minded, and anti- 
Christian selfishness, forget the final cause and chief end for the furtherance of which 
the blessing must be mainly sought by us, and for the accomplishment of which it 
must be mainly conferred, if conferred at all, by a gracious God—as emphatically 
taught us in the ever memorable words of his own Holy Spirit, “That so thy way may 
be known upon earth, and thy saving health among all nations.” And let not our 
efforts in attempting to realize the glorious end for which evangelical mercies and 
favors are avowedly sought and bestowed, be either feeble or disproportionate—lest, 
by deficient or contradictory practices, our prayers should prove so many idle mock- 
eries of our God; and our petitions, so many provocations to the High and Holy One, 
_ to withdraw from us altogether those privileges which we already enjoy—if we enjoy 
them only with the selfish and dishonest intention of enriching ourselves by defrauding 
the world. 

Come and let us, with united heart and soul, adopt as our own, the fervid language 
f One who drank deep at the fount of inspiration—One whose presence once glad- 
dened these shores, and tended to chase the darkness from heathen lands—One who 
‘is now of the happy number of glorified spirits that cease not to chant their hallelujahs 
“aro the Throne. And, while we appropriate His glowing words as the vehicle of 


¢ “Waft, waft, ye winds, His story, Till o’er our ransomed nature, 
Ey And you, ye waters, roll, The Lamb for sinners slain, 
& Till, like a sea of glory, Redeemer, King, Creator, 

4 It spread from pole to pole; In bliss return to reign.” 


_ {Alexander Duff was born at Moulin, Perthshire, Scotland, April 25, 1806, and 
"died at Edinburgh February 12, 1878. He went as missionary to India in 1829. He 
_at first belonged to the Church of Scotland, and later joined the Free Church. India 

and India Missions was*written in 1839. 
_____ This sermon was characterized by Dr. A. T. Pierson as Duff's “great sermon.” 
While his sermon or vindication before the Scotch Assembly was the greatest, still 
has so many local references that it would not have the permanent interest that the 


one given will maintain.] 


214 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE SOVEREIGNTY OF jae 


TIMOTHY DWIGHT, S: I. D. Ea 


“O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that 
walketh to direct his steps.”—Jeremiah 10: 23. 


In this passage of Scripture, the prophet, after uttering a-variety of sublime 
declarations concerning the perfections and providence of God, and the follies and sins 
of men, exhibits the progress of life as a way. In this way all men are considered as 
travelling. We commence the journey at our birth; pass on through the several stages 
of childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, and finish it when we enter eternity. The 
accommodations, and the fare, are greatly varied among the various travellers. Some 
find their entertainment plentiful, and agreeable; and some, even luxurious and splen- 


‘did. Others are slenderly provided with food, raiment and lodging; are almost mere 


sufferers; and literally, have not where to lay their heads. 

In the meantime, sorrow and disease, dangers and accidents, like a band of 
marauders, lie in wait for the travellers; and harass, and destroy, a great proportion 
of their number. Of the vast multitude, who continually walk in the path of life, 
almost all disappear long before they reach the goal at which it terminates. A very 
few arrive at the end. Of these every one, dragging heavily his weary feet over the 
last division of the road, teaches us, that this part of his progress is only labor and 
sorrow. 

A remarkable fact, universally attendant on our journey, is recited in the text. 
“O Lord,” says the deeply humbled prophet, “I know that the way of man is not in 
himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” The enterprise is not con- 
trived by ourselves. We are placed in it, and necessitated to accomplish it, by a 
superior and irresistible hand. It cannot but seem strange, that in such a journey we 
should originally be prevented from the ability to direct ourselves; and that, while we 
are compelled to the undertaking, we should be furnished for it in a manner so 
imperfect. Yet such if unquestionably the fact. Nor is the explanation so difficult, 
or so unsatisfactory, as we are prone to believe. God originally intended that all His 
creatures should be dependent on Him for aid, guidance and protection. Nor can it 
be rationally supposed that such a dependence on His perfections and providence is 
either unreasonable or undesirable. The Sovereignty of God which is so clearly and 
strongly visible in this interesting subject, has ever been questioned, and very often 
denied, by mankind. To establish this doctrine in the minds of my audience, is the 
peculiar design of the present discourse. In a sermon, lately delivered in this place 
on the decrees of God, I explained what I intend by the divine Sovereignty. It was 
then observed that “the conduct of God is sovereign, in this sense; that He does 
according to His will, independently and irresistibly, without giving an account of any 
of His matters any farther than He pleases; but that He wills nothing without the 
best reason, whether that reason be disclosed to His creatures, or not; that real glory 
to Himself, and real good to His creation, not otherwise attainable, are universally the 
object to which His pleasure is directed, whether it respects the existence and motions 
of an insect, or the salvation of a man.” It was remarked, also, at that time that, in the 
ordinary sense of the word, God never acts arbitrarily; and that to say, He wills a 


» 


The Sovereignty of God—Dwight. 215 


_ thing because He wills it, is to speak without meaning. All His pleasure, all His 
_ determinations, are perfectly wise and good; founded on the best of all reasons, and 
directed to the best of all purposes. Were He to act in any other manner His provi- 
_ dence would be less wise, and less desirable. 

It will not be questioned, that this doctrine is deeply interesting to man. On this 
life is suspended that which is to come. Consequences, eternal and incomprehensible, 
will flow from those doctrines, which we adopt in the present world. All our conduct 
will then be examined; and will either be approved, or condemned, If we have chosen 
the straight and narrow way prescribed to us, the termination will be happy. If we 
_have preferred the broad and crooked road, it will be deplorable. 

Few of this audience will probably deny the truth of a direct Scriptural declaration. 
With as little reason can it be denied, that most of them apparently live in the very 
manner, in which they would live, if the doctrine were false: or that they rely, chiefly 
at least, on their own sagacity, contrivance and efforts, for success in this life, and that 
e which is to come. As little can it be questioned that such self-confidence is a guide 
‘2B eminently dangerous and deceitful. Safe as we may feel under its direction, our safety 
is imaginary. The folly of others in trusting to themselves we discern irresistibly. 
The same folly they perceive, with equal evidence, in us. Our true wisdom lies in 
_ willingly feeling, and cheerfully acknowledging, our dependence on God; and in com- 
| mitting ourselves with humble reliance to His care and direction. 

With these observations I will now proceed to illustrate the truth of the doctrine. 
| The mode which I shall pursue will, probably, be thought singular. I hope it will be 
| useful. Metaphysical arguments, which are customarily employed for the purpose oi 
- establishing this and several other doctrines of theology, are, if I mistake not, less 
_ Satisfactory to the minds of men at large, than the authors of them appear to believe. 
_ Facts, wherever they can be fairly adduced for this end, are attended with a superior 
_ power of conviction; and commonly leave little doubt behind them. On these, there- 
fore, I shall at the present time rely for the accomplishment of my design. In the 

First place, the doctrine of the text is evident, from the great fact, that the birth 
| and education of all men depend not on themselves. 

. The succeeding events of life are derived, in a great measure at least, from our 
birth. By this event, it is in a prime degree determined whether men shall be princes 
_ or peasants, opulent or poor, learned or ignorant, honorable or despised; whether they 
__ Shall be civilized or savage, freemen or slaves, Christians or heathen, Mohammedans 

or Jews. 

i A child is born of Indian parents in the western wilderness. By his birth he is, 
- of course, a savage. His friends, his mode of life, his habits, his knowledge, his opin- 
ions, his conduct, all grow out of this single event. His first thoughts, his first instruc- 

tions, and all the first objects with which he is conversant, the persons whom he loves, 
- the life to which he addicts himself, and the character which he assumes. are all savage. 

He is an Indian from the cradle; he is an Indian to the grave. To say that he could 

not be otherwise, we are not warranted; but that he is not, is certain. 

Another child is born of a Bedouin Arab. From this moment he begins to be 
an Arabian. His hand is against every man; and every man’s hand is against him. 
_ Before he can walk, or speak, he is carried through pathless wastes in search of food; 
_and roams in the arms of his mother, and on the back of a camel, from spring to 
spring, and from pasture to pasture. Even then he begins his conflict with hunger 
and thirst; is scorched by a vertical sun; shrivelled by the burning sand beneath; and 
‘poisoned by the breath of the Simoon. Hardened thus through his infancy and child- 
_ hood, both in body and mind, he becomes, under the exhortations and example of his 

father, a robber from his youth; attacks every stranger whom he is able to overcome; 
and plunders every valuable thing on which he can lay his hand. 


"i ‘ i‘ 


oa 
q 


—— 


a 


216 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


A third receives his birth in the palace of a British nobleman; and is welcomed 
to the world as the heir apparent of an ancient, honorable and splendid family. As 
soon as he opens his eyes on the light, he is surrounded by all the enjoyments which 
opulence can furnish, ingenuity contrive, or fondness bestow. He is dandled on the 
knee of indulgence; encircled by attendants, who watch and prevent alike his neces- 
sities and wishes; cradled on down; and charmed to sleep by the voice of tenderness 
and care. From the dangers and evils of life he is guarded with anxious solicitude. 
To its pleasures he is conducted by the ever-ready hand of maternal affection. His 
person is shaped and improved by a succession of masters; his mind is opened, invyig- 
orated and refined, by the assiduous superintendence of learning and wisdom. While 
a child, he is served by a host of menials, and flattered by successive trains of visitors. 
When a youth he is regarded by a band of tenants with reverence and awe. His equals 
in age bow to his rank; and multitudes, of superior years, acknowledge his distinction 
by continual testimonies of marked respect. When a man, he engages the regard of 
his sovereign; commands the esteem of the senate; and earns the love and applause of 
his country. 

A fourth child, in the same kingdom, is begotten by a beggar, and born under a 
hedge. From his birth he is trained to suffering and hardihood. He is nursed, if he 
can said to be nursed at all, on a coarse, scanty and precarious pittance; holds life only 
as a tenant at will; combats from the first dawnings of intellect with insolence, cold 
and nakedness; is originally taught to beg and to steal; is driven from the doors of 
men by the porter or the house dog; and is regarded as an alien from the family of 
Adam. Like his kindred worms, he creeps through life in the dust; dies under the 
hedge, where he is born; and is then, perhaps, cast into a ditch, and covered with 
earth, by some stranger, who remembers, that, although a beggar, he still was a man. 

A child enters the world in China; and unites, as a thing of course, with his sottish 
countrymen in the stupid worship of the idol Fo. Another prostrates himself before 
the Lama, in consequence of having received his being in Thibet, and of seeing the 
Lama worshipped by all around him. 

A third, who begins his existence in Turkey, is carried early to the mosque; 
taught to lisp with profound reverence the name of Mohammed; habituated to repeat 
the prayers and sentences of the Koran as the means of eternal life; and induced, in 
a manner irresistibly, to complete his title to Paradise by a pilgrimage to Mecca. 

The Hindoo infant grows into a religious veneration for the cow; and perhaps 
never doubts, that, if he adds to this a solemn devotion to Juggernaut, the Gooroos, 
and the Dewtahs, and performs carefully his ablutions in the Ganges, he shall wash 
away all his sins, and obtain, by the favor of Brahma, a seat among the blessed. 

In our own favored country, one child is born of parents devoted solely to this 
world. From his earliest moments of understanding, he hears and sees nothing com- 
mended, but hunting, horse racing, visiting, dancing, dressing, riding, parties, gaming, 
acquiring money with eagerness and skill, and spending it in gayety, pleasure and 
luxury. These things, he is taught by conversation and example, constitute all the 
good of man. His taste is formed, his habits are riveted, and the whole character of 
his soul is turned to them, before he is fairly sensible that there is any other good. 
The question, whether virtue and piety are either duties or blessings, he probably 
never asks. In the dawn of life he sees them neglected and despised by those whom 
he most reverences; and learns only to neglect and despise them also. Of Jehovah 
he thinks as little, and for the same reason, as a Chinese or a Hindoo. They pay their 
devotions to Fo and to Juggernaut: he, his to money and pleasure. Thus he lives, and 
dies, a mere animal; a stranger to intelligence and morality, to his duty and his God. 

Another child comes into existence in the mansion of Knowledge and Virtue. 
From his infancy, his mind is fashioned to wisdom and piety. In his infancy he is 


; 
} 


The Sovereignty of God—Dwight. 217 


. taught and allured to remember his Creator; and to unite, first in form, and then in 
affection, in the household devotions of the morning and evening. God he knows 
almost as soon as he can know anything. The presence of that glorious being he is 
- taught to realize almost from the cradle; and from the dawn of intelligence, to under- 
stand the perfections and government of his Creator. His own accountableness as 
_ soon as he can comprehend it, he begins to feel habitually, and always. The way of life 
_ through the Redeemer is early, and regularly explained to him by the voice of parental 
_ love; and enforced and endeared in the house of God. As soon as possible, he is 
"enabled to read, and persuaded to “search the Scriptures.” Of the approach, the 
_ danger and the mischiefs of temptations, he is tenderly warned. At the commencement 
ch sin, he is kindly checked in his dangerous career. To God he was solemnly given 


in baptism. To God he was daily commended in fervent prayer. Under this happy 


| 


cultivation he grows up, “like an olive tree in the courts of the Lord;” and, green, 
beautiful and flourishing, he blossoms; bears fruit; and is prepared to be transplanted 
__ by the divine hand to a kinder soil in the regions above. 
4 How many, and how great, are the differences in these several children! How 
3 plainly do they all, in ordinary circumstances, arise out of their birth! From their 
i birth is derived, of course, the education which I have ascribed to them; and from this 
_ education spring in a great measure both their character and their destiny. The place, 
_ the persons, the circumstances, are here evidently the great things which, in the 
_ ordinary course of Providence, appear chiefly to determine what the respective men 
shall be; and what shall be those allotments which regularly follow their respective 
_ characters. As, then, they are not at all concerned in contriving or accomplishing 
either their birth or their education; it is certain that, in these most important par- 
 ticulars, the way of man is not in himself. God only can determine what child shail 
spring from parents, wise or foolish, virtuous or sinful, rich or poor, honorable or 
‘infamous, civilized or savage, Christian or heathen. 

I wish it to be distinctly understood, and carefully remembered, that “in the moral 
conduct of all these individuals no physical necessity operates.” Every one of them 
is absolutely a free agent; as free as any created agent can be. Whatever he does is the 

result of choice, absolutely unconstrained. 

Let me add, that not one of them is placed in a situation in which, if he learns 

_and performs his duty to the utmost of his power, he will fail of being finally accepted. 


Secondly. The doctrine is strikingly evident from this great fact also; that the 

course of life, which men usually pursue, is very different from that, which they have 
_ intended. 

Human life is ordinarily little else than a collection of disappointments, Rarely is 
the life of man such as he designs it shall be. Often do we fail of pursuing, at all, the 
business originally in our view. The intentional farmer becomes a mechanic, a sea- 
man, a merchant, a lawyer, a physician, or a divine. The very place of settlement, and 
of residence through life, is often different, and distant, from that which was originally 
contemplated. Still more different is the success which follows our efforts. 

All men intend to be rich and honorable; to enjoy ease; and to pursue pleasure. 
But how small is the number of those who compass these objects! In this country, 
the great body of mankind are, indeed, possessed of competence; a safer and happier 
lot than that to which they aspire; yet few, very few are rich. Here also, the great 
body of mankind possess a character, generally reputable; but very limited is the 
number of those who arrive at the honor which they so ardently desire, and of which 
they feel assured. Almost all stop at the moderate level, where human efforts appear 
to have their boundary established in the determination of God. Nay, far below this 
level, creep multitudes of such as began life with full confidence in the attainment of 
distinction and splendor. 


218 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


The Lawyer, emulating the eloquence, business, and fame, of Murray or Dunning, 
and secretly resolved not to slacken his efforts, until all his rivals in the race of glory 
are outstripped, is often astonished, as well as broken-hearted, to find business and 
fame pass by his door, and stop at the more favored mansion of some competitor, in 
his view less able, and less discerning, than himself. 

The Physician, devoted to medical science, and possessed of distinguished powers 
of discerning and removing diseases, is obliged to walk; while a more fortunate 
empiric, ignorant and worthless, rolls through the streets in his coach. 

The Legislator beholds with anguish and amazement the suffrages of his coun- 
trymen given eagerly to a rival candidate, devoid of knowledge and integrity; but 
skilled in flattering the base passions of men, and deterred by no hesitations of con- 
science, and no fears of infamy, from saying and doing anything which may secure 
his election. ; 

The Merchant often beholds with a despairing eye his own ships sunk in the 
ocean; his debtors fail; his goods unsold, his business cramped; and himself, his family 
and his hopes ruined; while a less skilful but more successful neighbor sees wealth 
blown to him by every wind, and floated ‘on every wave. 

The crops of the Farmer are stinted; his cattle die; his markets are bad; and the 
purchaser of his commodities proves to be a cheat who deceives his confidence, and 
runs away with his property. 

Thus the darling schemes and fondest hopes of man are daily frustrated by time. 
While sagacity contrives, patience matures, and labor industriously executes; disap- 
pointment laughs at the curious fabric, formed by so many efforts, and gay with so 
many brilliant colors, and while the artists imagine the work arrived at the moment 
of completion, brushes away the beautiful web, and leaves nothing behind. 

The designs of men, however, are in many respects not unfrequently successful. 
The lawyer and physician acquire business and fame; the statesman, votes; and the 
farmer, wealth. But their real success, even in this case, is often substantially the 
same with that already recited. In all plans, and all labors, the supreme object is to 
become happy. Yet, when men have actually acquired riches and honor, or secured 
to themselves popular favor, they still find the happiness, which they expected, eluding 
their grasp. Neither wealth, fame, office, nor sensual pleasure can yield such good 
as we need. As these coveted objects are accumulated, the wishes of man always grow 
faster than his gratifications. Hence, whatever he acquires he is usually as little satis- 
fied and often less than before. 

A principal design of the mind in laboring ior these things is to become superior 
to others. But almost all rich men are obliged to see, and usually with no small 
anguish, others richer than themselves; honorable men, others more honorable; 
voluptuous men, others who enjoy more pleasure. The great end of the strife is 
therefore unobtained; and the happiness expected never found. Even the successful 
competitor in the race utterly misses his aim. The real enjoyment existed, althoug 
it was unperceived by him, in the mere sirife for superiority. When he has outstripp 
all his rivals the contest is at an end: and his spirits, which were invigorated only by 
contending, languish for want of a competitor. 

Besides, the happiness in view was only the indulgence of pride, or mere anim: 
pleasure. Neither of these can satisfy or endure. A rational mind may be, and oite 
is, so narrow and grovelling, as not to aim-at any higher good, to understand its natu 
or to believe its existence. Still, in its original constitution, it was formed with 4 
capacity for intellectual and moral good, and was destined to find in this good its onl 
satisfaction. Hence, no inferior good will fill its capacity or its desires. Nor can this 
bent of its nature ever be altered. Whatever other enjoyment, therefore, it may attai 
it will, without this, still crave and still be unhappy. 


The Sovereignty of God—Dwight. 219 


No view of the ever-varying character’and success of mankind in their expecta- 


_ factorily than that of the progress and end of a class of students in this seminary. At 
_ their first appearance here they are ail exactly on the same level. Their character, 
_ their hopes and their destination are the same. They are enrolled on one list; and 
enter upon a collegiate life with the same promise of success. At this moment they 
are plants, appearing just above the ground; all equally fair and flourishing. Within 
a short time, however, some begin to rise above others; indicating by a more rapid 
_ growth a structure of superior vigor, and promising both more early and more 
- abundant fruit. 
, Some are studious, steadfast, patient of toil, resolved on distinction, in love with 
_ science, and determined with unbroken ambition never to be left behind by their com- 
-panions. Of these a part are amiable, uniform in their morals, excellent in their dis- 
_ positions, and honorable by their piety. Another part, although less amiable, are still 
decent, pleasant in their temper, uncensurable in their conduct, and reputable in their 
character. 

Others are thoughtless, volatile, fluttering from object to object, particularly from 


Others still are openly vicious, idle, disorderly; gamblers, profane, apparently 


infidels; enemies to themselves, undutiful to their parents, corrupters of their com- 


. i 


_panions, and disturbers of the collegiate peace. 

% When the class, which these individuals originally constituted, leaves this seat of 
science, a number of them will always be missing. Some of these have been sent away 
‘ by the mandate of law; some have voluntarily deserted their education; and some not 

_ yery unfrequently have gone to the grave. Of those who remain, the character and 

_ the prospects have usually become widely different. The original level is broken, and 
broken for ever. 

How different from all this were their parents’ expectations and. their own! 

‘ Still, when they enter the world, they all intend to be rich, honorable and happy. 
_ Could they look into futurity, and discern the events which it will shortly unfold; how 
_ changed would be their apprehensions! 

One, almost at his entrance into life, knowing but inexperienced, discerning but 
not wise, urged by strong passions, and secure in self-confidence, pushes boldly forward 
to affluence and distinction; but, marked as the prey of cunning and the victim of 
temptation, is seduced from prudence and worth to folly, vice, and ruin. His property 
is lost by bold speculation, his character by licentiousness, and the man himself by the 

disappointment of his hopes and the breaking of his heart. 

Another, timid, humble, reluctant to begin, and easily discouraged from pursuing, 

_insensible to the charms of distinction, and a stranger to the inspiration of hope, with- 
out friends to sustain and without prospects to animate, begins to flag, when he 

_ commences his connection with the world, creeps through life because he dares not 
attempt to climb, and lives and dies, scarcely known beyond the limits of his native 
village. 


+ 


A third yields himself up a prey to sloth, and shrinks into insignificance for want 
of exertion. 


A fourth, possessed of moderate wishes, and preferring safety to grandeur, steers 
of design between poverty and riches, obscurity and distinction, walks through life 
without envying those who ride, and finds, perhaps, in quiet and safety, in an even 


course of enjoyment, and in the pleasure of being beloved rather than admired, the ~ 


<n 


226 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


happiness which his more restless companions seek from opulence, power and splendor 
in vain. 

A fifth, cheerful, fraught with hope, and assured by the gayety and bustle, which 
he sees around him, that the world is filled with good, moves onward to acquire it, 
without a suspicion of disappointment or danger. At once he is astonished to find, that 
men, who look pleasantly on him, are not his friends; that a smile of approbation is 
no evidence of good will; and that professions and promises convey to him no assur- 
ance of aid or comfort. To be dependent, he soon learns, is to be friendless, and to 
need assistance, a sufficient reason for having it refused. The business, which he 
expected to court his acceptance, flies from him; the countenance, on which he reposed, 
is withdrawn, and the hopes, which he gayly cherished, begin early to wither. Alone, 
forgotten, unprepared for struggles, and never mistrusting that struggles would be 
necessary, he is overset by the suddenness and violence of the shock, and either falls 
into listlessness and stupor, or dies of a broken heart. 

A sixth, from imbecility of constitution or the malignant power of accident, 
sickens and expires, when he has scarcely begun to live. 

A seventh, with vigorous industry, effort and perseverance, goes steadily forward 
to wealth and distinction. Yet even he finds the void of his mind unsupplied by reai 
good. He is rich and great, but not happy. That enchanting object, happiness, 
wrought into such elegance of form and adorned with such brilliant colors, has ever 
fascinated his mind. Lost in wonder and delight, and gazing with an eager and 
bewildered eye, he never considered, that in this world the rainbow with all its splendor 
was only painted on a cloud; and, while he roves from field to field, and climbs from 
one height to another in pursuit of the fairy vision, is astonished to behold it still 
retreat before him, and finally vanish for ever. 

Were I to ask the youths who are before me, what are their designs and expecta- 
tions concerning their future life, and write down their several answers, what a vast 
difference would ultimately be found between those answers, and the events which 
would actually befall them! To how great a part of that difference would facts, over 
which they could have no control, give birth! How many of them will in all proba- 
bility be less prosperous, rich, and honorable than they now intend: how many, 
devoted to employments, of which at present they do not even dream; in circumstances, 
of which they never entertained even a thought; behind those whom they expected to 
outrun, poor, sick, in sorrow or in the grave. 


Thirdly. The doctrine is further evident from the fact, that Life does not depend 
upon man. 

All intend to live, and feel secure of many years: but how often does death frus- 
trate this intention, and dissolve the charm of this security! How many leave the 
world at an immature age! How many, in the midst of bold projects, sanguine desires 
and strenuous exertions! How many asterisks appear with a melancholy aspect even 
in the younger classes of the triennial catalogue: marking solemnly, to a considerate 
mind, the termination of parental hopes, and the vanity of youthful designs! Where 
now are multitudes of those who a little while since lived and studied and worshipped 
here, with fond views of future eminence and prosperity, and with as fair a promise as 
can be found of future success, usefulness and honor? 

As we are unable to assure ourselves even of a single day, much more of a long 


‘life, it is plain, that our eternal state lies beyond our control. As death finds us, so the 


judgment will certainly find us. He therefore, who kills, as well as makes alive, at his 
pleasure, must of course hold in his hands, only, all our allotments which lie beyond 
the grave. ; 

I have not called up this doctrine at the present time, for the purpose of entering 
into any of those metaphysical disquisitions, which restless curiosity, rather than sound 


. 
, 


The Sovereignty of God—Dwight. 221 


yisdom, has commonly founded on it; but on the one hand to give it its proper place 
in this system of discourses, and on the other to derive from it several practical obser- 
yations, which, there is reason to hope, may, by the blessing of God, be useful to those 
vyho hear me, especially to those who are students in this seminary. 


Remarks: 
First. You see here, my young friends, the most solid reasons for gratitude to 


God, only, directed that you should be born in this land, and in the midst of peace, 
plenty, civilization, freedom, learning and religion; and that your existence should not 
commence in a Tartarian forest or an African waste. God, alone, ordered that you 
should be born of parents who knew and worshipped Him, the glorious and eternal 
Jehovah; and not of parents who bowed before the Lama or the ox, an image of brass 
‘or the stock of atree. In the book of His counsels, your names, so far as we are able 
_ to judge, were written in the fair lines of mercy. It is of His overflowing goodness, 
_ that you are now here; surrounded with privileges, and beset with blessings, educated 
to knowledge, usefulness and piety, and prepared to begin an endless course of happi- 
ness and glory. All these delightful things have been poured into your lap, and have 
come, unbidden, to solicit your acceptance. If these blessings awaken not gratitude, 
“it cannot be awakened by blessings in the present world. If they are not thankfully 
felt by you, it is because you know not how to be thankful. Think what you are, and 
_ where you are; and what and where you just as easily might have been. Remember, 
_ that, instead of cherishing tender affections, imbibing refined sentiments, exploring the 
- field of science, and assuming the name and character of the sons of God, you might as 
_ easily have been dozing in the smoke of a wigwam, brandishing a tomahawk, or danc- 
g round an embowelled captive; or that you might yourselves have been embowelled 
‘by the hand of superstition, and burnt on the altars of Moloch. If you remember 
these things, you cannot but call to mind, also, who made you to differ from the 
_ miserable beings who have thus lived and died. 


5 Secondly. This doctrine forcibly demands of you moderate desires and expec- 
tations. 

é There are two modes in which men seek happiness in the enjoyments of the 
- Present world. ‘Most persons freely indulge their wishes, and intend to find objects 
‘sufficient in number and value to satisfy them.” A few “aim at satisfaction by propor- 
tioning their desires to the number and measure of their probable gratifications.” By 
the doctrine of the text, the latter method is stamped with the name of wisdom, and 
on the former is inscribed the name of folly. Desires indulged grow faster and farther 
than gratifications extend. Ungratified desire is misery. Expectations eagerly indulged 
) an d terminated by disappointment, are often exquisite misery. But how frequently 
i a expectations raised, only to be disappointed, and desires let loose, only to termi- 
. om in distress! The child pines for a toy: the moment he possesses it, he throws it 
and cries for another. When they are piled up in heaps around him, he looks at 
‘them without pleasure, and leaves them without regret. He knew not, that all the 
good, which they could yield, lay in expectation; nor that his wishes for more would 
.. faster than toys could be multiplied, and is unhappy at last for the same 
on as at first: his wishes are ungratified. Still indulging them, and still believing 
at the gratification of them will furnish the enjoyment for which he pines, he goes 

on, only to be unhappy. 
Men are merely taller children. Honor, wealth and splendor are the toys for 
which grown children pine; but which, however accumulated, leave them still disap- 
‘Pointed and unhappy. God never designed that intelligent beings should be satisfied 


£ 


— eee ee aE. = 


222 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


with these enjoyments. By his wisdom and goodness they were formed to derive their 
happiness and virtue. 


Moderated desires constitute a character fitted to acquire all the good which this 
world can yield. He, who is prepared, in whatever situation he is, therewith to be con- 
tent, has learned effectually the science of being happy, and possesses the alchymic 
stone, which will change every metal into gold. Such a man will smile upon a stool, 
while Alexander at his side sits weeping on the throne of the world. 


The doctrine of the text teaches you irresistibly that, since you cannot command 
gratifications, you should command your desires; and that, as the events of life do 
not accord with your wishes, your wishes should accord with them. Multiplied enjoy- 
ments fall to but few men, and are no more rationally expected than the highest prize 
in a lottery. But a well regulated mind, a dignified independence of the world, and a 
wise preparation to possess one’s soul in patience, whatever circumstances may exist, 
is in the power of every man, and is greater wealth than that of both Indies, and 
greater honor than Caesar ever acquired. 


Thirdly. As your course and your success through life are not under your control, 
you are strongly urged to commit yourselves to God, who can control both. 

That you cannot direct your course through the world, that your best concerted 
plans will often fail, that your sanguine expectations will be disappointed, and that 
your fondest worldly wishes will terminate in mortification, cannot admit of a momen- 
tary doubt. That God can direct you, that He actually controls all your concerns, and 
that, if you commit yourselves to His care, He will direct you kindly and safely, can 
be doubted only of choice. Why, then, do you hesitate to yield yourselves and your 
interests to the guidance of your Maker? There are two reasons which appear espe- 
cially to govern mankind in this important concern: they do not and will not realize 
the agency of God in their affairs; and they do not choose to have them directed as 
they imagine He will direct them. The former is the result of stupidity; the latter, of 
impiety. Both are foolish in the extreme, and not less sinful than foolish. 

The infinitely wise, great and glorious Benefactor of the universe has offered to 
take men by the hand, lead them through the journey of life, and conduct them to His 
own house in the heavens. The proof of His sincerity in making this offer has been 
already produced. He has given His own Son to live, and die, and rise, and reign, 
and intercede for our race. “Herein is love,” if there ever was love; ‘‘not that we have 
loved Him, but that He has loved us.” That He, who has done this, should not be 
sincere, is impossible. St. Paul, therefore, triumphantly asks what none can answer: 
“He, that spared net His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He 
not with Him also freely give us all things?” Trust, then, His word with undoubting 
confidence; take His hand with humble gratitude, and with all the heart obey His 
voice, which you will everywhere hear, saying, “this is the way, walk ye therein.” In 
sickness and.in health, by night and by day, at home and in crowds, He will watch 
Over you with tenderness inexpressible. He will “make you lie down in green 
pastures, lead you beside the still waters and guide you in paths of righteousness, for 
His name’s sake. He will prepare a table before you in the presence of your enemies, 
and cause your cup to run over with blessings. When you pass through the waters 
of affliction, He will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. 
When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned; neither shall the flame 
kindle on you.” From their native heavens, He will commission those charming 
twin-sisters, Goodness and Mercy, to descend and “follow you all your days.” 

But if you wish God to be your guide and your friend, you must conform to His 
pleasure. Certainly you cannot wonder that the infinitely Wise should prefer His 
own wisdom to yours, and that He should choose for His children their allotments, 


The Sovereignty of God—Dwight. 223 


rather than leave them to choose for themselves. That part of His pleasure, which 
Ly you are to obey, is all summed up in the single word, Duty, and is perfectly disclosed 
_ in the Scriptures. The whole scheme is so formed as to be plain, easy, profitable, and 
delightful; profitable in hand, delightful in the possession. Every part and precept of 
_ the whole is calculated for this end, and will make you only wise, good, and happy. 
Life has been often styled an ocean, and our progress through it a voyage. The 
_ ocean is tempestuous and billowy, overspread by a cloudy sky, and fraught beneath 
with shelves and quicksands. The voyage is eventful beyond comprehension, and at 
‘the same time full of uncertainty, and replete with danger. Every adventurer needs 
to be well prepared for whatever may befall him, and well secured against the manifold 
hazards of losing his course, sinking in the abyss, or of being wrecked against the 


_ These evils have existed at all times. The present, and that part of the past 
which is known to you by experience, has seen them multiplied beyond example. It 
has seen the ancient and acknowledged standards of thinking violently thrown down. 
Religion, morals, government, and the estimate formed by man of crimes and virtues, 
and of all the means of usefulness and enjoyment, have been questioned, attacked, 
“and in various places, and with respect to millions of the human race, finally over- 
_ thrown. A licentiousness of opinion and conduct, daring, outrageous, and rending 
_ asunder every bond, formed by God or man, has taken place of former good sense 
‘and sound morals, and has long threatened the destruction of human good, Industry, 
‘cunning, and fraud have toiled with unrivalled exertions to convert man into a savage, 
and the world into a desert. A wretched and hypocritical philanthropy, also, not less 
‘mischievous, has stalked forth as the companion of these ravagers: a philanthropy born 
a dream, bred in a novel, and living only in professions. This guardian genius of 
ag interests, this friend of human rights, this redresser of human wrongs, is yet 
' without a heart to feel, and without a hand to bless. But she is well furnished witin 
ngs, with eyes, and a tongue. She can talk, and sigh, and weep at pleasure, but can 
neither pity nor give. The objects of her attachment are either knaves and villains at 
home, or unknown sufferers beyond her reach abroad. To the former, she ministers 
the sword and the dagger, that they may fight their way into place, and power, and 
profit. At the latter, she only looks through a telescope of fancy, as an astronomer 
‘searches for stars invisible to the eye. To every real object of charity within her 
teach she complacently says, ‘Be thou warmed, and be thou filled; depart in peace.” 
By the daring spirit, the vigorous efforts, and the ingenious cunning, so indus- 
triously exerted on the one hand, and the smooth and gentle benevolence, so softly 
professed on the other, multitudes have been, and you easily may be, destroyed. The 
mischief has indeed been met, resisted, and overcome; but it has the heads and the 
) lives of the Hydra, and its wounds, which at times have seemed deadly, are much more 
teadily healed than any good man could wish, than any sober man could expect. 
_ Hope not to escape the’assaults of this enemy: To feel that you are in danger will 
| ever be a preparation for your safety. But it will be only such a preparation; your 
| deliverance must ultimately and only flow from your Maker. Resolve, then, to com- 
‘mit yourselves to Him with a cordial reliance on His wisdom, power, and protection. 
Consider how much you have at stake, that you are bound to eternity, that your 
existence will be immortal, and that you will either rise to endless glory or be lost in 
absolute perdition. Heaven is your proper home. The path, which I have recom- 
mended to you, will conduct you safely and certainly to that happy world. Fill up 
life, therefore, with obedience to God, with faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
ntance unto life, the obedience to the two great commands of the Gospel, with 
supreme love to God and universal good- will to men, the obedience to the two great 
commands of the law. On all your sincere endeavors to honor Him, and befriend 


224 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


your fellow-men, He will smile; every virtuous attempt He will bless; every act of 
obedience He will reward. Life in this manner will be pleasant amid all its sorrows; 
and beams of hope will continually shine through the gloom, by which it is so often 
overcast. Virtue, the seed that cannot die, planted from heaven, and cultivated by 
the divine hand, will grow up in your hearts with increasing vigor, and blossom in 
your lives with supernal beauty. Your path will be that of the just, and will gloriously 
resemble the dawning light, “which shines brighter and brighter, to the perfect day.” 
Peace will take you by the hand, and offer herself as the constant and delightful com- 
‘panion of your progress. Hope will walk before you, and with an unerring finger 
point out your course; and Joy, at the end of the journey, will open her arms to 
receive you. You will “wait on the Lord, and renew your strength; will mount up 
with wings, as eagles; will run, and not be weary; will walk, and not faint.” 


[The sermon is another selection from “Half Hours With Great Preachers,” 
through the permission of the publishers, Porter & Coates, Philadelphia. 

Timothy Dwight, S. T. D., LL. D., a learned and able theologian of the Congrega- 
tional Church, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, May 14th, 1752. Much of 
his worth and labors in life were owing to his mother’s training—a daughter of the 
great Jonathan Edwards. At the age of seventeen he graduated with honors from 
Yale College, acted as a tutor therein for six years, was licensed to preach in 1777, and 
served the year following as a chaplain in the American army. Pastoral and academic 
duties, mainly at Greenfield, intervened till his appointment as president of Yale Col- 
lege and professor of theology, in 1795. These duties he discharged with conscientious 
fidelity till his death, January 11th, 1817. To each course of students he preached a 
series of sermons, forming a systematic survey of theology. These were first published 
a half century ago, in five volumes, entitled: “Theology Explained and Defended in a 
Series of Sermons,” 173 in all, and deserve a continued popularity. ] 


THE FALL AND RECOVERY OF MAN. 


CHRISTMAS EVANS. 


“For if, through the offense of one, many be dead; much more the grace of God, 
and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” 
—Romans 5: 15. 


Man was created in the image of God. Knowledge and perfect holiness were 
impressed upon the very nature and faculties of his soul. He had constant access to 
his Maker, and enjoyed free communion with Him, on the ground of his spotless, 
moral rectitude. But alas! the glorious diadem is broken; the crown of righteousness 
is fallen. Man’s purity is gone, and his happiness is forfeited. “There is none 
tighteous; no, not one.’ “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” 
But the ruin is not hopeless. What was lost in Adam, is restored in Christ. His 
blood redeems us from bondage, and His Gospel gives us back the forfeited 
_ inheritance. ‘For if, through the offense of one, many be dead; much more the grace 
of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto 
many.” Let us consider:—First, The corruption and condemnation of man; and 
Secondly, his gracious restoration to the favor of his offended God. 


; I. To find the cause of man’s corruption and condemnation, we must go back 

to Eden. The eating of the ‘forbidden tree’”’ was “the offense of one,’”’ in consequence 
Biot which “many are dead.” This was the “sin,” the act of “disobedience,” which 
“brought death into the world, and all our woe.” It was the greatest ingratitude to 
_ the Divine bounty, and the boldest rebellion against the Divine sovereignty. The 
_ royalty of God was contemned; the riches of His goodness slighted; and His most 
desperate enemy preferred before Him, as if He were a wiser counsellor than infinite 


_ wisdom. Thus man joined in league with hell, against heaven; with demons of the bot- 
_ tomless pit, against the Almighty Maker and Benefactor; robbing God of the obedience 
due to His command, and the glory due to His name; worshipping the creature, in- 

_ stead of the Creator; and opening the door to pride, unbelief, enmity, and all wicked 

and abominable passions. How is the “noble vine,” which was planted “wholly a right 

_ seed,” “turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine!” 

" Who can look for pure water from such a fountain? “That which is born of the 
flesh is flesh.” All the faculties of the soul are corrupted by sin; the understanding 
j dark; the will perverse; the affections carnal; the conscience full of shame, remorse, 
_ confusion, and mortal fear. Man is a hard-hearted and stiff-necked sinner; loving 

darkness rather than light, because his deeds are evil; eating sin like bread, and drink- 

_ ing iniquity like water; holding fast deceit, and refusing to let it go. His heart is 

_ desperately wicked; full of pride, vanity, hypocrisy, covetousness, hatred of truth, and 

hostility to all that is good. 

This depravity is universal. Among the natural children of Adam, there is no 
exemption from the-original taint. ‘The whole world lieth in wickedness.” ‘We are 
all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness is as filthy rags.” The corruptior 
may vary in the degrees of development, in different persons; but the elements are in 
all, and their nature is everywhere the same; the same in the blooming youth, and the 
withered sire; in the haughty prince, and the humble peasant; in the strongest giant, 


226 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and the feeblest invalid. The enemy has “come in like a flood.” The deluge of sin 
has swept the world. From the highest to the lowest, there is no health or moral 


soundness. From the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, there is nothing but q 


wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores. The laws, and their violation, and the 
punishments everywhere invented for the suppression of vice, prove the universality 
of the evil. The bloody sacrifices, and various purifications, of the pagans, show the 
handwriting of remorse upon their consciences; proclaim their sense of guilt, and their 
dread of punishment. None of them are free from the fear which hath torment, what- 
ever their efforts to overcome it, and however great their boldness in the service of sin 
and Satan. “Mene! Tekel!’” is written on every human heart. “Wanting! wanting!” 
is inscribed on heathen fanes and altars; on the laws, customs, and institutions of 
every nation; and on the universal consciousness of mankind. 


This inward corruption manifests itself in outward actions. “The tree is known 
by its fruit.” As the smoke and sparks of the chimney show that there is fire within; 
so all the “filthy conversation” of men, and all “the unfruitful works of darkness” in 
which they delight, evidently indicate the. pollution of the source whence they pro- 
ceed. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” The sinner’s speech © 
betrayeth him. ‘Evil speaking” proceeds from malice and envy. “Foolish talking 
and jesting,” are evidence of impure and trifling thoughts The mouth full of cursing 
and bitterness, the throat an open sepulchre, the poison of asps under the tongue, the 
feet swift to shed blood, destruction and misery in their paths, and the way of peace 
unknown to them, are the clearest and amplest demonstration that men “have gone 
out of the way,” “have together become unprofitable.” We see the bitter fruit of the 
same corruption in robbery, adultery, gluttony, drunkenness, extortion, intolerance, 
persecution, apostasy, and every evil work—in all false religions; the Jew, obstinately 
adhering to the carnal ceremonies of an abrogated law; the Mohammedan, honoring 
an impostor, and receiving a lie for a revelation from God; the Papist, worshipping 
images and relics, praying to departed saints, seeking absolution from sinful men, and 
trusting in the most absurd mummeries for salvation; the Pagan, attributing divinity 
to the works of his own hands, adoring idols of wood and stone, sacrificing to malig- 
nant demons, casting his children into the fire or the flood as an offering to imaginary 
deities, and changing the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the beast 
and the worm. 

“For these things sake the wrath of God cometh upon the children of disobedi- 


ence.’ They are under the sentence of the broken law; the malediction of Eternal — 


Justice. “By the offense of one, judgment came upon all men unto condemnation.” 
“THe that believeth not is condemned already.” “The wrath of God abideth on him.” 


“Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law, © 
to do them.” ‘Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of his 


hands shall be given him.” “They that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, shall reap 
the same.” “Upon the wicked the Lord shall rain fire, and snares, and a horrible 
tempest; this shall be the portion of their cup.” “God is angry with the wicked every — 
day; if he turn not He will whet his sword; He hath bent His bow, and made it 
ready.” } 
Who shall describe the misery of fallen man! His days, though few, are full of 
evil. Trouble and sorrow press him forward to the tomb. All the world, except 
Noah and his family, are drowning in the deluge. A storm of fire and brimstone is” 
fallen from Heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah. The earth is opening her mouth to. 
swallow up alive Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Wrath is coming upon “the Beloved 
City,” even ‘“‘wrath unto the uttermost.” The tender and delicate mother is devouring 
her darling infant. The sword of men is executing the vengeance of God. The eart 
is emptying its inhabitants into the bottomless pit. On every hand are “confused 


ising ei 


The Fall and Recovery of Man—Evans. 227 


ioises, and garments rolled in blood.” Fire and sword fill the land with consternation 
ind dismay. Amid the universal devastation, wild shrieks and despairing groans fill 
he air. God of mercy! is Thy ear heavy, that Thou canst not hear? or Thy arm 
shortened, that Thou canst not save? The heavens above are brass, and the earth 
yeneath is iron; for Jehovah is pouring His indignation upon His adversaries, and 
He will not pity or spare. 

Verily, “the misery of man is great upon him!’ Behold the wretched fallen 
‘reature! The pestilence pursues him. The leprosy cleaves to him. Consumption is 
yasting him. Inflammation is devouring his vitals. Burning fever has seized upon 
he very springs of life. The destroying angel has overtaken the sinner in his sins. 
[he hand of God is upon him. The fires of wrath are kindling about him, drying up 
‘very well of comfort, and scorching all his hopes to ashes. Conscience is chastising 
jim with scorpions. See how he writhes! Hear how he shrieks for help! Mark 
what agony and terror are in his soul, and on his brow! Death stares him in the 
ace, and shakes at him his iron spear. He trembles, he turns pale, as a culprit at the 
Jar, as a convict on the scaffold. He is condemned already. Conscience has pro- 
1ounced the sentence. Anguish has taken hold upon him. Terrors gather in battle 
irray about him. He looks back, and the storms of Sinai pursue him; forward, and 
jell is moved to meet him; above, and the heavens are on fire; beneath, and the world 
s burning. He listens, and the judgment trump is calling; again, and the brazen 
thariots of vengeance are thundering from afar; yet again, and the sentence penetrates 
his soul with anguish unspeakable—‘Depart! ye accursed! into everlasting fire, pre- 
pared for the devil and his angels!” 

Thus, “by one man, sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death 
passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” They are “dead in trespasses and 
sins;”’ spiritually dead, and legally dead; dead by the mortal power of sin, and dead by 
the condemnatory sentence of the law; and helpless as sheep to the slaughter, they are 
driven fiercely on by the ministers of wrath to the all-devouring grave and the lake of 
fire! . 

But is there no mercy? Is there no means of salvation? Hark! amidst all this 
prelude of wrath and ruin, comes a still small voice, saying: “Much more the grace of 
God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto 
many.” 


II. This brings us to our second topic, man’s gracious recovery to the favor of 
his offended God. 

I know not how to present to you this glorious work, better than by the following 
figure. Suppose a vast graveyard, surrounded by a lofty wall, with only one entrance, 
which is by a massive iron gate, and that is fast bolted. Within are thousands and 
millions of human beings, of all ages and classes, by one epidemic disease bending to 
the grave. The graves yawn to swallow them, and they must all perish. There is no 
balm to relieve, no physician there. Such is the condition of man as a sinner. All 
have sinned; and it is written, “The soul that sinneth shall die.” But while the 
unhappy race lay in that dismal prison, Mercy came and stood at the gate, and wept 
over the melancholy scene, exclaiming—‘“O that I might enter! I would bind up their 
wounds; I would relieve their sorrows; I would save their souls!” An embassy of 

ngels, commissioned from the court of Heaven to some other world, paused at the 
ihe, and Heaven forgave that pause. Seeing Mercy standing there, they cried:— 
“Mercy! canst thou not enter? Canst thou look upon that scene and not pity? Canst 
ou pity, and not relieve?” Mercy replied: “I can see!’ and in her tears she added, 
‘I can pity, but I can not relieve!” ‘Why canst thou not enter?” inquired the 
eavenly host. “Oh!” said Mercy, “Justice has barred the gate against me, and I 
ust not—can not unbar it!” At this moment, Justice appeared, as if to watch the 


~* 


228 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


gate. The angels asked, “Why wilt thou not suffer Mercy to enter?” He sternly 
replied: “The law is broken, and it must be honored! Die they or Justice must!” — 
Then appeared a form among the angelic band like unto the Son of God. Addressing — 
Himself to Justice, He said: “What are thy demands?’ Justice replied: “My ; 
demands are rigid; I must have ignominy for their honor, sickness for their health, 
death for their life. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission!” “Justice,” — 
said the Son of God, “I accept thy terms! On Me be this wrong! Let Mercy enter, — 
and stay the carnival of death!” “What pledge dost thou give for the performance 
of these conditions?” “My word; My oath!” “When wilt thou perform them?” “Four 
thousand years hence, on the hill of Calvary, without the walls of Jerusalem.” The ~ 
bond was prepared, and signed and sealed in the presence of attendant angels. Justice — 
was satisfied, the gate. was opened, and Mercy entered, preaching salvation in the 
name of Jesus. The bond was committed to patriarchs and prophets. A long series — 
of rites and ceremonies, sacrifices and obligations, was instituted to perpetuate the 
memory of that solemn deed. At the close of the four thousandth year, when Daniel’s 
“Seventy weeks” were accomplished, Justice and Mercy appeared on the hill of Calvary. 
“Where,” said Justice, “is the Son of God?” “Behold Him,” answered Mercy, “an 
the foot of the hill!’ And there He came, bearing His own cross, and followed by 
His weeping church. Mercy retired, and stood aloof from the scene. Jesus ascended © 
the hill, like a lamb for the sacrifice. Justice presented the dreadful bond, saying 
“This is the day on which this article must be cancelled.” The Redeemer took it. 
What did He do with it? Tear it to pieces, and scatter it to the winds? No! He 
nailed it to His cross, crying, “It is finished!’ The victim ascended the altar. Justice 
called on holy fire to come down and consume the sacrifice. Holy fire replied: “I . 
come! I will consume the sacrifice, and then I will burn up the world!” It fell upon 
the Son of God, and rapidly consumed His humanity; but when it touched His Deity, 
it expired. Then was there darkness over the whole land, and an ‘earthquake shook — 
the mountain; but the heavenly host broke forth in rapturous song—Glory to God in 
the highest! on earth peace! good will to man!” ie q 
Thus grace has abounded, and the free gift has come upon all, and the Gospel 
has gone forth proclaiming redemption to every creature. “By grace ye are saved, 
through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any 
man should boast.” By grace ye are loved, redeemed, and justified. By grace ye are 
called, converted, reconciled and sanctified. Salvation is wholly of grace. The plan, 
the process, the consummation are all of grace. 7 


b 


| 


“Grace all the work shall crown, 
Through everlasting days, : | 

It lays in Heaven the topmost stone, 
And well deserves the praise!” 


“Where sin abounded, grace hath much more abounded.” “Through the offense 
of one, many were dead.” And as men multiplied, the offense abounded. The waters 
deluged the world, but could not wash away the dreadful stain. The fire fell from 
heaven, but could not burn out the accursed plague. The earth opened her mout 
but could not swallow up the monster sin. The law thundered forth its threat fro 
the thick darkness on Sinai; but could not restrain, by all its terrors, the children o 
disobedience. Still the offense abounded, and multiplied as the sands on the se 
shore. It waxed bold, and pitched its tents on Calvary, and: nailed the Laveen 
atree. But in that conflict sin received its mortal wound. The victim was the vict 
He fell. but in His fall He crushed the foe. He died unto sin, but sin and death we: 
crucified upon His cross. Where sin abounded to condemn, grace hath much mo: 
abounded to justify. Where sin abounded to corrupt, grace hath much more abound 


The Fall and Recovery of Man—Evans. 229 


to purify. Where sin abounded to harden, grace hath much more abounded to soften 
‘and subdue. Where sin abounded to imprison men, grace hath much more abounded 
to proclaim liberty to the captives. Where sin abounded to break the law and dis- 
honor the Lawgiver, grace hath much more abounded to repair the breach and efface 
the stain. Where sin abounded to consume the soul as with unquenchable fire and a 
gnawing worm, grace hath much more abounded to extinguish the flame and heal the 
wound. Grace hath abounded! It hath established its throne on the merit of the 
Redeemer’s sufferings. It hath put on the crown, and laid hold of the golden scepter, 
and spoiled the dominion of the prince of darkness, and the gates of the great cemetery 
are thrown open, and.-there is the beating of a new life-pulse throughout its wretched 
population, and immortality is walking among the tombs! 
This abounding grace is manifested in the gift of Jesus Christ, by whose mediation 
our reconciliation and salvation are effected. With Him, believers are dead unto sin, 
and alive unto God. Our sins were slain at His cross, and buried in His tomb. His 
“resurrection hath opened our graves, and given us an assurance of immortality. “God 
commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us; 
“much more, then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath 
‘through Him; for if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death 
of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” 
; “The carnal mind is enmity against God; it is not subject to the law of God, 
neither indeed can be.” Glory to God, for the death of His Son, by which this enmity 
slain, and reconciliation is effected between the rebel and the law! This was the 
“unspeakable gift that saved us from ruin; that wrestled with the storm, and turned it 
away from the devoted head of the sinner. Had all the angels of God attempted to 
_ stand between these two conflicting seas, they would have been swept to the gulf of 
destruction. “The blood of bulls and goats, on Jewish altars slain,” could not take 
. ay sin, could not pacify the conscience. But Christ, the gift of Divine Grace, 
“Paschal Lamb by God appointed,” a “sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood 
han they” bore our sins and carried our sorrows, and obtained for us the boon of 
ernal redemption. He met the fury of the tempest, and the floods went over His 
ad; but His offering was an offering of peace, calming the storms and the waves, 
agnifying the law, glorifying its Author, and rescuing its violator from the wrath 
‘and ruin. Justice hath laid down His sword at the foot of the cross, and amity is 
‘restored between heaven and earth. 
Hither, O ye guilty! come and cast away your weapons of rebellion! Come with 
your bad principles and wicked action;; your unbelief, and enmity, and pride; and 
throw them off at the Redeemer’s feet! God is here, waiting to be gracious. He will 
receive you; He will cast all your sins behind His back, into the depths of the sea; 
and they shall be remembered against you no more forever. By Heaven’s “Unspeak- 
able gift,” by Christ’s invaluable atonement, by the free and infinite grace of the 


ather and the Son, we persuade you, we beseech you, we entreat you, “be ye recon- 
iled to God!” 


It is by the work of the Holy Spirit within us, that we obtain a personal interest 
in the work wrought on Calvary for us. If our sins are cancelled, they are also 
cified. If we are reconciled in Christ, we fight against our God no more. This is 
the f fruit of faith. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” May the Lord 
inspire in every one of us that saving principle! 
; _ But those who have been restored to the Divine favor may sometimes be cast 
wn and dejected. They have passed through the sea, and sung praises on the shore 
deliverance; but there is yet between them and Canaan “a waste howling wilderness,” 
g and weary pilgrimage, hostile nations, fiery serpents, scarcity of food, and the 
Jordan. Fears within and fightings without, they may grow discouraged, and 


_ 


. 
S 
f 


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230 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


yield to temptation and murmur against God, and desire to return to Egypt. But 
fear not, thou worm Jacob! Reconciled by the death of Christ; much more, being — 
reconciled, thou shalt be saved by His life. His death was the price of our redemp- ’ 
tion; His life insures liberty to the believer. If by His death He brought you through 
the Red Sea in the night, by His life He can lead you through the river Jordan in the © 
day. If by His death He delivered you from the iron furnace in Egypt, by His life 
He can save you from all the perils of the wilderness. If by His death he conquered 
Pharaoh, the chief foe, by His life He can subdue Sihon, king of the Amorites, and 
Og, the king of Bashan. “We shall be saved by His life.” “Because He liveth, we 
shall live also.” ‘Be of good cheer!” The work is finished; the ransom is effected; 
the kingdom of heaven is opened to all believers. “Lift up your heads and rejoice,” 
“ye prisoners of hope!” There is no debt unpaid, no devil unconquered, no enemy 
within’ your hearts that has not received a mortal wound! “Thanks be unto God, 
who giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ!” 


[This sermon is from the Cross edition of Evans’ sermons, and is considered 
one of his most effective discourses. 

Christmas Evans was born at Ysgarwen, Cardiganshire, South Wales. At the 
age of seventeen he could not read, but being awakened spiritually he soon learned to 
read the Bible. He preached his first sermon when eighteen, but devoted four more 
years to study, and joined the Baptists. In 1792 he visited South Wales, where his 
preaching resulted in the conversion of multitudes. He was forty-six years old when 
he settled at Anglesea, remaining fourteen years. His published sermons are the 
result of his labors at Cardiff.] 


(231) 


WHAT GOD REQUIRES. 


FREDERICK W. FARRAR, D. D., F. R. S. 


Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? 
all I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the 
ord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers gf oil? Shall 
I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 


‘but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?—Micah 6: 6-3. 
; Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most High 
God? It is indeed a momentous question, the most momentous that can be framed in 
“mortal words. For as we enter deeper into the valley of life, and its rocks begin more 
and more to overshadow us, to what do all the other questions of life reduce them- 
Selves? To any man who has the slightest sense of religion—to any man, who, with 
all his perfections, yet solemnly feels that if life is to be life at all, every year must 
_ bring him nearer and nearer to the great Light—to all whom the sorrows and disap- 
b intments of life have forever disenchanted—no hope, no~thought, no question 
_ femains but this, Is God’s love with me? Am I at peace with Him? In one word, 
am I His? Oh! if not, how shall I, the lowliest of His creatures—how shall I 
"approach Him? What else can I care for but this? Remove the fear of God’s 
displeasure, and I have no other fear. Give me the joy of His countenance, and I 
ask no other joy. Whatever may have been the illusions of youth, they have vanished 
om the eyes of manhood. The winds have carried those bubbles beyond the river, 
, as we seemed to touch them, they have burst; but one thing have I desired of the 
Lord, that will I seek after, even to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit 
His Temple. Wherewith then shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before 
the Most High God? 
_ Many and various, in all ages, have been the answers to that question, but in 
irit and principle they reduce themselves to the three, which in these verses are 
acitly rejected, that the fourth may be established for all time. And, therefore, this 
is one of those palmary passages of Holy Writ which should be engraved on every 
instructed conscience as indelibly ds by a pen of iron upon the living rock. It formu- 
F the best teaching of religion; it corrects the worst errors of superstition. Every 
book of Scripture, every voice of Nature, every judgment of conscience re-echoes and 
firms it. Happy will it be for us, if we will use it as a lamp to guide our footsteps, 
law to direct our life. 


' (1.) The first answer is, Will Levitical sacrifices suffice? “Shall I come before 
im with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?” That is, “Shall I do some 
tward act, or acts, to please God?” Men are ever tempted to believe in this virtue 
doing something; to ask, as they often asked our Lord, ‘‘What shall I do to inherit 
al life?” And there are times when such external systems may, for ignorant and 
-necked nations, be a wise safeguard. It was so for the Israelites at the Exodus, 
ressed and imbruted as they were by long slavery, and saturated with heathen 
itions of cruelty and vice. The Levitical institutes—so multiplex, so trivial, so 
tricate, so material, so burdensome—statutes which were not good, and judgments 


. ae 


232 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


whereby they could not live—were best suited, intolerable as was their yoke, to a 
people which in honor of their brute idol, could sit down to eat, and to drink, and rise 
up to play, while the body of heaven in its clearness had scarcely vanished from their 
eyes, and the majesty of darkness still rolled around the burning hill. There have 
been attempts in all ages to revive such ceremonials, or others like them, because they 
are easier than true holiness, and tend to pacify and appease the perverted conscience. 
But God’s own Word about them is plain; they perish in the using; they cannot 
sanctify to the purifying of the flesh; nay, in so far as they are substituted for a heart 
religion—in so far as they are used to compound for the weightier matters of the law— 
in so far as they furnish an excuse for selfishness, for censoriousness, for party spirit— 
they are eminently displeasing to God. External observances, without inward 
holiness, are but the odious whiteness of the sepulchre. “Bring no more vain obla- 
tions, incense is an abomination unto Me,” saith God to such; “your sabbaths and 
calling of assemblies I cannot away with.’ Thousands, I suppose, have been asking 
themselves this Lent, Need we fast? Yes, my brethren, if you think that you ought; 
and if you know and find that by doing so you increase your religious earnestness, and 
strengthen your moral life. But not if you think that fasting is an end instead of a 
means; not if it renders you more self-satisfied; not if it makes you less active in 
works of good; not if it renders you less lenient to your own failings. “Eat an ox, 
and be a Christian,” said the Jesuit Fathers to a penitent who could not abstain from 
meat. What is the passionate, indignant language of the Prophet Isaiah on this 
subject? ‘“‘Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the first of wicked- 
ness; is it such a fast that I have chosen? to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to 
spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable 
day to the Lord?” No; fasting may be necessary, only do not take it for religion;— 
but, on the other hand, look at home; loose the bands of wickedness, your own and 
others; undo the heavy burdens, your own and others; take the beam out of your 
own eyes; wash you, make ycu clean; put away the evil of your doings from before 
Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, That is dearer in God’s eyes than per- 
petual sacrifice, holier and purer than days of unbroken fast. 


(2) If then we cannot please God by merely doing, can we by giving? “Will the - 
Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, and ten thousands of rivers of oil?” Shall 


‘we like the Pagans try to bribe God? Shall we make His altars swim with the blood 


of hecatombs, and fill his sanctuaries with votive gold? Or shall we, like terrified 
sinners in the Middle Ages, think to buy off His anger by bequeathing our possessions 
to charity or to the Church? Ah! my brethren, I suppose that while not one of us 
is so ignorant as not to know the duty of charity, none of us is so exquisitely foolish 
as to imagine that he can by gifts win his way one step nearer to the great White 
Throne. Sacrifices, to bribe Him whose are all the ‘beasts of the forest, and the cattle 
upon a thousand hills? Gold or gems to Him, before whom the whole earth, were it 
one entire and perfect chrysolite, would be but as an atom in the sunbeam? Ah, no! 


“Vainly we offer each ample oblation; 
Vainly with gifts would His favor implore; 

Better by far is the heart’s adoration, 
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.” 


“Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it Thee, but Thou delightest not in 


burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite 
heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” , 
(3.) If then neither by doing, nor by giving, can we please God, what third | 
experiment shall we try? Shall it be by suffering? Shall I, lacerating my heart in its” 
tenderest affections, give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body, they 


ths: 


y 
; 


What God Requires—Farrar. 233 
¥) 
sin of my soul? This, too, has been frequently and fearfully attempted; frequently, 
and fearfully, and more persistently than any other, because in all ages, and in all 
nations, men have invested God with the attributes of terror and of wrath. Could we, 
my brethren, judge rightly of the glorious sun in heaven, if we only saw it glaring 
uridly through the whirled sands of the desert, or dimmed and distorted by the 
1ideous ice-fogs of the North? And can we, my brethren, judge of God—the Sun of 
souls—when He looms dark and terrible through the crimson mist of haunted 
consciences and guilty hearts? No; when men have been able only to thus regard 
[ im, then all the day long His terrors have they suffered with a troubled mind. He, 
the All-loving, the All-merciful, has seemed to them cruel, wrathful, irresistible, delight- 
g in smoking victims and streaming blood. And thus alike in sunny Greece, and 
stately Rome, and apostatizing Israel, and scorching Africa, and in the far sweet islands 
f the sea, to hideous emblems of some savage deity—a Moloch, an Odin, an Atua, a 
eeva—in the rushing stream, or the molten furnace, or on the blade of the conse- 
crated sword, has the blood of man been shed in abominable sacrifice, or his life 
robbed of all health and joy in horrible self-torture. Nothing seemed too sanguinary 
or revolting to appease the sense of sin, or dim the glare of awakened wrath. 


“Our sires knew well 

y The fitting course for such; dark cells, dim lamps, 
\ A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm, 

4 No mossy pillow blue with violets.” 


They fled from the society of their fellows to vast wilderness, or desolate hills, or 
Wave-washed caverns. Knowing their sin, not knowing their Savior—gazing in 
remorse and tears at the splendors of Sinai, not coming in humble penitence to the 
Cross ef Calvary—life became to them an intolerable fear. When a man feels that the 

€ of God is fixed upon him in anger, and knows not how to escape, then no mountain. 
En: too heavy, no sea too deep, no solitude too undisturbed. He says with the poet, 


“Place me alone in some frail boat 

2 Mid th’ horrors of an angry sea, 

, Where I, while time may move, shall float 
¥ Despairing either land or day. 


‘Or under earth my youth confine 

' To the night and silence of a cell, 

' Where scorpions round my limbs may twine— 
) Oh, God! so thus forgive me Hell.” 

tt But has any man ever found these sufferings sufficient? Has any man ever 
attested that he found forgiveness through voluntary torture? Or is not that true 
which is said of the prophets of Baal, “They leaped upon the altar, and cried aloud, 
and cut themselves after their manner. And it came to pass that there was neither 
voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded?” 


_ (4.) Not then by doing, not by giving, not by suffering may we come before the 
ord, or bow ourselves before the Most High God. Oh! if we could thus be at peace 
Him, who would not be doing incessantly, who would not give all that he has, 
ho would not cheerfully suffer, as never martyr suffered yet? Yet let us not imagine 
that if men have acted thus in sincerity, it will all have been in vain. No, let us take 
comfort, knowing that God is love. Though not by any number of formal actions 
can we enter into eternal life, yet no work done from’ a right motive, however erro- 
neous, can be the fruit of an utterly corrupted tree. Though no self-inflicted anguish 


ew &- 


234 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


can be acceptable to God, yet “‘agonies of pain and blood shed in rivers are better 
than the soul spotted and bewildered with mortal sin.” Though no giving shall 
purchase interest in heaven, yet the poorest and slightest act which has sprung from 
a true charity—the kindly word spoken in Christ’s name, the cup of cold water given 
for His sake—shall not miss its reward. You may remember how, in the old legend, 
St. Brendan, in his northward voyage, saw a man sitting upon an iceberg, and with © 
horror recognized him to be the traitor Judas Iscariot; and the traitor told him how, Wy 
at Christmas time, amid the drench of the burning lake, an angel had touched his arm, 
and bidden him for one hour to cool his agony on an iceberg in the Arctic sea; and 
when he asked the cause of this mercy, bade him recognize in him a leper to whom in 
Joppa streets he had given a cloak to shelter from the wind, and how for that one kind 
deed this respite was allotted him. Let us reject the ghastly side of the legend, and 
accept its truth. Yes, charity—love to God as shewn in love to man—is better than all 
burnt-offering and. sacrifice. Yet if we condemn the errors of other ages in their mode 
of approaching God, let us at the same time humbly remember that, better had we be 
at ceremonials all day long—better be -giving in the most mercenary spirit of self- 
interest, better even be a Moloch worshipper, drowning with drums the cries of his — 
little infant as he passes it through the fire—than to be a Christian, living, as alas! so 
many live without God in the world; living in pride, fulness of bread, abundance of 
idleness; living, while they are unjust, unmerciful, uncharitable, unholy, in self-satisfied 
pharisaism, in gluttonous indifference, in sensual ease. 


Yet if all these be at the best but unacceptable ways, what is the true way of 
pleasing God? If not by doing, not by giving, not by suffering, then how? What is 
the Prophet’s answer? My brethren, by being. “He hath shewed thee, O man, what — 
is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, © 
and to walk humbly with thy God?’ Not once or twice only in Scripture are we 
taught the same great lesson. “Behold,” said Samuel to the presumptuous king, 
‘behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” “I 
spake not to your fathers concerning burnt-offerings,” said Jeremiah, “but this thing 
commanded I them, Obey my voice.” Four times over—thrice to the murmuring 
Pharisees, once to the inquiring Scribe who was not far from the kingdom of heaven— 
did our Lord expressly sanction the same high principle. By being, then, shall we 
please God; but by being what? By being correct in the pronunciation of a half-a- — 
dozen shibboleths? By being diligent in a few observances? By fasting? By attend- 
ing Church services? By saying “Lord, Lord,” when, all the while, the heart is 
unsanctified, the lips uncharitable, the passions unsubdued? No, my brethren, no a 
thousand times; but by being just, and merciful, and humble before our God. It is © 
the answer of all the Prophets, it is the answer of all the Apostles, it is the answer of © 
Christ Himself. Justice that shall hate the wicked balances, justice that shall recoil 
from oppression and violence, justice that shall loathe the small vices of gossip, scandal, 
and spite; mercy that shall make us careful 


“Never to mix our pleasures or our pride 
With anguish of the meanest thing that feels;” 


————————— 


mercy that shall cherish for every sorrow which can be alleviated, and every pang that — 
can be assuaged, a divine, trembling, self-sacrificing love; mercy which, looking neither ~ 
to be admired, nor honored, nor loved, shall live for the good of others, not its own; ~ 
and lastly, a humble reverence towards God, which shall be the source alike of that 
high justice, and that heavenly mercy—oh this is what God requires, and thus alone — 
can we live acceptably to Him. Yea, acceptably; for this is to live im Christ. In Him — 
was justice fulfilled; in Him was mercy consummated; in Him was such humility of 

reverence towards His heavenly Father that, alike on the hills of Galilee, and in the 


What God Requires—Farrar. 235 


garden of Gethsemane, we see Him absorbed in constant prayer. Oh! my brethren, 
od needs not our services; He needs not our formule; He needs not our gifts; least 
of all does He need our anguish; but He needs us, our hearts, our lives, our love; He 
needs it, and even this He gives us; shedding abroad the spirit of adoption in our 
hearts. If we resist not that Spirit we need no longer be what we are; no longer what 
we have been. All meanness and malice, all deceitfulness and fraud, all injustice and 
insolence, all pharisaism and uncharity, all worldliness and lust will fall away from us, 
‘and we shall be clothed, as with a wedding garment which Christ shall give, with 
justice, and humanity, and purity and love. Oh! if we would indeed know how to 
serve Him aright, let us put away all idle follies and fancies of our own; and seating 
urselves humbly at His feet, amid those poor and ignorant multitudes who sat listen- 
ing to Him among the mountain lilies, let us learn the spirit of His own beatitudes— 
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth; blessed are the merciful for they 
shall obtain mercy; blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they 
shall be filled. 
_ [Very Rev. Frederick William Farrar, D. D., was born Aug. 7, 1831, and received 
his education at King William’s College, Isle of Man, King’s College, London, and 
Trinity College, Cambridge. He was sixteen years master at Harrow, chaplain to the 
Queen, Hulsean lecturer at Cambridge, Bampton lecturer at Oxford; chaplain to 
‘speaker of House of Commons, and dean of Canterbury since 1895. He is author of 
a very prominent Life of Christ, Darkness and Dawn, an excellent story of early 
¢ hristianity, and some thirty other volumes.] 


{ 
; 
| 


236 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


GOD’S LOVE FOR A SINNING WORLD. 


CHARLES G. FINNEY. 


“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoso- 
ever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’—John 3: 16. 


Sin is the most expensive thing in the universe. Nothing else can cost so much. 
Pardoned or unpardoned, its cost is infinitely great. Pardoned, the cost falls chiefly on 
the great atoning Substitute; unpardoned, it must fall on the head of the guilty sinner. 

The existence of sin is a fact everywhere experienced—everywhere observed. 
There is sin in our race everywhere, and in awful aggravation. 

Sin is the violation of an infinitely important law—a law designed and adapted to 
secure the highest good of the universe. Obedience to this law is naturally essential to 
the good of creatures. Without obedience there could be no blessedness even in 
heaven. 

As sin is a violation of a most important law, it cannot be treated lightly. No 
government can afford to treat disobedience as a trifle, inasmuch as everything—the 
entire welfare of the government and of all the governed—turns upon obedience. Just 
in proportion to the value of the interests at stake is the necessity of guarding law and 
of punishing disobedience. 

The law of God must not be dishonored by anything He shall do. It has been 
dishonored by the disobedience of man; hence, the more need that God should stand 
by it, to retrieve its honor. The utmost dishonor is done to law by disowning, disobey- 
ing, and despising it. All this sinning man has done. Hence, this law being not only 
good, but intrinsically necessary to the happiness of the governed, it becomes of all 
things most necessary that the law-giver should vindicate his law. He must by all 
means do it. P 

Hence, sin has involved God’s government in a vast expense. Either the Jaw must 
be executed at the expense of the well-being of the whole race, or God must submit to 
suffer the worst results of disrespect to His law—results which in some form must 
involve a vast expense. 

Take for example any human government. Suppose the righteous and necessary 
laws which it imposes are disowned and dishonored. In such a case the violated law 
must be honored by the execution of its penalty, or something else not less expensive, 
and probably much more so, must be endured. Transgression must cost happiness, 
somewhere, and in vast amount. 

In the case of God’s government it has been deemed advisable to provide a sub- 
stitute—one that should answer the purpose of saving the sinner, and yet of honoring 
the law. This being determined on, the next great question was—How shall the 
expense be met? 

The Bible informs us how the question was in fact decided. By a voluntary con- 
scription—shall I call it—or donation? Call it as we may, it was a voluntary offering. 
Who shall head the subscription? Who shall begin where so much is to be raised? 


Who will make the first sacrifice? Who will take the first step in a project so vast? — 
The Bible informs us. It began with the Infinite Father. He made the first great — 


4 


NN eee ee 


_— 


a see ee ee ee ee ee ee oe 


ci. 


God's Love for a Sinning World—Finney, 237 


donation. He gave His only begotten Son—this to begin with—and having given 
‘Him first, He freely gives all else that the exigencies of the case can require. First, 
He gave His son to make the atonement due to law; then gave and sent His Holy 
Spirit to take charge of this work. The Son on His part consented to stand as the 
‘representative of sinners, that He might honor the law, by suffering in their stead. He 
poured out His blood, made a whole life of suffering a free donation on the altar— 
withheld not His face from spitting, nor His back from stripes—shrunk not from the 
‘utmost contumely that wicked men could heap on Him. So the Holy Ghost also 
devotes Himself to most self-denying efforts unceasingly, to accomplish the great 
object. 

_ It would have been a very short method to have turned over His hand upon the 
wicked of our race, and sent them all down quick to hell, as once He did when certain 
angels “kept not their first estate.” Rebellion broke out in heaven. Not long did God 
_ bear it, around His lofty throne. But in the case of man He changed His course— 
id not send them all to hell, but devised a vast scheme of measures, involving most 
amazing seli-denials and self-sacrifices, to gain men’s souls back to obedience and 


_ For whom was this great donation made? ‘God so loved the world,” meaning 
_ the whole race of men. By the “world” in this connection cannot be meant any par- 
ticular part only, but the whole race, Not only the Bible, but the nature of the case 
‘shows that the atonement must have been made for the whole world. For plainly if it 
had not been made for the entire race, no man of the race could ever know that it was 
_ made for himself, and therefore not a man could believe on Christ in the sense of 
' receiving by faith the blessings of the atonement. There being an utter uncertainty as 
_ to the persons embraced in the limited provisions which we now suppose to be made, 
the entire donation must fail through the impossibility of rational faith for its recep- 
_ tion. Suppose a will is made by a rich man bequeathing certain property to certain 
_ unknown persons, described only by the name of “‘the elect,” Thcy are not described 
_ otherwise than by this term, and all agree that although the maker of the will had the 
ndividuals definitely in his mind, yet that he left no description of them, which either 
the persons themselves, the courts, nor any living mortal can understand. Now such 
a will is of necessity altogether null and void. No living man can claim under such a 


ince it does not embrace all the residents of Oberlin, and does not define which of 
hem, ail is lost. All having an equal claim and none any definite claim, none can 
‘inherit. If the atonement were made in this way, no living man would have any valid 
_ reason for believing himself one of the elect, prior to his reception of the Gospel. 
ence he would have no authority to believe and receive its blessings by faith. In fact, 


As the case is, however, the very fact that a man belongs to the race of Adam— 
‘that the fact that he is human, born of woman, is all-sufficent. It brings him within the 
‘Pale. He is one of the world for whom God gave His Son, that whosoever would 
believe in Him might not perish, but have everlasting life. 


The subjective motive in the mind of God for this great gift was love, love to the 
orld. God so loved the world that He gave His Son to die for it. God loved the 
‘universe also, but this gift of His Son sprang from love to our world. True in this 
reat act He took pains to provide for the interests of the universe. He was careful 
to do nothing that could in the least let down the sacredness of His law. Most care- 
did He intend’to guard against misapprehension as to His regard for His law 


ad for the high interests of obedience and happiness in His moral universe. He meant 


238 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


once for all to preclude the danger lest any moral agent should be tempted to under- 
value the moral law. 

Yet farther, it was not only from love to souls, but from respect to the spirit of 
the law of His own eternal reason, that He gave up His Son to die. In this the 
purpose to give up His Son originated. The law of His own reason must be honored 
and held sacred. He may do nothing inconsistent with its spirit. He must do every- 
thing possible to prevent the commission of sin and to secure the confidence and love 


of His subjects. So sacred did He hold these great objects that He would baptize His” 


Son in His own blood, sooner than peril the good of the universe. Beyond a question 
it was love and regard for the highest good of the universe that led Him to sacrifice 
His own beloved Son. 

Let us next consider attentively the nature of this love. The text lays special 
stress on this—God so loved—His love was of such a nature, so wonderful and so 
peculiar in its character, that it led Him to give up His only Son to die. More is 
evidently implied in this expression than simply its greatness. It is most peculiar in 
its character. Unless we understand this, we shall be in danger of falling into the 
strange mistake of the Universalists, who are forever talking about God’s love for 
sinners, but whose notions of the nature of this love never lead to repentance or to 
holiness. They seem to think of this love as simply good nature, and conceive of God 
only as a very good-natured being, whom nobody need to fear. Such notions have not 
the least influence towards holiness, but the very opposite. It is only when we come 
to understand what this love is in its nature that we feel its moral power promoting 
holiness. 

It may be reasonably asked, if God so loved the world with a love characterized by 
greatness, and by greatness only, why did He not save all the world without sacrificing 
His Son? This question suffices to show us that there is deep meaning in this word 
“so,” and should put us upon a careful study of this meaning. 


1. This love in its nature is not complacency—a delight in the character of the 
race. This could not be, for there was nothing amiable in their character. For God 


to have loved such a race complacently would have been infinitely disgraceful to 
Himself. : > 


2. It was not a mere emotion or feeling. It was not a blind impulse, though 
many seem to suppose it was. It seems to be often supposed that God acted as men 
do when they are borne away by strong emotion. But there could be no virtue in this. 
A man might give away all he is worth under such a blind impulse of feeling, and be 
none the more virtuous. But in saying this we do not exclude all emotion from the 
love of benevolence, nor from God’s love for a lost world. He had emotion, but not 
emotion only. Indeed the Bible everywhere teaches us that God’s love for man, lost 
in his sins, was paternal—the love of a father for his offspring—in this case, for a 
rebellious, froward, prodigal offspring. In this love there must of course blend the 
deepest compassion. 


3. On the part of Christ, considered as Mediator, this love was fraternal. “He 
is not ashamed to call them brethren.’ In one point of view He is acting for brethren, 
and in another for children. The Father gave Him up for this work and of course 
sympathizes in the love appropriate to its relations. 


4. This love must be altogether disinterested, for He had nothing to hope or to 
fear—no profit to make out of His children if they should be saved. Indeed, it is 
impossible to conceive of God as being selfish, since His love embraces all creatures 
and all interests according to their real value. No doubt He took delight in saving 
our race—why should He not? It is a great salvation in every sense, and greatly does 


* 


God’s Love for a Sinning World—Finney., 239 


swell the bliss of heaven—greatly will it affect the glory and the blessedness of the 
infinite God. He will eternally respect Himself for love so disinterested. He knows 
so that all His holy creatures will eternally respect Him for this work and for the 


‘ 


5. This love was zealous—not that cold-hearted state of mind which some sup- 
pose—not an abstraction, but a love, deep, zealous, earnest, burning in His soul as a 
that nothing can quench. 


6. The sacrifice was a most self-denying one. Did it cost the Father nothing to 
give up His own beloved Son to suffer, and to die such a death? If this be not self- 
‘denial, what can be? Thus to give up His Son to so much suffering—is" not this the 
noblest self-denial? The universe never could have the idea of great self-denial but 


7. This love was particular because it was universal; and also universal because 
‘it was particular. {God loved each sinner in particular, and therefore loved all. Because 
He loved all impartially, with no respect of persons, therefore He loved each in 
particular. 


_ 8. This was a most patient love. How rare to find a parent so loving his child as 
never to be impatient. _Let me go round and ask, how many of you, parents, can say 
that you love all your children so well, and with so much love, and with love so wisely 

controlling, that you have never felt impatient towards any of them—so that you can 
take them in your arms under the greatest provocations and love them down, love 
‘them out of their sins, love them into repentance and into a filial spirit? Of which of 
your children can you say, Thank God, I never fretted against that child—of which, 
_ if you were to meet him in heaven, could you say, I never caused that child to fret? 

Often have I heard parents say, I love my children, but oh, how my patience fails me! 
_ And, after the dear ones are dead, you may hear their bitter moans, Oh, my soul, how 
could I have caused my child so much stumbling and so much sin! 

But God never frets—is never impatient. His love is so deep and so great that 
He is always patient. 

Sometimes, when parents have unfortunate children—poor objects of compassion 
—they can bear with anything from them; but when they are very wicked, they seem 
to feel that they are quite excusable for being impatient. In God’s case, these are not 
unfortunate children, but are intensely wicked—intelligently wicked. But oh, His 
amazing patience—so set upon their good, so desirous of their highest welfare, that 
however they abuse Him, He sets Himself to bless them still, and weep them down, 
and melt them into penitence and love, by the death of His Son in their stead. 


9. This is a jealous love, not in a bad sense, but in a good sense—in the sense 
of being exceedingly careful lest anything should occur to injure those He loves. 
Just as husband and wife who truly love each other are jealous with ever wakeful 
jealously over each other’s welfare, seeking always to do all they can to promote each 
other’s true interests. 

_ This donation is already made—made in good faith—not only promised, but 

actually made. The promise, given long before, has been fulfilled. The Son has come, 

has died, has made the ransom and lives to offer it—a prepared salvation to all who 

will embrace it. 

_ The Son of God died not to appease vengeance, as some seem to understand it, 

but under the demands of law. The law had been dishonored by its violation. Hence, 
ist undertook to honor it by giving up to its demands His suffering life and 


- 


240. Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


atoning death. It was not to appease a vindictive spirit in God, but to secure the 
highest good of the universe in a dispensation of mercy. 
Since this atonement has been made, all men in the race have a right to it. It is 


a se: 


open to every one who will embrace it. Though Jesus still remains the Father’s Son, © 


yet by gracious right He belongs in an important sense to the race—to everyone; so 
that every sinner has an interest in His blood if he will only come humbly forward 
and claim it. God sent His Son to be the Savior of the world—of whomsoever would 
believe and accept this great salvation. 

God gives His Spirit to apply this salvation to men. He comes to each man’s 
door and knocks, to gain admittance if He can, and show each sinner that he may 
now have salvation. Oh, what a labor of love is this! 

This salvation must be received, if at all, by faith. This is the only possible way. 
God’s government over sinners is moral, not physical, because the sinner is himself 
a moral and not a physical agent. Therefore, God can influence us in no way unless 
we will give Him our confidence. He never can save us by merely taking us away to 
some place called heaven—as if change of place would change the voluntary heart. 
There can, therefore, be no possible way to be saved but by simple faith. 


Now do not mistake and suppose that embracing the Gospel is simply to believe | 


these historical facts without truly receiving Christ as your Savior. If this had been 
the scheme, then Christ had need only to come down and die; then go back to heaven 
and quietly wait to see who would believe the facts. But how different is the real case! 
Now Christ comes down to fill the soul with His own life and love. Penitent sinners 
hear and believe the truth concerning Jesus, and then receive Christ into the soul to 
live and reign there supreme and forever. On this point many mistake, saying, If I 
believe the facts as matters of history it is enough. No! No! This is not it by any 
means. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” The atonement was 
indeed made to provide the way so that Jesus could come down to human hearts and 
draw them into union and sympathy with Himself—so that God could let down the 


arms of His love and embrace sinners—so that law and government should not be 


dishonored by such tokens of friendship shown by God toward sinners. But the 


atonement will by no means save sinners only as it prepares the way for them to come 


into sympathy and fellowship of heart with God. 

Now Jesus comes to each sinner’s door and knocks. Hark! what’s that? what’s 
that? Why this knocking? Why did He not go away and stay in heaven if that were 
the system, till men should simply believe the historical facts and be baptized, as some 
suppose, for salvation? But now, see how He comes down—tells the sinner what He 
has done—reveals all His love—tells him how holy and sacred it is, so sacred that He 
can by no means act without reference to the holiness of His law and the purity of His 
government. Thus impressing on the heart the most deep and enlarged ideas of His 


holiness and purity, He enforces the need of deep repentance and the sacred duty of 


renouncing all sin. . 
REMARKS. 

1. The Bible teaches that sinners may forfeit their birthright and put themselves 
beyond the reach of mercy. It is not long since I made some remarks to you on the 
manifest necessity that God should guard Himself against the abuses of His love. The 
circumstances are such as create the greatest danger of such abuse, and, therefore, He 
must make sinners know that they may not abuse His love, and cannot do it with 
impunity. ; 


2. Under the Gospel, sinners are in circumstances of the greatest possible 
responsibility. They are in the utmost danger of trampling down beneath their feet 
the very Son of God. Come, they say, let us kill Him and the inheritance shall be 


; God’s Love for a Sinning World—Finney. 241 


_ ours. When God sends forth, last of all, His own beloved Son, what do they do? Add 
to all their other sins and rebellions the highest insult to this glorious Son! Suppose 
8 something analogous to this were done under a human government. A case of rebel- 
lion occurs in some of the provinces. The king sends his own son, not with an army 
_ to cut them down quick in their rebellion, but all gently, meekly, patiently, he goes 
among them, explaining the laws of the kingdom and exhorting them to obedience. 
What do they do in the case? With one consent they combine to seize him and put 
$ him to death! 


But you deny the application of this, and ask me, Who murdered the Son of God? 
_ Were they not Jews? Aye, and have you, sinners, had no part in this murder? Has 
not your treatment of Jesus Christ shown that you are most fully in sympathy with 
the ancient Jews in their murder of the Son of God? If you had been there, would 
~ anyone have shouted louder than you, Away with Him—crucify Him, crucify Him? 
Have you not always said, Depart from us—for we desire not the knowledge of Thy 

_ ways? 


8. It was said of (Christ that, Though rich He became poor that we through His 
| poverty might be rich. How strikingly true is this! Our redemption cost Christ His 
life; it found Him rich, but made Him poor; it found us infinitely poor, but made us 

Tich even to all the wealth of heaven. But of these riches none can partake till they 
_ shall each for himself accept them in the legitimate way. They must be received on the 
| terms proposed, or the offer passes utterly away, and you are left poorer even than if 

no such treasures had ever been laid at your feet. 
| Many persons seem entirely to misconceive this case. They seem not to believe 
what God says, but keep saying, If, if, if there only were any salvation for me—if there 
were only an atonement provided for the pardon of my sins. This was one of the last 
things that was cleared up in my mind before I fully committed my soul to trust God. 
I had been studying the atonement; I saw its philosophical bearings—saw what it 
demanded of the sinner; but it irritated me, and I said—If I should become a Christian, 
how could I know what God would do with me? Under this irritation I said foolish 
and bitter things against Christ—till my soul was horrified at its own wickedness, and 
T said—I will make all this up with Christ if the thing is possible. 
\ In this way many advance upon the encouragements of the Gospel as if it were 

only a peradventure, an experiment. They take each forward step most carefully, with 
fear and trembling, as if there were the utmost doubt whether there could be any mercy 
for them. So with myself. I was on my way to my office, when the question came 
before my mind—What are you waiting for? You need not get up such an ado. All 
is done already. You have only to consent to the proposition—give your heart right 
up to it at once—this is all. Just so it is. All Christians and sinners ought to under- 
Stand that the whole plan is complete—that the whole of Christ—His character, His 
work, His atoning death, and His ever-living intercession—belong to each and every 
_ man, and need only to be accepted. There is a full ocean of it. There it is. You may 
| just as well take it as not. It is as if you stood on the shore of an ocean of soft, pure 
water, famishing with thirst; you are welcome to drink, and you need not fear lest you 
| exhaust that ocean, or starve anybody else by drinking yourself. You need not feel 
that you are not made free to that ocean of waters; you are invited and pressed to 
drink—yea, to drink abundantly! This ocean supplies all your need. You do not need 
to have in yourself the attributes of Jesus Christ, for His attributes become practically 
yours for all possible use. As saith the Scripture—He is of God made unto us wisdom, 
righteousness, sanctification and redemption. What do you need? Wisdom? Here 
itis. Righteousness? Here it is. Sanctification? Here you have it. All is in Christ. 
Can you possibly think of any one thing needful for your moral purity, or your use- 


242 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


fulness, which is not here in Christ? Nothing. All is provided here. Therefore you 
need not say, I will go and pray and try, as the hymn,— $ 


“T’ll go to Jesus tho’ my sin 
Hath like a mountain rose, 
Perhaps He will admit my plea; 
Perhaps will hear my prayer.” 

There is no need of any perhaps. The doors are always open. Like the doors of 
Broadway Tabernacle in New York, made to swing open and fasten themselves open, 
so that they could not swing back and shut down upon the crowds of people thronging — 
to pass through. When they were to be made, I went myself to the workmen and told 
them by all means to fix them so that they must swing open and fasten themselves in 
that position. 

So the door of salvation is open always—fastened open, and no man can shut it— 
not the Pope, even, nor the devil, nor, any angel from heaven or from hell. There it 
stands, all swung back and the passage wide open for every sinner of our race to 
enter if he will. q 

Again, sin is the most expensive thing in the universe. Are you well aware, O | 
sinner, what a price has been paid for you that you may be redeemed and made an heir | 
of God and of heaven? O what an expensive business for you to indulge in sin! 

And what an enormous tax the government of God has paid to redeem tial 
province from its ruin! Talk about the poor tax of Great Britain and of all other 
nations superadded; all is nothing to the sin-tax of Jehovah’s government—that awful 
sin-tax! Think how much machinery is kept in motion to save sinners! The Son of. 
God was sent down—angels are sent as ministering spirits to the heirs of salvation; 
missionaries are sent, Christians labor, and pray, and weep in deep and anxious 
solicitude—all to seek and save the lost. What a wonderful—enormous tax is levied 
upon the benevolence of the universe to put away sin and to save the sinner! If the 
cost could be computed in solid gold, what a world of it—a solid globe of itself! What 
an array of toil and cost, from angels, Jesus Christ, the Divine Spirit, and living men! 
Shame on sinners who hold on to sin despite of all these benevolent efforts to save 
them! who instead of being ashamed out of sin, will say—Let God pay off this tax; 
who cares! Let the missionaries labor, let pious women work their very fingers off to 
raise funds to keep all this human machinery in motion; no matter: what is all this to 
me? I have loved my pleasures and after them I will go! What an unfeeling hea 
is this! 

Sinners can very well afford to make sacrifices to save their fellow sinners. Pat 
could for his fellow sinners. He felt that he had done his part toward making sinners, 
and now it became him to do his part also in converting them back to God. But see 
there—that young man thinks he cannot afford to be a minister, for he is afraid he 
shall not be well supported. Does he not owe something to the grace that saved his 
soul from hell? Has he not some sacrifices to make, since Jesus has made so many 
for him, and Christians too, in Christ before him—did they not pray and suffer and 
toil for his soul’s salvation? As to his danger of lacking bread in the Lord’s work, a 
him trust his Great Master. Yet let me also say that churches may be in great fault 
for not comfortably supporting their pastors. Let them know God will assuredly 
starve them if they starve their ministers. Their own souls and the souls of their 
children shall be barren as death if they avariciously starve those whom God in His 
providence sends to feed them with the bread of life. . 

How much it costs to rid society of certain forms of sin, as for example, 
slavery. How much has been expended already, and how much more yet remains to 
be expended ere this sore evil and curse and sin shall be rooted from our land! This 


God’s Love for a S inning World—Finney, 243 


is part of God’s great enterprise, and He will press it on to its completion. Yet at 
what an amazing cost! How many lives and how much agony to get rid of this one 
sin! 

Woe to those who make capital out of the sins of men! Just think of the rum- 
ler—tempting men while God is trying to dissuade them from rushing on in the 
ways of sin and death! Think of the guilt of those who thus set themselves in array 
against God! So Christ has to contend with rumsellers who are doing all they can to 


Our subject strikingly illustrates the nature of sin as mere selfishness. It cares 
“not how much sin costs Jesus Christ—how much it costs the Church, how much it 
taxes the benevolent sympathies and the self-sacrificing labors of all the good:in earth 
heaven;—no matter; the sinner loves self-indulgence and will have it while he can. 
ow many of you have cost your friends countless tears and trouble to get you back 
f om your ways of sin? Are you not ashamed when so much has been done for you, 
that you cannot be persuaded to give up your sins and turn to God and holiness? 
The whole effort on the part of God for man is one of suffering and self-denial. 
Beginning with the sacrifice of His own beloved Son, it is carried on with ever 
newed sacrifices and toilsome labors—at great and wonderful expense. Just think 


d cost—yea, that very sin which you roll as a sweet morsel under your tongue! God 
ay well hate it when He sees how much it costs, and say—O do not that abominable 
thing that I hate! 

Yet God is not unhappy in these self-denials. So great is His joy in the results, 


9y, SO intensely do ne love their children. 

Such is the labor, the joy, and the self-denial of the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost, in their great work for human salvation. Often are they grieved that so many 
will refuse to be saved. Toiling on in a common sympathy, there is nothing, within 
onable limits, which they will not do or suffer to accomplish their great work. 
[t is wonderful to think how all creation sympathizes, too, in this work and its neces- 
oid sufferings. Go back to the scene of Christ’s sufferings. Could the sun in the 
vens look down unmoved on such a scene? O no, he could not even behold it— 
veiled his face from the sight! All nature seemed to put on her robes of deepest 
ring. The scene was too much for even inanimate nature to bear. The sun 
ed his back and could not look down on such a spectacle! 

The subject illustrates forcibly the worth of the soul. Think you God would have 
é all this if He had had those low views on this subject which sinners usually have? 
Martyrs and saints enjoy their sufferings—filling up in themselves what is lacking 
f the sufferings of Christ; not in the atonement proper, but in the subordinate parts 
the work to be done. It is the nature of true religion to love self-denial. 
The results will fully justify all the expense. God had well counted the cost before 
began. Long time before He formed a moral universe He knew perfectly what it 
cost Him to redeem sinners, and He knew that the result would amply justify 
all the cost. He knew that a wonder of mercy would be wrought—that the suffering 
d ed of Christ, great as it was, would be endured; and that results infinitely 
glorious would accrue therefrom. He looked down the track of time into the distant 
a where, as the cycles rolled along, there might be seen the joys of redeemed 
who are singing their songs and striking their harps anew with the everlasting 


i psa a 


244 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


song, through the long, long, long eternity of their blessedness;—and was not this 
enough for the heart of infinite love to enjoy? And what do you think of it, Christian? 
Will you say now, I am ashamed to ask to be forgiven? How can I bear to receive 
such mercy! It is the price of blood, and how can I accept it? How can I make 
Jesus Christ so much expense? 

You are right in saying that you have cost Him great expense—but the expense 
has been cheerfully met—the pain has all been endured, and will not need to be : 
endured again, and it will cost none the more if you accept than if you decline; and 
moreover still, let it be considered, Jesus Christ has not acted unwisely; He did not 
pay too much for the soul’s redemption—not a pang more than the interests of God’s 
government demanded and the worth of the soul would justify. 

O, when you come to see Him face to face, and tell Him what you think of it— 
when you are some thousands of years older than you are now, will you not adore that 
wisdom that manages this scheme, and the infinite love in which it had its birth? O 
what will you then say of that amazing condescension that brought down Jesus to your 
rescue! Say, Christian, have you not often poured out your soul before your Savior 
in acknowledgment of what you have cost Him, and there seemed to be a kind of | 
lifting up as if the very bottom of your soul were to rise and you would pour out your 
whole heart. If anybody had seen you they would have wondered what had happened : 
to you that had so melted your soul in gratitude and love. 

Say now, sinner, will you sell your birthright? How much will you take for it? 
How much will you take for your interest in Christ? For how much will you sell your 
soul? Sell your Christ! Of old they sold Him for thirty pieces of silver; and ever 
since the heavens have been raining blood on our guilty world. If you were to be 
asked by the devil to fix the sum for which you would sell your soul, what would be 
the price named? Lorenzo Dow once met a man as he was riding along a solitary 
road to fulfill an appointment, and said to him, “Friend, have you ever prayed?” “No.” 
“How much will you take never to pray hereafter?” “One dollar.” Dow paid it over 
and rode on. The man put the money in his pocket, and passed on, thinking. Th 
more he thought the worse he felt. There, said he, I have sold my soul for on 
dollar! It must be that I have met the devil! Nobody else would tempt me so. Wit 
all my soul I must repent or be damned forever! 

How often have you bargained to sell your Savior for less than thirty pieces 
silver! Nay, for the merest trifle! 

Finally, God wants volunteers to help on this great work. God has given Himself, 
and given His Son, and sent His Spirit; but more laborers still are needed; and whi 
will you give? Paul said, I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. Do y 
aspire to such an honor? What will you do—what will you suffer? Say not, I have 
nothing to give. You can give yourself—your eyes, your ears, your hands, your mind 
your heart, all; and surely nothing you have is too sacred and too good to be devote 
to such a work upon such a call! How many young men are ready to go? and hoy 
many young women? Whose heart leaps up crying—Here am I! send me? § 


aA 
[Charles G. Finney was born at Warren, Litchfield County, Conn., August 29, 
1792, and died at Oberlin, O., August 16, 1875. He was a revivalist and educator; 
president of Oberlin College, 1852-1866. Among his published work is Lectures on 
Revivals, Professing Christians, Theology and his sermons. * 
This sermon is from a volume published by E. J. Goodrich in 1876, entitled 
Sermons on Gospel Themes. Four different volumes were examined, and it w 
thought that this was as representative as any, and its value would be more lasting 
than some others.] 7 


} 
i 


(245) 


DIVINE AND HUMAN COPARTNERSHIP. 


CHARLES HENRY FOWLER, D. D. 


‘al 


“For ye are laborers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry: ye are God's 
ilding.”—I Cor. 3: 9. 


I like this passage that I have read in your hearing as a text, because there is so 
much in it—simple and plain, and familiar, yet full, and possibly profound—certainly 
ractical. It is an epitome of the divine economy; it is full of the richest and pro- 
foundest human philosophy; it is quivering all over with divine power. Like the 
nightly pillar in the camp of Israel, it stands in this epistle radiant and glorious with 
the divine presence. What an inlook it gives us, when we look carefully at it, into the 
ae of our living and into the dignity of our fellowships, and into the glory of our 
destiny ! 

____ It is an entire income of divinity into humanity, with its mangers and its wilder- 
“messes, with its gardens and its Calvaries; and it is also a transfiguration—an exaltation 
_ of humanity under the divine commission, with its inspirations and its resurrections, 
4 ‘with its ascensions and its enthronements, for we are “laborers together with God.” 

| a I suppose, in the exposition of this text, like the exposition of most other texts of 
: # Scripture, that which is best is that which is simplest and most manifest on the surface. 


- The critical putting of the passage is that you and I are workers together of or under 
God. The general application of the passage is that we are workers together with 
God, supported by the general Scripture teaching. The same truth is put in another 

ssage by the apostle when he says: “We are to work out our salvation with fear and 
an while God worketh in us to will and to do of His own good pleasure.” 
And he also exhorts these same Corinthians as laborers together with God. So, it 
"seems, we have a right to a joint application of the passage as it stands before us, that 
‘God and we are in copartnership. 
Notice a moment the exceeding skill, almost amounting to a cunning perception 
Of the case—the skill with which the apostle brings out the kind of work to be done 

uus in the very words used to put it: “Ye are God’s husbandry’’—God’s farm, 

arm-making, farm-working. This rude Corinthian heart is to be brought in and 
subdued, so as to bear a gospel harvest. ‘‘Ye are God’s building’—an edifice erected, 
constructed—not an outgrowth, but here an erection, here a construction, here some- 
thing done by an outside power—God'’s building, a house in which God shall be at 
1ome—a house built around the idea of God’s presence, characters in which we are to 

e with God, which shall have all the sacredness of the inner sanctuary, and all the 
familiarity of the home. “Ye are God’s building.” 

__ And pause now a moment to see how adroitly the apostle lets down these conceited 

Sorinthians in the putting of the text itself. The text, back of our English version, 
has this suggestive thing in it. In this short sentence there is no word at all to rep- 
Tesent these Corinthians who are contending about men and about their personal 
advancement, but the name of God is put in full three times, and the Corinthians are 

y drawn in by the person of the verb; these conceited men are left out, and the 

Imighty is made the controlling thought of the text, and yet the copartnership is 

maintained—a copartnership in which all the power is of God, and all the glory 


246 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


belongs to God, and yet the power so adjusted that all—absolutely all—the respori- 
sibility rests with us. These are the conditions of our copartnership. 

This law of human and divine action—co-labor, laboring together—is a universal 
law. You cannot touch humanity anywhere but you strike this truth. It makes up 
the warp and woof of nature, of our lives, of society; it is everywhere divine power 
and human agency—it is a combination of these forces. One fact indicating that 
is this:— 

Either element, when left to itself fails. Men have blundered concerning this 
subject, as concerning all other subjects, and whenever they have left out the divine 
element in their calculations, they have failed. Mere humanitarian systems that did 
not or ought not to pretend to be religions, but only systems of philosophy, built not 
upon the divine Christ, but upon the human Jesus, have demonstrated that, leaving 
out the supernatural power, they have failed to accomplish the supernatural work. 
They move among men doing a kind of human work, but they do not move among 
men doing the divine work. They somehow demonstrate that their systems are 
circumscribed by the bounds of their nationalities, and their influence seldom survives 
the sexton who digs their unwilling graves; that which is born of the flesh proves to 
be flesh; the fountain not bubbling on the summit, the stream never rises there. 
Having no power from on high, they necessarily fail to lift up fallen humanity. 

And in accordance with this fact of the failure of the elements, when separated, 
we find this one thing in history: the richest and choicest peoples—the peoples who 
have most culture and thought and education and intellectual power, are the peoples 
who have utterly died out of history; so that the perfect languages are the dead 
languages. 

And parallel with this we find another fact as startling, that the low animal peoples 
who live a kind of sensual or animal life, who have no great outlook of thought, who 
mount to no summits of culture, who sink to no depth of philosophy—these are the 
peoples who live on and on through centuries. Humanity accepted as a fallen fact 
persists like an animal instinct through the ages; but whenever she undertakes to rise, 
she wears herself out by the endeavor. Leaving out the divine power, the elements 
fail because they are separated. ‘ ; 

And the divine element fails as utterly when separated from the human. It seems 
to inhere in the nature of the case that they cannot believe except they hear, and they — 
cannot hear except one be sent. And here is the human agency. The man who caa 
sit down in a leaky boat and fold his arms, thinking that if it is the Lord’s great will © 
that he should be saved he will be saved, will find that God’s great will will be done, 
and that it is His great will that he should go to the bottom, because God has no better 
use for such a man. And the churches which undertake to let the Lord do all their 
work are the churches whose work will never—no, never be done. The divine element 
in itself fails in the work. It seems to me conclusive, then, that, as the elements, when 
separated, fail, there is, in the purpose of God concerning it, this anticipated and 
necessary union. 

Take another fact. See how God works in things. It is one vast plan spread out 
before us in such a way that we may, by chance, avail ourselves of the energies of 
nature to do our work, to carry our burdens. God turns the great wheels always one 
way; so that we may see them and catch the secret, find how they move, and throw 
about them the belts of our creative and inventive thought, and thus, claiming our 
possible copartnership, cause things to come to pass. He gives us bodies, possible 
strength, time, opportunity, brain, but these, in themselves, are not enough. Left to 
themselves, they produce either the sloven or the savage—either the Bushman or the 
Sioux. Civilization means more than these. It means very much labor in the shop, 
very much weariness in the study, very much anguish in the closet, and very much 


ee es 


Divine and Human Copartnership—Fowler. 247 


" patient on-going after the seers and the prophets. God gives soil, sunlight, moisture, 
"nourishment, germs, but these are not enough. Left to themselves, they produce 
a i. and noxious weeds. There is required also your thought and nerve and plan 
and skill, and then you and God can produce a loaf of bread. 
_ You wanted this church. God gave the stone and the clay, and the iron and the 
lumber, but not here. The stone was in the quarry, the clay was in the bank, the iron 
was, in the vein, the lumber was in the forest, and you know what it has cost to put 
them together. 

And this same old law holds as firmly over character as it does over materials. 
_ This poor man has fallen into bad habits, and staggered out of the way and gotten 
down into the street, until the filth is upon his garments. Now, there is no process by 
_ which he may come back to respectability that is not based on his individual struggle. 
_ Sometimes gold dust thrown into the air may dim or divert the public eye, but soon 
that is past, and the unfortunate victim is left to hew his way up to respectability at the 
hardest. 
These are but material and social applications of law that finds its first legitimate 
and original cause, the reason of its existence, back in our moral nature. If, then, we 
do actually find that, in the world about us, God does so work in the system of copart- 
nership with us, need we be alarmed, overwhelmed, if He requires us in His spiritual 
interest, in our spiritual lives, to obey the same rule? 

Take another fact that looks to this copartnership—the fact of destitution, any- 
where—poverty—poverty of purse or of spirits; all poverty is inexplicable, except on 
the supposition of this copartnership. There is a beautiful island—Erin, the island 
of the heart—and yet her children actually gnaw their bones in famine. No fault of 
' God. He loves Erin; He loves all men. Yonder, in the great valley between the 
' mountains, waves a harvest large enough for all men. It needs the human instrumen- 
 talities to take yonder harvest to yonder starving ones. There, in the alley, comes 
up a boy, dandled on the lap of corruption, fed on vice, graduated in a brothel, trained 

| ‘up a thief, and turned out a cut-throat. He has no fair chance. No fault of God. 


(ge 


= =a 


SE 


God loves that little cut-throat as much as He does anybody else in the universe. Not 
His fault that he has no chance. Look, there are wide zones of fertile land, upon 

which all the cities may scatter their victims into freedom. God has provided for 
them. It needs the human intervention to make the right distribution. And then 
there are vast Christless empires which never heard of Him. But it is no fault of God. 
He loves them; He is no respecter of persons; He willeth not the death of him that 
dieth, but He would that all men would turn and live. No Christ has touched their 
shores; no prophet has cried in their ears; yet it is no fault of God. Fault there must 
be somewhere. It is only a demonstration of the human element in the copartnership. 
If God could have His way, tomorrow’s sun would not rise over an unsaved sinner in 
all the universe. If God’s way could be carried out, every lost profligate would be 
accepted of God; for “Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death for every man.” 
Yea, more than that. If God could have His way, the very last prison-pen in all the 
universe would be open, and the very last mourning and sorrowing one would be lifted 
up into peace and purity and joy unspeakable. But there is in the way, the human 
element in the copartnership. There is a human will in the path, and human rebellion 

| inthe way. No fault of God. 

Take another fact looking to this copartnership. All our blessings come to us 
through human instrumentality. We have some elements—we have air and time and 
| life, a few things from God directly, or apparently directly; and yet when you come 
back to them you find that we are, after all, related to them through some human 
instrumentality. How crude they are as they come from the Almighty!—hardly worth 
having. Indeed, it is not possible for us to have them without human instrumentality. 


248 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Life itself is such a little, helpless thing; yet little as 


tenderness of maternal love. We receive it through maternal agencies. And what a 


it is, it comes to us only by the 


long journey it is from the helplessness of that little babe, only a lump of possibilities 


on the lap of its mother, to that stalwart man! It is a long way, and much drilling 


and wearing along the way to realize the power. 


Take this revelation of God, God’s truth, His word, too grand for our invention 


and too vital for us to dispense with; and yet what ah 


uman thing it is! Here you can 


find full length portraits of the prophets and the seers. Here you can come in contact 


with living men—God-anointed, God-appointed, God 
to be the light of the world. This book, with the div 
the sculptor’s studio—full of statues, stone men; 


-smitten men; yet men sent out 
ine element left out of it, is like 
but when it accepts the divine 


element, these statues catch the inspiration of life, and go forth—not gods, but men, 


_ speaking to us God’s secret by human lips, and yet wi 


th human speech. 


The highest and the last demonstration of this is seen in the incarnation itself. It 
seems to me that when God would bring His salvation into the world—what He 


wanted was salvation—and when He would bring 


it into the world, He had to 


incarnate it in His own Son; He could come to us only in the Son of Man. It is the 


only salvation that could by any chance reach us at a 


ll, if you will think about it. It 


seems as if somehow the remedial agencies came down into our weakness and touched 
them into power, so that these weak and broken elements rise up apparently instead 
of being lifted up, lifted up in fact; yet not by an outside power, but by an inside 
power, that has been catalogued with the fallen forces of humanity, so that Jesus enters 


into our humanity, is born under the law, is made 
obedient unto death, that He may come even to us, 
and of us, yet supernatural. 


like unto His brethren, and is 
and give salvation that is in us 


Look at these terms a little. “Ye are God’s husbandry,” and the work there 
indicated shows a little something of what we are to do, and how much you need this 
divine help in the case. The old nature is to be grubbed out by a kind of clearing-up 


process. The old forest that occupies the soil and shuts out the light and prevents, 


the good seed from getting root or nourishment, is to 


through divine agencies, into a protection and defence for the heavenly crop; and this” 


be taken down and transformed, 


is no small work. This means earnest endeavor. Try it. Put yourself at the work. 


Stand against the flood. Run against the tempest. 


less you are without the divine power. And yet this work is to be done by you, and 


through you, God helping. 


I think the figure looks, a little farther on, to building your characters. And 
this to me seems the core of this whole question—the building up of your characters — 


See how weak and utterly help- 


into the likeness of God. Not by a mere human endeavor, but by the human 


strengthened and made out by the divine; not 


that you can do “it alone and 


unfold from within you that which shall be pleasing to God, but that, with the divine 


power, every one of you can build up your character 
God in our Lord Jesus Christ. This sweeps out over 


so that it shall be acceptable to 
the whole field of our character 


and destiny. And just here, let me say, we are liable, in touching any of these points 


and discussing questions of this kind, to go too far, or 


side of the question. The problem of a religious life is made up of many equations 
and as many factors. Your religious character is many-sided. The Gospel comes to 


you many-sided. Here, seen from this standpoint, 


lose sight too much of the other 


it is all divine; and seen from 


another, it is all human. Here it is all devotion; there it is all activity. Here it has 


the breath and the billow of emotion; there it glist 
intellections. Now we see it with the grip of a syllo 
the intellect; then it comes in among the intuitions, w 
tion. Now it stands erect, holding the reins of eterna 


ens in the cold serenity of the 
gism holding the convictions of 
arming by the breath of inspira- 
1 obligation; next it settles upod 


f 


‘ 


Divine and Human C opartnership—F owler. 249 


t he soul with dew like peace of heaven, with the impleadings of divine mercy, and thus 
wins us to God. It is many-sided. It is—work out your faith, from your fingers’ 
nds. It is one perfect system. 

The foundation of our hope is salvation by faith only. It could not have been other- 
ise, even if God had not said: ‘‘By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of 
ourselves; it is the gift of God.” Yes, the fact that eternal life is an infinite gift puts 
it outside the possibility of our earning it. What we earn is limited and measured by 
day or hour; but God’s gift, eternal life, is infinite, and so necessarily a gift; and if a 
gift, necessarily to be taken by faith only, so that when the bond for the ten thousand 
talents is pressed for collection, then there is no footing at all left for works; it is only, 
“elieve—solely by faith. And this freeness makes it a gospel indeed. It would be 
mo gospel at all but for this. It is necessary that the system that meets us should be 
capable of delay, that we might put it off and off and off, even till life’s latest hour, 
‘and then, by divine power, through faith, take life and live. 
Aye, if I didn’t believe that the very lowest mortal on earth—the vilest and 
lowest—even though he should stand on the very crumbling verge of time, falling 
hheadlong into the pit, if he would but look once toward Christ, and offer believing 
"prayer, might be saved, I would never enter the pulpit again. It is because we need 
something to repair all our failures that we must have a system that comes only by 
faith. 

Now, then, having the one point of our pardon settled by faith, it seems to me the 
‘power of that faith must come out through works—divine aid, human activity. Com- 
‘ing through our characters, then, it is not possible for God to save us without our 
activity. A salvation that would fall upon us from heaven would only crush us, not 
cure us. God slays not our power, but our sins; He saves us, not the remnants of us; 
He saves our forces, our humanity, our will, our ability to feel and act and be. He 
Saves us, not slays us, by a system with which we have nothing to do. It seems to 
me—though it is a startling fact, it is true—that a man, full grown, lost in the solitude 
of his sin, plunging on in the loneliness of his suffering, a dethroned king, yet a king 
crowned and enthroned above his own wretchedness and sin—that such a being is 
worth infinitely more in the universe of God than a whole army of shining puppets, 
polished by no purpose of their own. 

We are sometimes told that God might have sent saietls to do this work He has 
in our hands; that the work of saving men might have been committed to orders of 
life above us. I am not prepared to say that it is impossible, yet I am prepared to say 
that it is not thinkable to me. It is not possible in the light of thought. In the first 
_ place, it is not something to be put upon us, but something to be wrought within us; 
_ Rot an outside cloak covering over our old corruptions, but an inside life and power— 
_ something that takes the whole being and occupies every part and fibre; and so, to be 
anything at all, must be worked out through the man himself, and cannot be put upon 
the man from the outside. Horace Bushnell has made a statement which is liable to 
misunderstood, but which contains a substantial truth. When a bush is bent down 
“im a forest, nature does not send another bush, nor yet a tree, to pick up the bush, but 
puts life and power into the bush itself. So it seems to me God operates upon us by 
His grace. He comes with His supernatural power into us, and works along the 
jormal lines of our activity, and thus enables us to rise into His likeness. 

And then, if there were any possibility that angels could come, and by swarming 
the whole vault above us into the brightest glory, and crowding in untold millions 
into the path of each wanderer, could hasten forward the salvation of one single sinner, 
the infinite love of God, that stops at nothing, would, of necessity, crowd all angelgy 
into this world of ours, and put an immediate stop to sin. But it is not in the nature 
of the case. We misapprehend the nature of sin itself. It is not something that may 


350 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


be put to death by an outside being; it can be killed only when the creatiie from 
whose bosom it leaps, and in whose purpose it lives, becomes the executioner. And 
we mistake the character of the work itself. It is not outside work, done for some- 
thing else and somebody else; it is an inside work, done in and for us at the end. We 
do not work like hirelings, we are sons; we work not for wages, but an inheritance— 
an inheritance not to be received after some grave has been filled, but that is to be 
received here, and under God, and with God, to be worked out by us for the home 
yonder. 


This outside work, pushing forward the interests of the church, building edifices, 
attending prayer-meetings, going after the poor, and other Christian work that comes 
upon a Christian’s heart that seems to be outside, may be, after all, only one field for 
his development. Yonder is a man who goes into a shop to make an engine. 
Unwittingly, he develops his arm, fills out his chest. Yonder man goes into a gymi- 
nasium, swings dumb-bells, climbs ropes, leaps bars, pounds bags of sand, and the 
like. Wittingly, he develops His chest and arms. Now, in God’s plan, both these 
systems work in together. Many a thing seems like making the engine, doing some 
outside thing, yet actually it is the only way by which we can be brought on in this 
co-operating work with God. And it is just here that the necessity is put upon us to 
do so much outside work for God; and the man who does it—who carries the burdens, 
who gets under the tremendous pressure, who agonizes in the darkness—is not the 
man to be pitied; but the man who does not do it—the man who dodges—he is the 
man to be pitied; the sick man, whom the Lord has to nurse and lead on to heaven, 
and whom He stands a mere chance of losing before He gets there with him; he is the 
man to be pitied, because it is in this process of co-operation with God that this poor 
material is fashioned up into a man, then a saint, then an angel. 

There is another thing that is true. If this fact of co-operation is true, then 
Christ’s kingdom goes forward or is retarded, according as we are active or negligent. 
I think that is an inevitable sequence from the proposition that we are co-workers 
with Him. Then, what follows? Just as the falling of an autumn leaf will jar the 
most distant sun, so the slightest faltering of even the weakest and lowest saint holds 
back the coming of the kingdom of Christ. Look at the case a little. There is no 
lack of love on His part. He has come for the sole purpose of saving men. He came 
into the world at the earliest hour. All through the ages He carried humanity on His 
heart, crying: “O that there were such an heart in you that you would hear my 
voice!” longing to come always from the moment of the first transgression, anxious 
to come to the oppressed and sorrowing and wounded, to comfort the mourning, and 
bind up their wounds. And this, of necessity, in the nature of infinite love. He could 
not have infinite love and hold back anywhere. It must press out at the earliest 
chance. So He waits, and waits, and waits for His people. He waited four thousand 
years for a virgin to say: “Thy will be done.” I doubt not He waited a thousand 
years for grand old Martin Luther, and that He stood and watched and looked for 
twelve centuries for the coming of John Wesley; and today He waits, and His cause 
hangs back, and His kingdom is delayed, because we, His children, allow our hands 
to hang down. He is here for the salvation of all men, coming to establish a kingdom 
of righteousness, and it delays because we lack faith and devotion and consecration. 
The thought to me is oppressive. We are so related to God’s kingdom that our lack 
of prayer and faith and sacrifice actually retards the coming of the kingdom. 

With this immense responsibility, we might expect, there comes also a com- 
mensurate dignity. It could not be otherwise. And yet it is to me incomprehen- 
sible. We can only look at it a little. It is amazing to me that such a being as Jesus 
Christ, full of His infinite love, clothed in light, the first-born of every creature, by 
whom all things consist, King of kings and Lord of lords, invisible, immortal, eternal, 


See 


Divine and Human Copartnership—Fowler. 25t 


to repeat His wonderful words, to walk among the sorrowing, and tell of His com- 
yassion. This to me is the infinite thing. All else in life is but as dust and ashes, 
and the chance of standing for Him among the dying and sinning, and there crying, 
‘Behold, behold the Lamb!” is more than all else in life. It seems to me, if we could 

ut see the dignity of the work He has given us, its power, depth, height, glory, irre- 
Sistible victory, divine radiance, we would go though we starved; we would work 
though it were a thousand years; we would pray on while we had breath. It seems to 


It is something, too, to be a citizen of this republic; it means something, though 
we cannot comprehend it. That poor soldier-boy may not know the day of the 
epublic’s birth, nor the number of her commonwealths, nor count the stars of her 
lag even, and yet he wears the sign of the nation’s power; and it is something to be 
1 citizen of this republic, because there is no land on all the earth, no dungeon any- 
_where under the sun, no island in the sea, where prince or potentate can harm a hair 
of his head with impunity. Let the despot touch him, and forty millions of citizens 
ise for his defence! I remember reading awhile ago, how that, yonder in South 
erica, a poor Norwegian sailor, by some transgression of the local laws, was 
volved in serious trouble. The petty government tried him for conspiracy; they 
und him guilty, and sentenced him to death. He did not understand his crime, nor 
b is relations to their government; he only knew the horror that was coming upon him, 
But the ministers of the governments of England and of the United States interfered 
in his behalf; they protested;.the petty authorities insisted; the ministers forbade the 
ecution, but the local government took the victim out, and drew up the line of 
_ soldiers for his execution, when the representatives of these two great governments, 
2. the flags of the two countries, went in before the man and wrapped around him 
the Stars and Stripes and England’s flag, and the soldiers dared not shoot. It meant 
ething to be a citizen of the United States, or Great Britain; but infinitely more 
n this is it to be a citizen of that country beyond. We are brought into fellowship 
God, and permitted to work in copartnership with Him; and though little, and 
gnorant, and unable to count His stars, nor tell His glory, nor know the time of His 
coming, yet we are in copartnership with him, and his flag is over us, and his angels 
are about us, and absolutely nothing can, by any chance, harm us. God's infinite love 
mes in just back of our weakness. He has given His only begotten Son for us. 
and with Him will He not freely give us all things? This tenderness comes to us so 
‘that we may know that we are His, and kept by His almighty power. 


% I remember once standing by the surging billows, all one weary day, and watch- 
ing for hours a father struggling beyond in the breakers for the life of his son. They 
e slowly toward the breakers on a piece of wreck, and as they came the waves 
turned over the piece of float, and they were lost. Presently we saw the father come 
‘the surface and clamber alone to the wreck, and then saw him plunge off into the 
= . . . . 
tr and thought he was gone; but in a moment he came back again, holding his 


" 


. Presently they struck another wave, and over they went; and again they 
eated the process. Again they went over, and again the father rescued his son. 
By and by, as they swung nearer the shore, they caught on a snag just out beyond 
where we could reach them, and for a little time the waves went over them there, til! 


vy" Cet a 


252 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


we saw the boy in the father’s arms hanging down in helplessness, and knew they 
must be saved soon or be lost; and I shall never forget the gaze of that father. And as 
we drew him from the devouring waves, still clinging to his son, he said, “That's my 
boy, that’s my boy!” and half frantic, as we dragged them up the bank, he cried all 
the time: ‘That’s my boy, that’s my boy!” And so I have thought, in hours of 
darkness, when the billows roll over me, the great Father is reaching down to me, and, 
taking hold of me, crying, ‘““That’s my boy!” and I know I am safe. 


[Charles Henry Fowler, D. D., a gifted pulpit orator of the M. E. Church, was 
born August llth, 1837. His boyhood and youth were spent on a farm in central 
Illinois. In 1859 he graduated with first honors from Genesee College, New York, 
and two years later from Garrett Biblical Institute, Evanston, Illinois. Upon the 
martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln, he was chosen to deliver the commemorative eulogy 
in that city. His literary works include able contributions to the church periodicals, 
and a volume exposing the fallacies of Bishop Colenso. He is a man of marked 
intellectuality, of great imagination and fancy—withal, of great force of will, of tireless 


energy and industry. This sermon was preached at the dedication of the Arch Street 


M. E. Church, Philadelphia, in 1870, and is from Porter and Coates’ Half Hours with 
the Great Preachers, being reproduced here with their permission. ] 


- 


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(258) 


CHRIST—THE LIGHT AND THE GLORY. 


A. J. GORDON. 


“A Light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” 
This strain of Hebrew poetry from the lips of the aged Simeon, who is holding the 


infant Jesus in his arms, is exquisitely rich and beautiful. It is beautiful, not merely 


because of the perfect rhythm of the language, but especially because of the grand pro- 
portion and balance of the thought. 


“The light,” and “the glory’—“the Gentiles” and “Israel”—these words are not 
used for variation or expansion merely; they stand for great antithetical ideas. The 


\ sun is “the light” and “the glory.” He is the light of the earth; but he is the glory of 


: 
‘4 
re 


the heavens. For while his beams fall on the earth to illumine and vivify it, he 
himself is in the heavens, the very central orb among its stars and planets. And while 
Jesus Christ is the light of the Gentile world, and while by His person and doctrine 
He is more and more “lighting every man that cometh into the world,” He is some- 
thing yet greater to the Jewish nation. He is the “glory of His people Israel,” for He 
is of Israel; He is the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star 
shining among the splendid constellation of Hebrew kings and prophets, and yet out- 
shining them all, because He is “the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express 
image of His person.” 

Unless we learn to distinguished these two classes, “the Gentiles’ and “thy people 
“Israel,” prophecy will be a jumble to us, and the purpose and intention of preaching 


_ the gospel will be utterly misunderstood. There are woes pronounced upon the nation 


of Israel with which we have absolutely nothing to do. There are promises given to 
God’s ancient people which pertain in no respect to us Gentile believers. For the 
preacher to cumber the doctrines of grace with legal conditions is no greater mistake 


_ than for the missionary to interline the terms of the great commission with Jewish 


promises. Let us find out assuredly what we heralds of the gospel to the Gentile 
nations are sent to do; and then we shall know, without question, whether success or 
failure is attending our efforts. 
And so, men, brethren, and fathers, heirs together of the grace of life and of the 
kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, I invite you to consider for a few moments the 
two great thoughts of my text—Jesus Christ the “light,” and Jesus Christ “the glory.” 
, I. Jesus Christ, the light to lighten the Gentiles. 
A more perfect symbol for setting forth the true office of the gospel could not 
possibly be named than this—“the light.” For what is the light doing as it is poured 
out upon the earth? Two things; it is electing and illuminating. Here a ray of sunlight 
falls upon the muddy pool, and takes out from its roiled and stagnant waters the pure 
crystalline drop, and draws it up to the sky. Here a beam strikes the mouldering sod, 
- quickening the hidden seed that has been buried there, and drawing out from it, “first 

the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.” Here another ray lights upon the 
- Dead Sea, and distils from its bitter, acrid waters, the pure, sweet rain-drops that form 
the clouds and give the showers. Election—the taking out of the pure from the 
impure; the separation of the precious from the vile; the drawing forth of life from 
_ death, and of beauty from decay—this is the great office and ministry of the sunlight, as 
it is sent forth from its heavenly fountain over all the face of the earth, 


254 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


And what now is the gospel doing throughout this present dispensation? It is 
“a light to lighten the Gentiles” we are told. But what specifically and exactly this 
means, we are also told: “Men and brethren, hearken unto me,” says James. “Simeon 
hath declared, how God, at the first, did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people 
for His name. And to this agree the words of the prophets.” “Aye, and we may add, 
to this agree, also, the words of the Savior and the apostles.” For is not the Church, 
concerning which Christ said, ‘““On this Rock will I build” it, named the ecclesia— 
the called out? and is not the song of the glorified, “Thou hast redeemed us by Thy 
blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation?” This is not the dispen- 
sation of universal salvation. If it were so we might well be discouraged, since we 
find, after eighteen hundred years of evangelization, that out of fourteen hundred 
million population of the earth, there are only a little over three hundred million of 
Christians of all kinds, Greek, Roman, Protestant. 

I recall this fact not to dampen the ardor of any lover of missions. I exult in the 
wonderful conquests which the last hundred years have witnessed in the spread of the 
gospel. But I see in these conquests no sign of the speedy conversion of the world, 
if by that is meant the regeneration, under the preaching of the gospel, of the inhabi- 
tants of the globe. Yet I do see in it the hastening answer to that prayer of the old 
rituals, ‘that it may please the Lord speedily to accomplish the number of His elect;” 
and I do hear in it the loudening cry of the coming King, “Fear not little flock; it is 
your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” 


What, you will ask in amazed impatience, is not the light of the Gospel spreading 
and intensifying in every direction? Indeed it is, as never before. «The progress from 
the flickering tallow candle of fifty years ago, to the brilliant gas chandelier of yester- 
day, and the keen, gleaming electric light of today, is but a symbol of the kindling 
and burning upward of the gospel brightness during the same century. The light 
increasing? Marvelously, beyond precedent! But, have you forgotten, also that the 
shadows deepen just as the light intensifies? When did ever such black gloom brood 
over the nations as now? Ghastly nihilism over Russia; red communism over Ger- 
many; black despair over Turkey; the assassin lurking behind every throne; 
drunkenness debauching every nation; hell from beneath moved to resist the march of 
our Redeemer. This is the double aspect of things which is everywhere visible; the 
path of the just shining more and more unto the perfect day; evil men and seducers 
waxing worse and worse; and at the end of the ages the tares and wheat found growing 
together. ‘Lo, I have told you these things beforehand,” says the Master. 


And nothing of all this will abate our missionary ardor a whit, if we understand 
our calling. For in all the incorrigible wickedness and corruption of the world, God 


assuredly has in every nation multitudes who are predestined unto eternal life. And 


this is our strong encouragement for missionary toil. Paul, confronting the unutter- 


able degradation and idolatry of Corinth, might well have shrank back appalled, had — 


he not heard the cheering words of his Master, “Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not 
thy peace, for I have much people in this city.” Under the inspiration of these words, 
he gave himself to the most unsparing toil and self-denial, as he tells these same 


Corinthians, “that he might by all means save some.” As surely as the gold is in the 
mines, the pearl in the depths of the sea, and the diamond in the rock, so surely has 


our Redeemer an elect people in every nation and every land. And it is to call and — 


gather out these, to form from them the Bride of Christ, and to make them ready for 


the marriage supper of the Lamb, that we are sent to preach the gospel. We are not 
commissioned to convert the whole world, “which never was, nor yet shall be,” says 


sturdy John Knox, “till the righteous Judge and King returns for the restoration of all — 


things.” 
We are sent to find, and to fashion in the divine likeness, those whom the Father 


Christ—The Light and the Glory—A. J. Gordon. 255 


hath given to the Son out of the world, and so to hasten the coming of the Lord, and 
the consummation of those yet wider purposes which God has announced concerning 
the nations of the earth. 
a Do you not see that we can only be strong and courageous in our missionary toil, 
as we understand exactly what we are sent to do? If we set before us a smaller task 
‘than that which God has assigned us, it will beget indolence; if we undertake a larger 
task, it will beget discouragement. If we know our true work, and are bending our- 
Selves to it with our utmost strength, nothing can daunt us or elude us. Success! 
And that success gauged to the pattern of Alexander’s—the conquest of the whole 
world—is this the standard by which our missionaries are to be judged? Then let us 
¢ pect that the great commendation will be revised from “Well done, good and faithful 
ant,” to “Well done, good and successful servant.” Then let us concede that there 
‘is Bay a place in our missionary annals for the record of Clough’s ten thousand con- 
-verts in a year, for Williams’ hundreds baptized in a day; but no place for Judson’s 
‘six years patient toil without a convert, for Henry Martyn’s lonely cry, “Oh, if I could 
‘see but one Hindu genuinely converted!” for Hans Egede’s farewell to Greenland, 
after fifteen years’ fruitless toil on ice-bound hearts: “I said I have labored in vain. I 
have spent my strength for naught.” These men were faithful to the last degree, and 
not a sigh, or a tear, or a groan, or toil of theirs will fail of entry in God’s book. 
But their reward will be for their fidelity to the commission of their Master. Let us 
fix our eyes more steadfastly upon that reward. 
It is the iron in the blacksmith’s blood that makes his arm strong and stalwart to 
wield the iron upon his anvil. It is this iron conviction in our hearts of the eternal 
‘decree of God concerning those whom He has chosen in Christ from the foundation of 
_ the world, that will make us strong and heroic in the work of accomplishing those 
‘decrees in the earth. Therefore let us hold our work and our commission distinctly 
before us—the world-wide proclamation of the gospel—‘‘Go ye into all the world and 
_ preach the gospel to every creature;” a gathering out from the world through an 
individual faith—‘‘He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved.” “And as it was 
in the beginning, so it is now, and shall be to the end of the age—that as many as 
were ordained unto eternal life, believed.” The faithful missionaries’ call will waken 
; echoes of the eternal call among all nations, as surely as the sun wakes up the song of 
‘birds from every forest where he shines, and opens flowers upon every meadow 
where his beams fall. 


‘ 


But I have said that the light illumines as well as elects. And this leads me to 
“speak of the second influence of the gospel—that of enlightening and civilizing the 
ons of the earth. The gathering out of the Church is the first great purpose of 
angelizing the world. But the inevitable accompaniment of such evangelizing will 
s the educating and humanizing of the race. As Archer Butler finely says, “The 
“mercies, whatever they be, that stretch beyond the Church in the scheme of grace, are 
but the diffusive blessings that spread around this mystical body. Even as the hem 
of His garment had healing virtues of old, they are still given to glorify Him, and as 
the appendages of His royalty.” Plant the golden candlestick of the Church in the 
“midst of every nation and people of the earth. But how far beyond itself will this 
ca ndle throw its beams! 

_ Civilization is the radiance of Christianity shot out into surrounding darkness; 
it is the light of the gospel woven into the warp and woof of human progress, to 
ve to it a brighter hue and a finer texture. But civilization is not regeneration. 
‘ivilization puts Christianity into the world; regeneration takes men out of the world. 
Gi ilization diffuses God’s life and truth among men; regeneration separates men unto 
God. The one process is pervasive; the other is elective. The one makes men better 
il i ens of earth; the other makes them citizens of heaven, We do not doubt for a 


256 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


moment that Christianity is destined in this age to transform the face of society, to 

soften the asperities, to mitigate the oppressions, to subdue the barbarisms of the | 
human race. This it has been doing from the beginning. See how it has swept 
slavery from its track as it has advanced; how it has lifted the curse from woman; 

how it has melted the ice of stolid inhumanity from human hearts. This is its inevi- 

table work. The patient sunbeams brooding over the buried seed till it draws out the 

hidden germ which it contains, is all the time warming the surrounding atmosphere. 

The gospel, falling on human society to draw out regenerated souls and separate them 
unto God in newness of life, is all the while changing the moral climate of the world; 

and in this sense you may apply the parable, if you please, of the leaven hidden in the 
meal till the whole was leavened. ) 

Therefore, how cheering and inspiring it is to observe human progress marching 
forward in the path of the gospel—the fruit of Christianity, and at the same time, its 
ally and coadjutor. You have only to think a moment to be reminded that the age of 
modern progress is exactly contemporaneous with the age of modern missions. The 
last century has seen more accomplished in missionary conquest than the previous ten 
centuries. And it is equally true that the last hundred years have witnessed greater 
achievements in the arts and inventions than ten hundred years before. How does it 
happen that Christianity and science are thus moving side by side, with equal pace? 
I answer the question by asking another: Why such a triumph of the Roman arms 
and arts just previous to the first advent of Christ? Thy splendid roads, O imperial 
Rome, have been built, that the heralds of redemption may make swift haste to bear the 
gospel of salvation far hence among the Gentiles; thy fleet ships have been constructed 
to carry the missionaries of the cross into Asia Minor, into Spain and Italy, and among 
the savage tribes of Britain; thy arts and sciences are but the chariot wheels of 


Messiah’s kingdom, to speed its progress over all the earth. Czsar is to plant the 


Roman eagle in the courts of the temple, to proclaim that Judaism is dead, and its 
carcass given to the birds of prey; but the wings of the Roman eagle are to bear up 
the new religion and carry it onward so swiftly, that within seventy years from the 


birth of Christ, the chief apostle shall write, “The gospel which ye have heard, and 
which was preached to every creature which is under heaven, whereof I, Paul, was 


made a minister.” (Col. 1: 23.) 

My brethren, I believe we are living over again that Roman age—reproducing its 
corruptions, and far surpassing its intellectual and scientific achievements. And I 
only echo the opinions of the deepest and most devout students of prophecy, when I 
express also the belief that our age is preparing for the second coming of the Lord 


as that age was for the first; an event which will usher in a wider spread of the gospel, | 


and a vaster triumph of redemption than we have ever yet dreamed of during this’ 
dispensation of election. What are these arts and inventions of the nineteenth century 
for? They are for the Master’s use when He shall assume His authority as King over 
all the earth. 
Do you remember how the Lord, as He was about to make His triumphal entry 
into Jerusalem, sent for the ass’s colt on which to ride, with instructions to say to the 
owner, “The Lord hath need of him?” What! He “who maketh the clouds His chariot, 
and walketh upon the wings of the wind,” in need of this lowly beast to bear Him to 
the Holy City! Behold, He cometh again. He is preparing for His triumphal entry 
among the nations. To the swift sailing ship He speaks: “The Lord hath need of thee, 
to carry His messengers to the ends of the earth, and to the far off islands of the sea.” 
To the keen lightning flash, now tamed and harnessed to man’s control, He speaks: 
“The Lord hath need of thee, to give commission to His distant servants: in the twink- 
ling of an eye.” ‘To the myriad-tongued printing press He speaks: “The Lord hath 
need of thee, to publish His glad tidings to them afar off, and to them that are nigh,” 
{ 


s 


Christ—The Light and the Glory—A. J. Gordon. 257 


\ The Englisman’s steamship, the Chinaman’s sail, the Indian’s canoe, the Esquimaux 
Raledze, the Hindu’s palanquin, the implements of the rudest and of the ripest civiliza- 
tion—the Lord hath need of them all. All were built by His light, and all are wanted 
- for the furtherance of His gospel. O, “fire and hail, snow and vapor; stormy wind 
fulfilling His word; mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all 
Besttte, creeping things and flying fowl’—the Lord is calling for you all to be His 
einisters, and to say unto the heathen, “Thy God and Creator.” 


II. Christ—the Glory of His people Israel. 


Jesus is the Son of David, and, in spite of their unbelief and rejection, the Hebrew 
_ Tace has in Him a peculiar and glorious proprietorship. “But thou, Bethlehem 
- Ephrata, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He 

Beome forth unto Me, that is to be a ruler in Israel, whose goings torth have been from 

old, from everlasting.” And whatever distinctions belong to other cities and tribes, 

’ there is one city and one tribe that has been honorea to be the progenitor of earth’s 

_ Lord and Redeemer. “Ruler in Israel’ He never yet nas been. ‘‘He came unto His 
own and His own received Him not.’”’ Given to be a chief corner-stone in Zion, elect 
and precious, He became to the Jews only a “stone of stumbling and a rock of 
offence,” upon which they were broken into utter wreck and ruin. 


a 


And yet, by a strange irony of fate, it has come to pass that that rejected stone has 
constituted the very chiefest glory of Israel in their dispersion and humiliation. In 
the midst of all their wandering and captivity, in that sullen obstinacy of unbelief 
which no ages of persecution and obloquy have suvitened, one only honor has remained 
‘to them—that of being the brethren and kinsmen of the Hebrew Christ. The dark 
- shadow of His cross has pursued and haunted them wherever their weary feet have 
: trod. But it could never be forgotten that the light that has cast that shadow was 
‘a light that sprung out of one of their own tribes, though for them it was only a light 
shining in the darkness, which the darkness comprehended not. So has Jesus made 
His nation glorious in its very ruin. 
' You have watched a sunset, and seen the day break up. You have seen it pile its 
shattered fragments of cloud and mist and storm upon the horizon, and then upon 
‘this confused and turbulent wreck of cloud, you have seen the hidden sun throwing 
back its light, kindling and transfiguring it till it has produced a scene of splendor far 
Surpassing anything which the morning or meridian day had witnessed. So the king- 
dom and Church of Israel went to pieces when her day was spent. There, in the 
deepening twilight of her apostasy and rejection, lay the splendid wrecks; her temple 
in ruins, her shekinah glory fled, her ritual abolished, her tribes scattered, her 
Messianic hopes disappointed, and all her national splendor turned to shame and 
mocking. But then it was that the light of her rejected Christ fell upon her, to bring 
an unsurpassed glory out of these very wrecks. His life, and teachings, and example— 
what illumination was ever thrown upon the Hebrew Scriptures compared with that 
which these imparted? His crucifixion, and ascension, and intercession—what mean- 
| ing had all the Jewish offerings and rituals, until these events put meaning into them? 
| His second advent, for resurrection, and judgment, and universal reign—what but for 
these things had become of Israel’s wrecked and disappointed Messianic hopes? Even 
| in His rejection and humiliation, Jesus of Nazareth is the “glory of His people Israel,” 
lighting up what, in their history, was otherwise utterly dark, and making illustrious 
what had else fallen into uttter obscurity. 

Hear the testimony of one of their own nation on this point. Benjamin D’Israeli 
says: “In this enlightened age the pupil of Moses may ask himself whether all the 
princes of the house of David have done so much for the Jews, as that Prince who 
was crucified on Calvary. Had it not been for Him, the Jews would have been com- 
paratively unknown. Has not He made their history the most famous in the world? 


258 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


What successes did they anticipate from their Messiah? The wildest dreams of the 
Rabbis have been far exceeded. Has not Jesus conquered Europe and changed its 
name into Christendom? Is it not through Him that countless myriads of all races 
have learned to find music in the songs of Zion, as well as to seek solace in the para- 
bles of Galilee?” 

And we have only to press these questions a little further, to find the amplest 
verification of my text. Who is it that has invested the Hebrew Scriptures with such 
extraordinary interest, that they are more profoundly and widely studied today than 
at any time since they were written? Is it not He, the Son of David, of whom all 
those Scriptures bear testimony? Why is it that in these days men are pondering 
every jot and tittle of Jewish law and ritual, treasuring every smallest fragment of 
Jewish antiquity, taking pleasure in the stones, and favoring the very dust of Zion? 
Is it not because of Him who is the most illustrious Son of Zion? Thou art the King 
of Glory, O Christ! and amid all the misery and humiliation and degradation of that 
race that gave Thee birth, Thou art, and ever shall be, the “glory of thy people Israel.” 

But consider now how much larger fulfillment these words are to have when the 
Christ, now rejected by the Jews, shall at last be owned and worshipped by them— 
when He shall take to Himself His great power and reign. Remember, that the 
unparalleled sufferings of the Hebrew race for the past nineteen centuries have come 
as the penalty of their rejection of their true Messiah. In the presence of Him who 
was set for “the fall and rising again of many in Israel,” they made their deliberate 
choice; and God has been giving them what they chose during all these ages. “We 
have no king but Caesar,” they cried. And Caesar after Caesar has oppressed, and 
crucified, and enslaved them, until this very day. They chose Barabbas, the robber, 
instead of Christ; and they have been robbed, and pillaged, and spoiled, as no other 
nation under the heavens ever was before. They cried, “His blood be on us and on 
our children;” and the blood which has fallen on Gentile hearts to sprinkle them from 
an evil conscience, has rested on the head of the Jews, as though imprecating the 
unceasing vengeance of God, from the day of the crucifixion till now. 

O “tribes of the wandering feet and weary breast,” are ye not exhausted 
from your long rebellion against your King? Shall it be long before ye “shall look 
upon Him whom ye have pierced and mourn for Him,” that “the fountain may be 
open to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for 
uncleanness?” It must come to pass, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. 
Prophecy is as true as history; and as certain as the fact of Israel’s long rejection, so 
certain is the promise of her final recovery. For, have you not noticed that all the 
curses pronounced upon the Jews are limited? Hear them: “Behold, your house is 
left unto you desolate!” How long? “Until ye shall say, Blessed is He that cometh 
in the name of the Lord.” “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles.” For 
how long? “Until the time of the Gentiles shall be fulfilled.” ‘‘Blindness in part has — 
happened unto Israel.” For how long? “Until the fullness of the Gentiles be come 
in.’ Thus each curse, as it dies away, lets fall upon our ear a gracious refrain of hope 
and benediction. 

How literally and awfully these words have been fulfilled. For eighteen hundred 
years the Holy City has been desecrated by heathen feet; for eighteen hundred years — 
the Temple has been desolate and in ruins, an exorable providence defying every 
attempt to rebuild it; for eighteen hundred years an incorrigible blindness has been 
upon the Jews, so that they could see no beauty in their King that they should desire 
Him. But as sure as the oath and covenant of God, all this is to be changed. The 
prophet Zachariah gives us a graphic picture of the great transaction. Israel has 
gathered, or begun to gather back, to Palestine. Once more, as so often, her enemies 
have begun to prey upon her. Then their long-expected Messiah reappears. “His 


ee ae 


Sa 


Christ—The Light and the Glory—A. J. Gordon. 259 


- feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives which is before Jerusalem.” At 
the very place where He went up after His rejection by the Jewish people, He shall 
_ reappear again; then the spirit of grace and supplication poured out upon these stub- 
born hearts; then the veil of unbelief lifted from their eyes; then their looking upon 
Him whom they have pierced, and mourning for Him—a mourning deep, heart- 
broken, unutterable—a mourning unto which the bitterness of ages of unbelief is 
distilled; then cleansing and forgiveness, and the hosanna of adoration. Until ye 
shall say, “Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord,” says Jesus. And say 
it they must, because His mouth has declared it. No burst of impetuous and excited 
hhosannas, to be followed by the cry “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” but a prolonged 
‘and universal acclaim. ‘‘The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of 
the corner. This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes. Blessed is He 
that cometh in the name of the Lord.” 
If now Christ is the “glory of His peopie Israel” in His rejection, how much more 
shall He be so in His acceptance! Ii the light of our Redeemer shining on the lurid 
wrecks of Israel’s apostasy,‘ kindles such splendor, how much more when He shall 
‘shine out of Zion, the perfection of beauty! ‘Then shall the moon be confounded, and 
the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion, and before His 
ancients gloriously.” 
‘ Do we ask, ‘‘How shall this be brought about?” Not by terror or compulsion, 
but by a free and willing choice in the last great outpouring of God's spirit upon His 
ancient people. I have read the pathetic story of the conversion of an aged Jew. On 
his dying bed, his eyes were opened by the Spirit of God, to discern his long rejected 
Messiah. In his delirium, as though in memory transported back to Pilate’s judgment 
hall, and hearing once more the question, ‘Whom will ye that I release unto you?” he 
Ww ould break out in the cry, ‘“Not Barabbas, but this man! Not Barabbas, but this 
man!” So must all Israel say before God's purposes can be fully accomplished. The 
vote which sentenced Jesus to the cross must be reversed, and before all heaven the 
_ Jewish nation must retract its condemnation of the Messiah. 
Do we ask, ““When shall this be accomplished?” The answer is clear and definite 
- inthe 11th of Romans, viz., when “‘the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. . . all Israel 
shall be saved.” If Scripture may interpret Scripture, if Simeon and James may in- 
terpret Paul, this fulness, this pleroma, means the full complement—the total number 
of all that are to be gathered out of the Gentiles. Oh, blessed calling of the mission- 
y! He is seeking and saving lost souls for the Master; and He is also, with every 
convert He makes, hastening the coming of the King, and the deliverance of God’s 
first chosen and dearly loved people from their long captivity. Do you not remem- 
ber how this thought stirred the heart of Adoniram Judson? What impetuous mission- 
ry ardor it kindled in the heart of Joseph Wolf? And what almost supernatural elo- 
quence it inspired on the tongue of Alexander Duff, as he dwelt upon it? As mission- 
aries and preachers of the cross, it is our joy to feel the impulse, not of a single motive, 
b it to yield ourselves to the impetus and sweep of all the great motives which combine 
: te ) make our hee the highest ever yet sein aeaiy to men—the Dee of the lost, for 


_ And now, my isieaa what are the signs of hope? As the first faint streaks of 

Jawn broke upon the hills of Idumza, the watchman heard the dwellers in the plain 

shouting up to him, “Watchman, what of the night?” Is our answer like his,—the 
ea , confident, glad response,—‘*The morning cometh?” 

_ Without answering this question too confidently, let me at least point you to some 

ng foregleams of the day. The wisest students of the prophetic Scriptures, for 

hhundred years, have bid us watch along these three or four distinct lines for the 


260 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. : 


tokens of God’s coming kingdom; viz., a marked decadence of the power of the papal 
Anti-Christ; a waning and decay of the Turkish power in Asia; a revival of Jewish 
hopes and expectations, and a movement of that people toward their own land; and 
a mighty and unwonted impulse in Christian missions. These are the signs, they have 
said, which should cause us to lift up our heads and expect our redemption as drawing 
nigh. 

Lift up your eyes now and behold round about—the papacy within the years losing 
the temporal power which has been her strength for ages, and Europe slipping from 
the grip of her bloody hand, so rapidly, that we can hardly credit what is passing; 
Turkey robbed of half her territory, and watching for the end of her dominion, the 
Jews stirred as they have not been for centuries by the nations, with an impulse of 
cruelty utterly unaccountable—Russia, Germany and Austria driving them out by 
hundreds, while Palestine is all alive with the signs of their return to their ancient 
home; and Christian missions, meantime exhibiting an energy of conquest and a 
measure of success, utterly unprecedented. What mean these tidings? One thing they 
certainly mean—“The night is far spent, and the day is at hand;” and that, therefore 
because the time is short we should summon all our energies, bring forth all our re- 
sources, throw ourselves with all our zeal into the work of preaching the gospel to 
every creature. And as the ringing challenge of our great Task-master sounds down 
the ages, “Behold, I come quickly,” “Occupy till I come,” let us bend ourselves to 
the task with all our strength; our hearts, meanwhile, breathing out the glad and wel- 


come response, ‘Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.” 


(261) 


JESUS’ HABITS OF:PRAYER. 


S. D. GORDON. 


A habit is an act repeated so often as to be done involuntarily, that is, without a 
new decision of the mind each time it is done. Jesus prayed. He loved to pray. In 
part, praying was His way of resting. He prayed so much and so often that it became 
a part of His life. It became to Him like breathing—involuntary. 
There is no thing we need so much as to learn how to pray. There are two ways 
_of receiving instruction; one, by being told, the other, by watching some one else. 
The latter is the simpler and surer way. How better can we learn how to pray than 
by watching how Jesus prayed and then trying to imitate Him? Not studying what 
He said about prayer, invaluable as that is and so closely interwoven with the other; 
nor yet how He received the requests of men when on earth, full of inspiring sugges- 
tion as that is of His present attitude toward our prayers; but how He himself prayed 
- when down here surrounded by our same circumstances and temptations. 
. There are two sections of the Bible to which we at once turn for light, the Gospels 
and the Psalms: In the Gospels is given chiefly the outer side of His prayer—habits; 
and in certain of the Psalms, glimpses of the inner side are unmistakably revealed. 
‘ Turning now to the Gospels, we find the picture of the praying Jesus like an 
¥ etching, a sketch in black and white, the fewest possible strokes of the pen, a scratch 
here, a line there, frequently a single word added by one writer to the narrative of the 
¢ other, which gradually bring to view the outlines of a lone figure with upturned face. 
‘e Of the fifteen mentions of His praying found in the four Gospels, it is interesting 
- to note that while Matthew gives three, and Mark and John each four, it is Luke, 
 Paul’s companion and mirror-like friend, who in eleven such allusions supplies most 
of the picture. Does this not contain a strong hint of the explanation of that other 
etching plainly traceable in the epistles which reveals Paul’s own marvellous prayer- 
life? 
: Matthew immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures writes to the Jews of their promised 
Davidic king; Mark with rapid pen relates the ceaseless activity of this wonderful 
_ servant of the Father; John, with imprisoned body but rare liberty of vision, from the 
_ glory-side revealed on Patmos, depicts the Son of God coming on an errand from the 
Father into the world, and again leaving the world and going back home unto the 
Father; but Luke emphasizes the human Jesus, a man, with reverence let me use a 
word in its old-fashioned meaning—a fellow, that is one of ourselves. And the Holy 
‘Spirit makes it very plain throughout Luke’s narrative that the man Christ Jesus 
‘prayed; prayed much; needed to pray; loved to pray. Oh when shall we men down 
here, sent into the world as He was sent into the world, same mission, same field, same 
Satan to combat, same Holy Spirit to empower, find out that power lies in keeping 
closest connections with the Sender, and completest insulation from the power-absorb- 
ing world! 


_ Let me rapidly sketch these fifteen mentions of the Gospel writers, attempting to 
keep their chronological order. 

The first mention is by Luke in chapter three. The first three Gospels tell of 
Jesus’ double baptism, but it is Luke who adds, “and praying.” It was while waiting 
in prayer that the Holy Spirit came upon Him. He dared not begin his public 


age 


262 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


mission without that anointing. It had been promised in the prophetic writings, and 
now, standing in the Jordan, He waits and prays until the blue above was burst 
through by the gleams of glory-light from the upper side and the dove-like Spirit 
wings down and abides upon Him. Prayer brings power. Prayer is power. The 
time of prayer is the time of power. The place of prayer is the place of power. Prayer 
is tightening the connections with the Divine dynamo so that the power may flow 
freely without loss or interruption. 

The second mention is made.by Mark in chapter one. Luke in chapter four, hints 
at it, “when it was day He came out and went into a desert place.” But Mark tells us 
plainly, “in the morning a great while before day (or a little more literally, “very early 
while it was yet very dark’) He arose and went out and departed into a desert or 
solitary place and there prayed.” The day before, a Sabbath day, spent in His adopted 
home-town, Capernaum, had been a very busy one for Him; teaching in the synagogue 
service, the interruption by a demon-possessed man, the casting out amid a painful 
scene; afterwards the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, and then at sunset the great 
crowd of diseased and demonized thronging the narrow street until far into the night 
while He passing amongst them, by personal touch, healed and restored every one. 
It was a long and exhausting day’s work. One of us spending as busy a Sabbath 
would probably feel that the next morning needed an extra hour’s sleep if possible. 
One must rest, surely. But this man Jesus seemed to have another way of resting in 
addition to sleep. Probably He occupied the guest-chamber in Peter’s home. The 
house was likely astir at the usual hour, and by and by breakfast was ready, but the 
Master hadn’t appeared yet. So they waited a bit. After a while the maid slips to 
His room door and taps lightly, but there is no answer; again a little bolder knock, 
then pushing the door ajar she finds the room unoccupied. Where’s the Master? 
“Ah,” Peter says, “I think I know. I’ve noticed before this that He has a way of 
slipping off early in the morning to some quiet place where He can be alone.” And 
a little knot of disciples, with Peter in the lead, starts out on a search for Him, for 
already a crowd is gathering at the door and filling the street again, hungry for more. 
And they “tracked Him down” here and there on the hillsides, among clumps of trees, 
until suddenly they came upon Him quietly praying with a wondrous calm in His 
great eyes. Listen to Peter, as he eagerly blurts out, “Master, there’s a big crowd 
down there all asking for you.” But the Master’s quiet decisive tones reply, “Let 
us go into the next towns that I may preach there also; for to this end came I forth.” 
Much easier to go back and deal again with the old crowd of yesterday; harder to meet 
new crowds with their new skepticism; but there’s no doubt about what should be done. 
Prayer wonderfully clears the vision; steadies the nerves; defines duty; stiffens the 
purpose; sweetens and strengthens the spirit. The busier the day for Him the more 
surely must the morning appointment be kept,* and even an earlier start made, appar- 
ently. The more virtue went forth from Him the more certainly must He spend time, 
and even more time, alone with Him who is the source of power. 


The third mention is in Luke, chapter five. Not a great while after the scene just 
described, possibly while on the trip suggested by His answer to Peter, in some one of 
the numerous Galilean villages, moved with the compassion that ever burned in His 
heart, He had healed a badly diseased leper, who, disregarding His express command, 
so widely published the fact of His remarkable healing that great crowds blocked 
Jesus’ way in the village and compelled Him to go out to the country district where 
the crowds which the village could not hold throng Him. Now note what the Master 
does. The authorized version says: “He withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.” 
A more nearly accurate reading would be: “He was retiring in the deserts, and pray- 


*See Isaiah 50:4 revised with context. 


a 


Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S. D. Gordon. 263 


ing;” suggesting not a single act, but rather a habit of action running through several 
days, or even weeks. That is, being compelled by the greatness of the crowds to go 
out into the deserts or country districts and being constantly thronged there by the 
people, He had less opportunity to get alone, and yet more need, and so while He 
patiently continues His work among them He studiously seeks. opportunity to retire 
at intervals from the crowds to pray. How much His life was like ours. Pressed by 
; duties, by opportunities for service, by the great need around us we are strongly 
tempted to give less time to the inner chamber with door shut. “Surely this work 
enist be done,” we think, “though it does crowd and flurry our prayer-time some.’ 
“No,” the Master’s practice here says with intense emphasis. Not work first and 
prayer to bless it. But the first place given to prayer and then the service growing 
out of such prayer will be charged with unmeasurable power. The greater the outer 
Bears on His closet-life, the more jealously He guarded against either a shortening 
of its time or a flurrying of its spirit. The tighter the tension the more time must 
a be for unhurried prayer. 
i The fourth mention is found in Luke, chapter six. “It came to pass in these days 
that He went out into the mountain to pray and He continued all night in prayer to 
7 God.” The time is probably about the middle of the second year of His public 
“ministry. He had been having very exasperating experiences with the national leaders 
from Judea, who dogged His steps, criticising and nagging at every turn, sowing seeds 
of skepticism among His simple-minded intense-spirited Galilean followers. It was 
also the day before He selected the twelve men who were to be the leaders after His 
_ departure, and preached the mountain sermon. Luke does not say that He planned to 
_ spend an entire night in prayer. 
+ Wearied in spirit by the ceaseless petty picking and Satanic hatred of His enemies, 
thinking of the serious work of the morrow, there was just one thing for Him to do. 
_ He knew where to find rest, and sweet fellowship, and a calming presence, and wise 


Rocce. Turning His face northward He sought the solitude of the mountain not far 


_ off for quiet meditation and prayer. And as He prayed and listened and talked without 
words, daylight gradually grew into twilight, and that yielded imperceptibly to the 
brilliant Oriental stars spraying down their lustrous fire-light. And still He prayed 
while the darkness below and the blue above deepened, and the stilling calm of God 
wrapped all nature around, and hushed His heart into a deeper peace. In the fascina- 
tion of the Father’s loving presence He was utterly lost to the flight of time, but 
prayed on and on until by and by the earth had once more completed its daily turn, 
the gray streaks of daylight crept up the east, and the face of Palestine, fragrant with 
‘the deep dews of an eastern night, was kissed by the sun of a new day. And then 
“when it was day’—how quietly the narrative goes on—‘“He called the disciples and 
chose from them twely e, . . . anda great multitude of disciples and of the people 
came .. . and Hehealedall . . . and He opened His mouth and taught them, 
'. . . for power came forth from Him.” Is it any wonder, after such a night! If all 
Our exasperations and embarrassments were followed and all our decisions and utter- 
ances preceded by unhurried prayer, what power would come forth from us, too. 
Because, as He is, even so are we in this world. 
_ The fifth mention is made by Matthew, chapter fourteen, and Mark, chapter six, 
John hinting at it in chapter six of his gospel. It was about the time of the third pass- 
Over, the beginning of His last year of service. Both He and the disciples had been kept 
exceedingly busy with the great throngs coming and going incessantly. The startling 
news had just come of the tragic death of His forerunner, There was need of bodily 
Test, as well as of quiet to think over the rapidly culminating opposition. So taking 
boat they headed toward the eastern shore of the lake. But the eager crowd watched 
the direction taken and, spreading the news, literally ran around the head of the lake 


pai i 


264 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


“and outwent them,” and when He stepped from the boat, for the much-needed rest, 
there was an immense company, numbering thousands, waiting for Him. Did some 
feeling of impatience break out among the disciples that they couldn’t be allowed a 
little leisure? Very likely, for they were so much like us. But He was “moved with 
compassion” and, wearied though He was, patiently spent the entire day in teaching, 
and then at eventime, when the disciples proposed sending them away for food He, 
with a handful of loaves and fishes, satisfied the bodily cravings of as many as five 
thousand. 

There is nothing that has so appealed to the masses in all countries and all cen- 
turies as ability to furnish plenty to eat. Literally tens of thousands of the human 
race fall asleep every night hungry. So here. At once it is proposed by a great 
popular uprising under the leadership of this Man as King, to throw off the oppressive 
Roman yoke. Certainly if only His consent could be had it would be immensely 
successful, they thought. Does this not rank with Satan’s suggestion in the wilder- 
ness, and with the later possibility coming through the visit of the Greek deputation, 
of establishing the kingdom without suffering? It was a temptation even though it 
found no response within Him. With the overawing power of His presence, so 
markedly felt at times, He quieted the movement, “constrained’”* the disciples to go 
by boat before Him to the other side, while He dismissed the throng. “And after He 
had taken leave of them’”—what gentle courtesy and tenderness mingled with irrevo- 
cable decision—“He went up into the mountain to pray,” and continued in prayer 
until the morning watch. A second night in prayer! Bodily weary, His spirit startled 
by an event which vividly foreshadowed His own approaching violent death, and now 
this vigorous renewal of the old temptation, again He has recourse to His one unfail- 
ing habit of getting off alone somewhere to pray. Time alone to pray; more time to 
pray was His one invariable offset to all difficulties, all temptations and all needs. 
How much more there must have been in prayer, as He understood and practiced it, 
than many of His followers today know! 

We shall perhaps understand better some of the remaining prayer incidents if we 
remember that Jesus is now in the last year of His ministry, the acute stage of His 
experiences with the national leaders preceding the final break. The awful shadow of 
the cross grows deeper and darker across His path. The hatred of the opposition 
leaders gets constantly intenser. The conditions of discipleship are more sharply put. 
The inability of the crowds of disciples and others to understand Him grows more 
marked. Many followers “go back.” He seeks to get more time for intercourse with 
the twelve. He makes frequent trips to distant points on the border of the outside 
non-Jewish world. The coming scenes and experiences—the scene on the little — 
hillock outside the Jerusalem-wall seems never absent from His thoughts. 

7 The sixth mention is made by Luke, chapter nine. They are up north in the neigh- 
borhood of the Roman city of Cesarea Philippi. “And it came to pa-s, as He was © 
praying alone, the disciples were with Him.” Alone, so far as the multitudes are con- — 
cerned, but seeming to be drawing these twelve nearer to His inner life. Some of . 
these later incidents seem to suggest that He was trying to woo them into something © 
of the same love for the fascination of secret prayer that He had. How much they 
would need to pray in the coming years when He was gone! Possibly, too, He 
yearned for a closer fellowship with them. He loved human fellowship as Peter and 
James and John, and Mary and Martha and many other gentle women well knew. 
And there’s no fellowship among men to be compared with the fellowship in prayer. 


Se a oe 


*Does not this very strong language suggest that the disciples had been conferred with by the 
revolutionary leaders and had probably approved the plan? 


Ghar 


Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S. D. Gordon. 265 


“There is a place where spirits blend, 
Where friend holds fellowship with friend, 
A place than all beside more sweet, 

It is the blood-bought mercy-seat.” 


The seventh mention is in this same ninth chapter of Luke, and records a third 
night of prayer. Matthew and Mark also tell of the transfiguration scene, but it is 
‘Luke who explains that He went up into the mountain to pray and that it was as He 
“was praying that the fashion of His countenance was altered. Without stopping to 


contact with God! Shall not we, to whom the Master has said “follow Me,” get alone 
with Him and His blessed word so habitually, with open, or uncovered face, that is, 


“And the face shines bright 
With a glow of light, 

From His presence sent 
Whom she loves to meet. 


4 Yes, the face beams bright Still the face shines bright 
x With an inner light, With the glory light 
iP As by day, so by night, From the mountain height, 
% In shade as in shine, Where the resplendant sight 
. With a beauty fine, Of His face 
‘i That she wists not of, Fills her view, 
es From some source within, And illuminates in turn 
And above. Not a few, 


But the wide race.” 


& The eighth mention is in the tenth chapter of Luke. He had organized a band of 
n, sending them out in twos into places He expected to visit. They had returned 
with a joyful report of the power attending their work; and standing in their midst 
His own heart overflowing with joy, He looked up and, as though the Father’s face 
were visible, spoke out to Him the gladness of His heart. He seemed to be always 
conscious of His Father’s unseen presence, and the most natural thing was to speak 
to Him. They were always within speaking distance of each other, and always on 
speaking terms. 
_ The ninth mention is in the eleventh chapter of Luke, very similar to the sixth 
mention in chapter nine. “It came to pass as He was praying in a certain place that 
) when He ceased one of His disciples said unto Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’” With- 
out doubt these disciples were praying men. He had already talked to them a good 
about prayer. But as they noticed how large a place prayer had in His life, and 
ome of the marvellous results, the fact came home to them with great force that there 
must be some fascination, some power, some secret, in prayer, of which they were 
ignorant. This Man was a master in the fine art of prayer. They really didn’t know 
how to pray, they thought. How their request must have delighted Him. At last 
they were being aroused concerning the great secret of prayer. May it be that this 


a 


if 


rH 


266 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


simple recital of His habits of prayer may move every one of us to get oftener alone — 
with Him and make the same earnest request. For the first step in learning to pray 
is to pray “Lord teach me to pray.”’ And who can teach like Him? 


The tenth mention is found in John, chapter eleven, and is the second of the four 
instances of ejaculatory prayer. A large company gathered outside the village of 
Bethany around a tomb in which four days before the body of a young man had been 
laid away. There is Mary, still quietly weeping, and Martha, always keenly alive to — 
the proprieties, trying to be more composed, and their personal friends, and the . 
villagers, and a company of acquaintances and others from Jerusalem. At His word, 
after some hesitation, the stone at the mouth of the tomb is rolled aside. And Jesus 
lifted up His eyes and said “Father, I thank Thee that Thou heardst Me; and I knew 
that Thou hearest Me always; but because of the multitude which standeth around I 
said it that they may believe that Thou didst send Me.” Clearly before coming to the 
tomb He had been praying in secret about the raising of Lazarus, and what followed 
was in answer to His prayer. How plain it becomes that all the marvellous power 
displayed in His brief earthly career came through prayer. What inseparable intimacy 
between His life of activity, at which the multitudes then and ever since have marveled, 
and His hidden closet-life of which only these passing glimpses are obtained. Surely — 
the greatest power entrusted to man is prayer-power. But how many of us are untrue 
to the trust while this strangely omnipotent power put into our hands lies so largely 
unused? Note, also, the certainty of His faith in the hearer of prayer: “I thank Thee 
that Thou heardst Me.” There was nothing that could be seen to warrant such faith. 
There lay the dead body. But He trusted as “seeing Him who is invisible.” Faith is 
blind, except upward. It is blind to impossibilities and deaf to doubt. It listens only 
to God and sees only His power and acts accordingly. Faith is not believing that He 
can but that He will. But such faith comes only of close, continuous contact with 
God Its birthplace is in the secret closet; and time, and the open Word and an 
awakened ear, and a reverent, quiet heart are necessary to its growth. 

The eleventh mention is found in the eleventh chapter of John. Two or three 
aays before the fated Friday some Greek visitors to the Jewish feast of Passover 
sought an interview with Him. The request seemed to bring to His mind a vision of 
the great outside world after which His heart yearned, coming to Him so hungry for 
what only He could give. And instantly, athwart that vision like an ink-black shadow, ~ 
came the other vision, never absent now from His waking thoughts, of the cross, so 
awfully near. Shrinking in horror from the second vision, yet knowing that only | 
through its realization could be realized the first, seemingly forgetful for the moment 
of the bystanders, as though soliloquizing, He speaks—‘“‘now is My soul troubled; 
and what shall I say? Shall I say, Father save me from this hour? But for this — 
cause, came I unto this hour; this is what I will say (and the intense conflict of soul 
merges into the complete victory of a wholly surrendered will) Father, glorify thy 
name.” Quick as the prayer was uttered came the audible voice out of heaven ans- 
wering, “I have both glorified it and I will glorify it again.” How near heaven must — 
be! How quickly the Father hears! He must be bending over intently listening, | | 
eager to catch even faintly whispered prayer. Their ears full of earth-sounds, unaccus-— 
tomed to listening to a heavenly voice, could hear nothing intelligible. He had 
a trained ear. Isaiah 50:4 revised (a passage plainly prophetic of Him) suggests how: 
it was that He could understand this Voice so easily and quickly. “He wakenethy 
morning by morning, He wakeneth mine ear to hear as they are taught.” A taught | 
ear is as necessary tp. prayer as a taught tongue, and the daily, morning i 
with God is essential to both. 

The twelfth mention is made by Luke, chapter twenty-two. It is Thursday night 
of passion week, in the large upper room in Jerusalem where He is celebrating the old 


Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S . D. Gordon. 267 


passover feast, and initiating the new memorial feast. But even that hallowed hour 
is disturbed by their self-seeking disputes. With the great patience of great love He 
gives them the wonderful example of humility, of which John 13 tells, speaking 
‘quietly of what it meant, and then turning to Peter, and using his old name, He 
F ays, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked to have you that he might sift you as wheat, 
but I made supplication for thee that thy faith fail not.’”’ He had been praying for 
Peter by name! That was one of His prayer-habits, praying for others. And He 
hasn't broken off that blessed habit yet! He is able to save to the uttermost them 
that draw near to God through Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession for 
them. His occupation now seated at the Father’s right hand in glory is praying for 
each of us who trust Him. By name? Why not? 

The thirteenth mention is the familiar one in John, chapter seventeen, and cannot 
e studied within these narrow limits, but merely fitted into its order. The twelfth 
chapter contains His last words to the world. In the thirteenth and through to the 
close of the seventeenth He is alone with the disciples. If this prayer is-read carefully 
n the revised version, it will be seen that its standpoint is that of one who thinks of 


reinstated in glory there. It is realiy, therefore, a sort of specimen of the praying 
for us in which He is now engaged, and so is commonly called the intercessory or 
high-priestly prayer. For thirty years He lived a perfect life. For three and a half 
ears He was a prophet speaking to men for God. For nineteen centuries He has 
en high priest speaking to God for men, and when He returns it will be as King 
reign over men for God. 

The fourteenth mention brings us within the sadly sacred precincts of Gethsemane 
garden, one of His favorite prayer spots, where He frequently went while in Jerusalem. 
The record is found in Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22. Let us approach with 

hearts hushed and heads bared and bowed, for this is indeed hallowed ground. It is a 
little later on that same Thursday night into which so much has already been pressed, 
and so much more is yet to come. After the talk in the upper room and the simple, 


wift, muddy Kidron into the enclosed grove of olive trees beyond. There would be 
o sleep for Him that night. Within an hour or two the Roman soldiers and the 
wish mob led by the traitor will be there searching for Him, and He meant to spend 
he intervening time in prayer. With the longing for sympathy so marked during 
ese latter months He takes Peter and James and John and goes farther into the 
eply shadowed grove. But now some invisible power tears Him away and plunges 
m alone still further into the moon-lit recesses of the garden; and there a strange, 
awful struggle of soul ensues. It seems like a renewal of the same conflict He experi- 
iced i in John 12 when the Greeks came, but immeasurably intenser. He who in 
self knew no sin was now beginning to realize in His spirit what within a few 
hours He realized actually, that He was in very deed to be made sin for us. And the 
ay realization comes in upon Him with such terrific intensity that it seems as though 
dis physical frame cannot endure the strain of mental agony. The actual experience 
of the next day produced such mental agony that His physical strength gave way. 
for He died not of His physical suffering, excruciating as that was, but literally of a 
roken heart, its walls burst asunder by the strain of soul. It is not possible for a 
sinning soul to appreciate with what night-mare dread and horror the sinless soul of 
is must have approached the coming contact with the sin of a world. With bated 
reath and reverent gaze one follows that lonely figure among the trees; now kneeling, 
10w: falling upon His face, now lying prostrate, “He prayed that if it were possible 
e hour might pass away from Him.” One snatch of that prayer reaches our ears: 


268 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


“Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee—if it be possible, let this cup pass 
away from Me; nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” How long He remained — 
so in prayer we do not know, but so great was the tension of spirit that a messenger 
from heaven appeared and strenghtened Him. Even after that “being in an agony ~ 
He prayed more earnestly (literally, more stretched out, more strainedly) and His — 
sweat became as it were great clots of blood falling down upon the ground.” When ~ 
at length He arises from that season of conflict and prayer the victory seems to be — 
won, and something of the old-time calm reasserts itself. He goes to the sleeping | 
disciples, and mindful of their coming temptation, admonishes them to pray; then — 
returns to the lonely solitude again for more prayer, but the change in the form of — 
prayer tell of the triumph of soul: ‘“‘O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away, except 

I drink it, Thy will be done.” The victory is complete. The crisis is past. He yields — 
Himself to that dreaded experience through which alone the Father’s loving plan for 
a dying world can be accomplished. Again He returns to the poor, weak disciples, and 
back again for another bit of strengthening communion, and then the flickering 
glare of torches in the distance tell Him that “the hour is come,” and with steady step 
and a marvellous peace lighting His face He goes out to meet His enemies. He over- 
came in this greatest crisis of His life by prayer. 

The fifteenth mention is the final one. Of the seven sentences which He spake 
upon the cross three were prayers. Luke tells us that while the soldiers were driving — 
the nails through His hands and feet and lifting the cross into place, He thinking even © 
then not of self, but of others, said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do.” | 

It was as the time of the daily evening sacrifice drew on, near the close of that 
strange darkness which overcast all nature, after a silence of three hours, that He 
loudly sobbed out the piercing, heartrending cry, “My God, My God, why didst Thou 
forsake Me?” A little later me triumphant shout proclaimed His work done, and 
then the very last word was a prayer quietly breathed out, as He yielded up His life, 
“Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” And so His expiring breath was 
vocalized into prayer. 

It may be helpful to make the following summary of these allusions: 

1. His times of prayer: His regular habit seems plainly to have been to devote 
the early morning hour to communion with His Father, and to depend upon that for 
constant guidance and instruction. This is suggested especially by Mark 1: 35; and 
also by Isaiah 50: 4-6, coupled with John 7:16 1. c., 8:28 1. c., and 12:49. : 

In addition to this regular appointment, He Souete other opportunities for secret 
prayer as special need arose; late at night after others had retired; three times He 
remained in prayer all the night; and at irregular intervals between times. Note that 
it was usually a quiet time when the noises of earth were hushed. He spent special - 
time in prayer both before and also after important events. (See mentions 1, 2, 3, 455 
5, 10, and 14.) . 

2. His place of prayer: He who said “enter into thine inner chamber and when 
thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father in secret,” Himself had no fixed inner 
chamber during His public career to make easier the habitual retirement for prayer. 
Homeless for the three and a half years of ceaseless traveling, His pak: of prayer was” 
“a desert place,” “the deserts,” “the mountains,” “a solitary place.” He loved nature. 
The hilltop back of Nazareth village, the slopes of Olivet, the hillsides overlooking the 
Galilean Lake were His favorite places. Note that it was always a quiet place, shut 
away from the discordant sounds of earth. 7 

3. His constant spirit of prayer: He was never out of the spirit of prayer. He 
could be alone in a dense crowd. It has been said that there are three sorts of soli- 
tude, namely, of time, as early morning or late night; of place, as a hilltop, or forest, 


Jesus’ Habits of Prayer—S. D. Gordon. 269 


them unmoved or be lost to all around in his own inner thoughts. Jesus used all three 
sorts of solitude for talking with His Father. (See mentions 8, 10, 11 and 15.) 

4. He prayed in the great crises of His life: Five such are mentioned; before the 
awful battle royal with Satan in the Quarantanian Wilderness at the outset; before 
thoosing the twelve leaders of the new movement; at the time of the Galilean uprising; 
before the final departure from Galilee for Judea and Jerusalem; and in Gethsemane, 
he greatest crisis of all. (See mentions 1, 4, 5, 7 and 14.) 

5. He prayed for others by name, and still does. (See mention 13.) 

6. He prayed with others: A habit that might well be more widely copied. A 
ew minutes spent in quiet prayer by friends or fellow workers before parting wonder- 
ully sweetens the spirit and cements friendship and makes difficulties less difficult, and 
hard problems easier of solution. (See mentions 6, 7, 9 and 13.) 

7.. The greatest blessings of His life came during prayer. While praying the 
Holy Spirit came upon Him; He was transfigured; three times a heavenly voice of 


trengthen Him. (See mentions 1, 7, 11 and 14.) 

How much prayer meant to Jesus! It was not only His regular habit, but His 
esort in every emergency, however slight or serious. When perplexed He prayed. 
N hen hungry for fellowship He found it in prayer. He chose His associates and 
received His messages upon His knees. If tempted He prayed. If criticized He 
yed. If fatigued in body or wearied in spirit He had recourse to His one unfailing 
it of prayer. Prayer brought Him power at the beginning, and kept the flow 
roken and undiminished. There was no emergency, no difficulty, no necessity, no 
smptation that would not yield to prayer. Shall not we who have been tracing these 
ps in His prayer-life go back over them again and again until we breathe in His 
ery spirit of prayer? And shall we not, too, ask Him daily to teach us how to pray, 
nd then plan to get alone with Him regularly that He may have opportunity to teach 
s, and we the opportunity to practice His teaching? 


__ [S. D. Gordon was born in Philadelphia, where he received his education. He 
was for some years Ohio State secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association, 
and later was with the New England Evangelization Society. In 1898 he organized 

ne Ohio Evangelization movement and developed it into a most successful work. 


4 This address has been given a number of times and has resulted in strengthening 
€ prayer-life of many. While not a sermon in every sense, we afe certain it will 
Prove very interesting and helpful.] 


270 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


WATCH. 


H. G. GUINNESS, D. D. 
“Watch!”’—Mark 13: 37. 


From the time when the evening sun sinks in the empurpled clouds of the west: 


from the time when the heavy mists of night descend; from the time when darkness 


creeps over the face of the earth, through the long hours of the night to the morning 
till the sun rises, the watcher_paces backward and forward on the castle walls. But 
when the morning comes, he is weary; he lays his head down and slumbers, and some 
one else takes his place,—he must sleep. There, bending over yon couch, gazing on 
yon sick child, there is a mother. She has watched that child night after night; night 
after night sleep hath not visited her eyelids. But now, look, she sits in the chair. 
It is night; the lamp almost dies out on the table; theraslumbers the child—you could 
almost hear the hoarse murmur of its breathing; there sits the mother, and sleep 
comes down upon her eyelids also, and she slumbers. And there, on the battle-field in 
the midst of the dead and the dying, lies the weary soldier. All day long he has been 
engaged in the fight; he is covered with the dust and blood of the fight, and there he 
sleeps, his head lying calmly, quietly upon the body of a dead man, slumbering even 


there on the battle-field. And the sailor, clinging to the giddy height of the mast, © 


slumbers also; he cannot keep his eyes open always. Yet, though all on earth have 
their time of sleep, there is One whose eye never closes, who never slumbers, never 
sleeps. The flowers shut up their faces, the petals cover over their bosoms, yea, night 
succeeds day, and day succeeds night, and after the long day of summer comes the 
long night of winter; but there is One who knows no rest, knows no sleep,—even 
God, and with Him it is one perpetual, one ceaseless, and unchanging watching. He 
watched when we were not; He watches now that we are, and He will watch to all 
eternity. Oh, Christian, there is not a word on your tongue, not a thought that crosses 
your mind, nor an imagination that floats, cloud-like, across your soul, not an act of 
your life, but He sees,—ever watching. And there is one thought that would almost 
silence me, but for His grace, which is sufficient, that His eye is now fixed on this 
heart, and His ear now listens to these words—still watching. 

Now, brethren, as Christians the Lord Jesus addresses you, and ere He departs 


He would give you His last injunction. Says Christ, speaking first of all to His ~ 


disciples, ‘‘Watch, for ye know neither the day nor the hour when the Son of man 
cometh.” Then turning to them, he says, “What I say unto you,’—Peter and James, 
and John, and Andrew,—“I say unto all, Watch,” it is of this command we would this 
night speak; and may the Spirit of God assist us, that our feeble words, spoken in 
weakness, may, by the Almighty hands of God, be blessed to many souls. 


There are four things that I would now speak of: And may we be enabled tc — 


watch against the first two, and watch for the second two. 
1.—Watch against sin. 
2.—Watch against temptation. 
3.—Watch for souls. 
4,—Watch for Christ. . 


Watch—Guinness. 27% 


I. A word or two about watching against sin. 


Now, Christian, thou art a soldier. Wilt thou go forth to the battle without 
armor? Is it wise, is it prudent for you? Should the soldier go forth simply clad in 
the ordinary raiment? Nay, let him clothe himself from head to foot in armor. And, 
pi ay, what armor should the Christian soldier wear? Paul tells us, and if you turn 
Yy ith me to the sixth chapter of Ephesians we will read over what he says upon the 
ubject. Paul says, “Take unto you the whole armor,’—of man? No. Of angels? 
No, “of God.” Among the ancients it was said that Jove’s armor was forged by 
Vulcan, in the fires of Vesuvius. This, of course, is all a myth, all nonsense; there was 
no such thing. But, be that as it may, our armor as Christians is proof. Why? 


w le to eaitherana i in the i day,’—that i is, now, 
the present day—‘‘and having done all, to stand.” ‘Stand, therefore,’ Paul repeats it, 


“having your loins girt about with truth.” Now, remember the commandments of 


the Lord Jesus Christ. He says, “if ye love Me”’—I do not say you do or do not; 
you profess to do it—‘‘if you love me, keep My commandments.”’ And, pray, what 
the one of His commandments? “Search the Scriptures.” And thus you gather 
about yourself a panoply of truth. Being girt about with truth, ‘‘and having on the 


breast-plate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel 


the fiery darts of the wicked; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of 
the Spirit, which is the word of God.’ Now, Christian, have ‘“‘your feet shod with 
peace;” that is the first part of the armor next to truth and righteousness. Peace, 
Christian; not anger, not war. You have to pass through a world of trouble; if you 


rom suffering, then you will not resent the thorn-like injury that pierces. Not only 
So, “but put on the breast-plate of righteousness;” glory, above all things, in the 
potless righteousness of the Lord Jesus. Let Satan come to thee and say, “thou art 
e;” say thou, “I know it, but do you see aes I have got on my bosom? Take your 


have in my bosom a breast-plate, and it is one of righteousness. What if I am vile? 
‘T have the righteousness of Him who is not vile—the Lord Jesus.’ Christian, take 
o “the shield of faith.” There are some of you sorely harassed with doubts. How 
you ward off these doubts? You know among the Romans they used frequently 
) have their darts barbed in a particular manner. They used to take a little phial 
that might easily be broken, and fill it with naphtha or mineral oil; they used to tie 
‘this to the dart, and then place the dart in the bow, and having lit this mineral oil 
they drew the bow, and, as the oil flamed, they let fly the arrow, and the arrow 
would bear the flame into the midst of the enemy. If it struck a’ tent it would set it 
on fire; if it struck a house, and that house was made of wood it would set fire to that 
Howse. Now, Paul speaks of this, when he tells us to beware of “the fiery darts of 

e wicked.” Beware of them. Oh, take on your arm this shield of faith. Says Satan, 
“You are a child of God.” Say, TT-amrT know it for I have here the shield of faith; 


ow it, because God has told me I am His, and He has adopted me into His 
family. ” Wear also “the helmet-ef salvation,” so that, no matter what blows you get, 


e head may be safe. And use in your hand “the sword of the Spirit, which is the 
word of God.” Oh, how quick, how powerful this sword of the Spirit is! It 1s 
sharper than any other sword. The sword of man may be powerful, but it fails to cut 
down to the very heart, and lay open the secrets of the bosom, If I had spoken my 
Own words, many of you would never have been affected; but doubtless many of you 
have been brought to conviction. Now, what sword is this that, held in the arms of 
s 


. 


& 


272 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


one feeble and vile, cuts through to your very soul? It was the sword of the Spirit— 
the word of God. It is the best sword always to be armed with. If ever you meet 
with an infidel take care how you use your own words. In combatting with him, use 
spiritual words. Some time since I remember hearing of a Christian minister who 
was traveling in Switzerland. He met there, in a stage coach, a young man, who was 
far from Christ, who knew not God, a mocker and an infidel. They entered into con- 
versation. This young man began to express his doubts on the subject of salvation. 
“Well,” said the Christian minister, “I believe it, because I feel it.” The young man — 
said, “It is all nonsense; I do not believe it; it is all a tale, an idle tale.” ‘Well,’ 
said the minister, thinking at once of the sword of the Spirit, “if the Gospel be hid, 
it is hid unto them that are lost, in whom the god of this world hath blinded the eyes 
of their understanding.” He then called to mind the words of Jesus, how that seeing 
they should not perceive, and how that hearing they should not understand. Well, 
that young man spoke no more to him, but began to reflect on the words. A day or 
two afterwards, these words still clinging to him brought him to conviction. He 
sought on his knees, and found forgiveness of God, through faith in Christ. He came 
to the minister and told him these words had pierced him. Nothing else would; he 
had read all sorts of evidences about Christianity; he had waded through Paley, but 
none of these had convinced him; it was the sword of the Spirit which pierced his 
heart. 

Now, there are some of you who think you are thoroughly armed from head to 
foot, but who, for all that, are false in your Christianity. I should like to say a few 
words to such, Some time since I remember walking across the tesselated pavement 
of a grand hall in the mansion of one of England’s noblest born. In a niche I saw, 
by the light which streamed through the painted glass of an oriel window, a statue. 
I thought at first it was a man. I walked across the pavement and drew near to 
examine the figure. He had upon his head a helmet of iron; the vizor was drawn 
down over his face, concealing the features; he held on his arm a long shield that 
reached to the very ground; in his hand was grasped an iron sword, double edged; 
he wore on his bosom a strong breast-plate; his limbs were covered with greaves and 
rings; his feet were also shod with iron. I drew near and began to examine it. Pres- 
ently, to my surprise, I saw something protruding; and I examined it, and found it 
was a piece of straw. On walking round I saw some more pieces of straw sticking 
out through the greaves of the armor. I soon found this was a man in armor—if you 
will—but stuffed with straw. This gave me a thought which I will not lose. There 
may be many, and there are many, in our midst, armed from head .to toot—cap-a-pied 
—with spiritual armor. We speak truth to them, and they have always got some 
answer ready, generally some text of Scripture. We warn them about the world to 
come, and they bring up some text of Scripture. Thus they are like a porcupine; we 
cannot touch them. But the sword of the Spirit can. The best way to treat a porcu- 
pine is to take it up with all its quills, and throw it into the water; and then it must 
swim and open out. Now, I would throw these men into the water—into the water 
of trouble and affliction. There may be some of you armed from head to foot with | 
this spiritual panoply, and the world calls you excellent Christians; but your religion 
is false, hollow, heartless, soulless, Godless, Christless. You may have this Bible, 
you may bear within your bosom the very words of truth, you may speak of Jesus 
to multitudes, you may bring up your families consistently; but, for all that, unless 
you are watching, unless you are striving, unless you are struggling, unless you are 
fighting, unless you are warring, unless you are pressing onward, you are none of 
God’s. Oh, let these words come home to the heart! Forget them not! Neglect 
them not! Come, every one of you, and search what is within. Examine yourselves 
and see whether ye be in the faith, “except ye be reprobates.” 


Watch—Guinness. 273 


Christian, not only watch in armor, but watch in earnest. One night, at the head 
of his troops, leaning upon his sword, stood an officer. There were the ramparts of 
Sebastopol before him. The gloom of midnight rested upon the whole scene. His 
troops, many of them, were slumbering; and the man stood there watching. In the 
midst of the gloom, his wandering and ever-watchful eye detects something. He sees 
a dark moving mass; he remarks it stealthily, slowly, silently, solemnly, through the 
darkness, drawing near; he watches, watches, and it is the Russians. He calls his 
men at once to arms; he rushes onwards, and dies in the fight. Now, Christian, it will 
not do forever to slumber. If thou art in armor be in earnest. There are numbers oi 
us, and we sleep within the citadel. There are numbers of us who creep through the 
gates, and they sleep without the citadel. There are numbers placed by the hand of 
God as pickets near the outposts of the enemy, and slumber there. Awful danger to 
sleep in such a position. Beware, and see to it that thou watch in earnest; then thou 
shalt detect moving masses of God’s enemies and thine, and, if thou watch, thou shalt 
ye ready. Watch in earnest! And there are some of you sent aloft, like the sailor 
upon the giddy topmast, to watch for dangerous reefs and rocks. Be in earnest! Oh, 


on every hand hidden rocks, sunken sands, lee shores. Watch, and God will guide 
thy vessel properly. I daresay there may be some here who are ministers. I often 


heart, directed by the hand of God. It may be there is here some minister who has 
hold of the helm of the vessel—the Church of God—guiding it, but perhaps falling 
asleep over the wheel. I bid that man take care. I have seen a man steering a ship, 
holding the spokes of the wheel, with the chart spread out before him, and the sails 
‘bent. By and by his head has nodded, and he has slumbered, until, by a sudden turn 
of the wheel, he has been flung completely over. Many have been lost often thus. 
Beware of this. If you are standing at the helm, you are standing in an awful position. 
You have work to do. Work, then, and the more you work, the more you will find 
yourself able to work. You know that, in the Arctic regions, the sailors who have to 
Mavigate the vessel are obliged, while on the deck, to beat their arms against their 


There is one more observation about this watching. Watch unto prayer against 
Sin. Oh, take care that you neglect not prayer! If you go forth in the morning 
Without prayer, ten to one that you will be brought in in the evening bowed down 


cients; an old saint was Origen. One morning he left his room without the usual 
prayer. His enemies came in, took him, and brought him before the judgment-seat, 
and said, “Origen, you must give up your Christ, or give up your life.” “Then I will 
give up my life first.” They then showed him the rack, and they said, “Art thou 
willing to be bound to that rack, and to have thy limbs stretched there until they are 
dislocated?” The old man said he was. But when they put him upon the rack, he 
shru nk, and said, ‘““Let me loose!”” They loosed him; he recanted, and wrote his name 
“renegade,” giving up Christ and all. Then the enemy blasphemed, saying, “Here is 
an old saint that has yielded; shall we not manage these poor weak women and chil- 
ren who refuse to yield?” Ah, they knew not that that man’s strength lies not in 
himself, but in God. Give me, give mea little child, whose strength is in the Almighty, 
rather than the warrior who is prayerless. Now Origen tells you a secret which these 

ple understand not. He says, “The reason I recanted today was because I went 
from my room without the usual prayer.” We bid you be prayerful; if you would 


274 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


ever succeed against sin, you must watch prayerfully. I feel it; I feel it. There are 
sins strong; there are sins mighty; there are sins that seize us and trample us down. 
If you would overcome such mighty demons, you must have God with thee. God 
must strengthen thy arms; and if God help thee, thou shalt surely not only be victor, 
thou shalt not only be conqueror, thou shalt be more than victor, more than con- 
queror. Oh, watch then, unto prayer. 


II. A word or two I must speak about watching against temptation. 


Now, there are several kinds of temptation. A word about watching against the 
world’s temptations. There are some here, I see, who are inclined to be led away by 
dress. I cannot avoid speaking about dress. I am here to speak the truth, and nothing 
else, or I cannot speak at all. There are some of you led away by dress. Is that 
watching against the world’s temptations? The world talks about fashion; do you 
attend to the world when it talks about these things? Oh, think of the words of the 
apostle! Think of what a woman’s true ornament externally should be—the soberness 
of spirit, the gentleness of soul, the meekness of heart, the warmth of love! Never 
forget that; if thou art yielding to the temptation of fashion, thou art yielding to the 
temptation of the world, and art being gradually led astray. Beware of it! Again, 
there are some of you, good Christians enough in some respects, who are led away 
from time to time to go and see sights. Does it do you any good? Does it do you 
any good to see persons making fools of themselves? Does it do you any good to go 
to the theater, to go to the horse-ring, or to the exhibitions of folly? I could mention 
some things in particular, but I have not time to pause. I know some Christians who 
make a great profession, but who regularly give themselves and their families a treat. 
They say there can be no harm in it, and they go and see different sights; but they 


come home less peaceful, less calm, less zealous, than when they go out. I know such> 


persons have come to the minister and said, “We are very unhappy; we wish to live 
more to God.” And the poor minister cannot tell the reason. But God knows it, 
that in a time of temptation they give way, and go round thus, following in the foot- 
steps of the world. Beware of doing any such thing! 

Watch against the temptations of the flesh. Oh, take care of pride, take care of 
lust, take care of sloth! If you let sloth, sloth will come upon you and tie your hands, 
sloth will bind your feet, sloth will draw down your eyelids, and will fan you, life 
slipping away all the while like a dream. I do believe that there are some of you this 
very hour lying, fanned by the wings of this sloth. There you are in the boat, floating 
down the swift stream towards yon mighty cataract, yon torrent. Oh, if I had a 
voice that would reach you, I would shout in your ear, “Awake thou slothful one! 
Beware! for the stream is swift and strong that bears thee to destruction. Awake! 
lest thou perish, and it be too late.’ We bid you watch against lust—lust is strong. 
And take care, in watching against these temptations, you do so with the help of God. 

I cannot pause further than to say, watch against the temptations of Satan. Some 
of you have had the house nicely swept, the furniture has been put in order, the 
windows have been cleaned, and the door is barred. Take care; for Satan stands just 
outside, and he is ever on the watch to enter. If, in a moment of inadvertency, you 
draw the bolt and open the door, in he will come, and the place will be ten times 


worse than it was before. Oh, beware of Satan; take care of the wily serpent. Watch 


against him in whatever form he comes—whether as an angel, or as a lion, cr as a 
serpent, or as a demon—take care of him, for he is all the while Satan. 


III. The third thing we say to you is, Watch for souls. 


Be sure you watch with zeal. What zealous men the prophets were! What a 
zealous man Elijah was! What a zealous man John was! The Pharisees and Saddu- 


: 
: 


—~ 2 


Watch—Guinness. 275 


sees come to him, and he preaches to them. Does he mince matters with them? 
Nay; he calls out to them in solemn tones of warning, and bids them beware lest they 
perish. “Beware,” said he, ‘‘O generation of vipers, lest you perish.’ And he suc- 
eee for multitudes followed him, and thousands were converted and were bathed 
y him. And what a zealous preacher the Lord Jesus was! How he spoke to the 
nultitudes that came to hear Him of heaven and hell! There they sat around Him, 
istened to His sermons, and from time to time He warned them of that place ‘“‘where 


man, and I am sure he met with success. Luther was a zealous man, and I am sure 
ie met with success. Whitfield was a zealous man, and I am sure God blessed him. 
, sometimes I have coveted the intense earnestness of that man, with whose voice 
his place has so often and often rung. Here oftentimes has he stood, with uplifted 
ands and streaming eyes, and called the guilty to repentance. Oh, how that man 
abored for souls! His zeal, his fire, his energy, his intense earnestness, his irrepres- 
ible concern—oh, who can depict, who can paint, who can imitate? It was heaven- 
jorn; it came from God downward. And God gave him success. I wish I could speak 
you as he might. I wish I could sit there by yon pillar, and just let him stand here 
ind preach the rest of the sermon—oh, if he would not shake every one of you in your 
ats! How that man would call you to repentance! 

But, methinks I might say one word to sinners, might I not? I bid you Christian, 
watch for souls; are we trying to watch for souls. God may, only give us four Sab- 
baths more to watch for souls in this place. What say you to that? It may be so; 
lay we not then speak a word to those afar off? Remember, this poor voice will not 
always sound in your ears. Remember you shall not always sit here, Sabbath evening 
ter Sabbath evening, while the sun is sinking in the west, and listen to the proclama- 
ion of the truth. Remember God will not always give you these opportunities for 


what solemn thoughts are these! They make my bosom swell and heave till my 

irt almost bursts. I call you to Christ. I bid you, every one of you, 
come as you are, come guilty, come to Jesus. And where is He? In your midst. 
Joes He call, and do you refuse? Oh, remember, death is coming. Whether you 
death or not, whether you hate death or not, whether you care about death or not, 


all you. Are you prepared? Nay; numbers are still in darkness. May we not bid 

e this night to seek salvation? “No” says Satan, “put it off till to-morrow.” 
fo-morrow may never come. We bid thee tonight, in the name of the most high God, 
Sometimes, when I am preaching God’s truth, when I speak from my soul 
sh I could always), I feel as if round about my heart two hands were clasped, 
d as if two arms were wrapped round this bosom—the two hands the hands of power, 
two arms the arms of God. I do feel it, God knoweth right well. And from this 
smn place, with the Bible before me, I say to you—Delay not, delay not! pause not, 
ause not! stay not! stop not! on, on! Where? Why, to Christ. Oh, man, mayest thou 
nd Him, and may God lead thee to Himself. But now, if thou wilt not hear us, if 
hou wilt not turn to God, may we not speak a word still further? Well we leave thee 
ith God. 


We bid you, Christian, watch for souls with love. Let there be no coldness, harsh- 

hess, distance, pride, in the way you address them. Nay; but in humility, with out- 

tretched hand, with streaming eyes, with kindness, speak to sinners; and you will find 
a 


Fy 


276 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


that God will bless you, and your words of love win their way to the heart, when 
words of hatred fall off without touching it. . . 

Christian watch for souls with care, too. Beware of losing opportunities for doing 
good. Here, I would call up one thing before your mind’s eye, and bid you never forget 
it. I should like you to be convinced of the very solemn and very awful fact, that there 
are thousands who have passed away. Mark what I say. Here we are, a vast multitude 
of people. There are thousands whom you have known, who have passed into eternity 
within your recollection, to whom you, as Christians, might have spoken about God, 
but to whom you never spoke, and who curse you because you did not. Let them join 
their voices and speak to you; oh, hear them, and be warned, and be instructed. There 
was one whose hand I held in mine; with whom I trod—the narrow way that leadeth 
unto life? No—the broad road that leadeth unto hell, and who has departed. I will 
tell you how it was. Bred early to a knowledge of the blessed God, I became a back- 
slider, and I wandered with him for years in the road that leadeth to hell. I left this 
land, and wandered over the shores of Mexico, the West Indies, Texas, through: the ; 
Caribbean seas; and then returned home, after having been a long while away. I went 
to where my friend lived, and asked for him. “Where is so-and-so?” The person 
hesitated, “Where is he? Is he here, or is he in a different part of the country?” The 
person turned pale. I said, “Tell me—I must have it--where is he?” “Well,” said the 
person, “he is dead!” “Dead!” I felt petrified. I said, “Where did he die?” The 
person said, ““He went up to London; there he ran a course of dissipation, and then he 
was suddenly cut off by the hand of God.” Do you know, I have never lost the 
remembrance of that. Do you know, sometimes I close my door, and go on my knees 
in prayer, and I pray God to blot. out the black mark. And sometimes I lie down to 
slumber, and I see staring at me through the gloom a pale face that I know—it is the 
face of that damned man. Aye, methinks, if he might speak he would curse me; he 
would say, “God curse you.” “Why?” “Because you might have preached to me 
Christ Jesus, but now I am lost.” Oh, Christian, we bid you while you may, which is 
now, witness, witness of Jesus, and then God himself will give you success. Beware, 
then, and watch for souls with care. 


. 
‘ 
: 


IV. Ere we close, there is just one more point which I shall notice; it is this— 
watch for Christ. Now, I think that is the sweetest, the best, the most blessed; it 
comforts me most of all, and I am sure it will comfort you most of all as Christians. 
Christian, in watching for Jesus, watch affectionately. What is He to thee? “Well,” 
says one, “He is my own best friend!’ Well, if He is, remember He is away, and He 
is returning; so watch for His coming affectionately. Is He to thee a husband? Then 
be sure and look out for his return. In wandering along the streets one dark and silent 
evening, I pass by yonder house. I see, there, still in the room by the window, a 
woman. Sometimes she opens the window, and her head looks out, and she looks up 
and down the street; she sees no one coming, and she draws down the window, and 
the blind. But she is still watching. How? Listening. Then she hears a footstep 
coming along; she opens the window, looks out; it is not he whom she expects; she 
closes the window again. Again she hears footsteps coming along; she listens; they 
pass the door, and they go. At last, she hears another footfall which she thinks she 
recognizes. She listens; it approaches nearer, nearer, it comes closer, stops at the 
door; she rushes down and receives her husband with joy. Art thou the bride 
Jesus? Canst thou be happy while He is away? Watch for him affectionately. Loo 
for Him, up to Heaven, and say, “Why tarry Thou the wheels of Thy chariot?” Oh 
watch for Him, and say, “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, come, come quickly.” Amen, ame 
Watch affectionately, Christian. 

Then, do not be impatient; but watch patiently. There are some of you w 

‘watch on your sick bed. You are tossed from side to side, and you say, “T wish t 


‘ 


W atch—Guinness. 277 


‘Lord would come, for He would take away this pain.” It is very right for you to watch 
for His coming; but it is not right for you to be impatient. It is right for you to say, 
“Lord, come, come;” but it is not right for you to say, “Come in my time.” Say, 
“Come in Thy time, not in mine.” I know one who lies this hour on the bed of sick- 
‘ness, and she oftentimes—though I have never seen her; so I hear from those who 
‘know her—she oftentimes remembers me in her prayers. I am sure I wish God may 
bless her for it, for I know how the ministers of God need the prayers of Christians. 
I know another, who said to me yesterday, “I never go down on my knees in prayer, 
which I do four times a day, without remembering you.” That woman is on the bed 
of sickness, in continual pain; it is sometimes more than flesh and blood can bear; she 
almost faints away. But she is calm and peaceful, looking out for the coming of the 
di ord Jesus, watching with patience. What lessons does she preach to us from her 
sick bed. Let her preach; let her voice not be silent; let her tell you to watch for the 
Lord, and watch with patience. 

But there may be many who do not watch at all for the Lord Jesus; they do not 
expect His coming. They are in the wrong, says Christ, “I tell you not that I shall 
come in the morning, or at noon-day, or at evening, or in the night, or at cock-crow- 
ing; at any time I may come, therefore I say to you, watch.” 

The last word I shall speak to you to-night is this:—Watch unto the end. Oh, 
‘Christian, give not up watching to the end, for He who should come will not delay. 
Sometimes, when calmly resting in the evening as I have gazed up at the stars, I have 
fancied I could see Him coming in the clouds, surrounded by hosts of angels, and that 
I could hear the sound of the trumpet—a solemn sight—and I have almost covered my 
eyes and shuddered, and yet wept for joy, for, oh, it would be blessed to see Him. 
Christian, watch unto the end. He may come next month—do you believe that? I 
believe it. He may come before 1858—do you believe that? I believe it. He may 
come before ten years are over your head. He may come ere you die. But whether 
Christ come or not while we live, we ourselves must go directly to Him. Are you 


Now, I part from you. I leave these solemn words with you, O Christian— 
atch, for God commands you. Watch against sin, in armor, in earnest, unto prayer. 


[This sermon was delivered at the Tabernacle, Moorfields, May 31, 1857, and was 

ublished by John Paul, London. 

___H. Grattan Guinness, D. D., was born near Dublin in 1835, He was the founder, 

2, and the director of East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions, 
hich has sent out over 1,000 missionaries. Among his literary works are The 

_— End of the Age, The Divine Program of the World’s History.] 

ft 

a4 


ey 


278 Pulpit Power and Eloquenéé. 


THE UPLIFTED CHRIS 


FRANK W. GUNSAULUS. 


he Prince of Peace, at about seven o’clock Friday morning, April 15th, had 
thus been handed over to a mob, revengeful and turbulent, by the cowardly instru- 
mentalities of Rome, by Pilate himself, who was greater because he sat on the 
judgment-seat. The procurator could say this only, and mockingly: “Behold your - 
King!’—John 19: 14—and he could hear their wild shout: ‘“Crucify Him! Crucify 
Him!? Neither Rome nor Israel could be the same, after such an experience. After 
that hour, Rome and Israel were to know no peace, They had met the Prince of 
Peace, and they had failed to recognize in Him a secure foundation for peace; they 
had refused to make Him their King of Kings. Instead, they had given Him over to 
a savagery which was to destroy both of them. The robe of ribaldry and jest was 
taken off—His robe was put on. It was bloody, but it was His own. They started 
on their way to Golgotha. 

One would pause here with a startling illustration of the fact that so much of that 
which is divine may be apparently tossed to and fro, with an ignorance, and, perhaps 
a brutality, as dark as the splendor against which the darkness shows itself is bright. 
But here, as elsewhere, if one stops long enough, it will be discovered that the unseen 
shuttles carry the divine thread, and the careful omniscience of God works within the 
careless ignorance of men. “They know not what they do.”—Luke 23:24. This 
saying was already in His heart and was soon to come from Jesus’ lips. Just as we 
tarry here to consider the unconsciousness in which mighty events occur, and in which 
human beings come into relation with the divinest forces, there comes upon our 
thought and experience a figure whose personality and action represent it all—Simon 
of Cyrene. The Galilean prisoner has been carrying His own cross, until it has 
probably broken Him down. Then there strays into the scene this helpful man from 
an unexpected quarter. Involuntarily, but immortally, he is to inscribe his name 
upon the tablets of time; and it will be read forever by the light of the Name which 
is above every name. For, “as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon 
by name; him they compelled to go with them, that he might bear His cross.” 

The eyes of mankind still follow the footsteps of that sorrowful procession, as it 
moves from the place where Jesus was judged to the place where He is to be crucified. 
It never fades from sight—this mournful scene. Human souls cannot permit it to be 
effaced. The Via Dolorosa runs through every human heart, though the way they 
took, on the planet, that day, is in controversy. There are echoes in us all of the 
preparations which were made by the soldiers and guards and which were deemed 
necessary to the consummation of the plot against the meek offender, who was 
accompanied by the other prisoners. They doubtless bore the cross-beams of their 
own crucifixes, as well as wooden placards advertising the crimes for which they had 
been placed under sentence of death. It is an amazingly pathetic impression made 
upon us by the ignorance and unconsciousness of those who stood near Jesus as H 
walked on, attended by that portion of the cohort which had never lost sight of Hi 
from the hour of His arrest in the garden. Nothing but our own heart’s blindness 
unto the real Christ, who is alive. forever more, can match the dull, but certai 
misapprehension of their unique privileges. 


The Uplifted Christ—Gunsaulus. 279 


; Perhaps it is more to say that all are stone-blind to the moral splendor. One man 
has caught a glimpse, we think even now, of the Royal One half-concealed in the 
worn companion with whom he treads the road, while both of them are under ban of 
_ the law. There are two prisoners associated with Jesus, to be partakers with Him in 
: common agony. One needs to look at them but a moment, to see that, while 


their presence with Jesus illustrates the undeserved contempt of Pilate for the Sufferer, 
one of them is waking to the sweet morning which is plashing its waves of light 
against his darkness. By and by, up yonder on Calvary, we shall see that coarse 
b wretch awake entirely, with eyes full of light; and he will become luminous forever. 
- will take his place, by one heart-word of faith, as the first trophy which the 
wounded hands of Jesus shall bear up to heaven. He will be known as “the dying 
thief,” who “rejoiced to see that Fountain in his day.” The contrast between this 
_ awakening man and these persons, however, does not suffice. We do not yet see how 
_ divine duties may be done doggedly, until the involuntary servant, Simon of Cyrene, 
_ is made one of the mournful procession, just as the quaternion of soldiers, the throng 
_ of Judeans, and the priests have passed out of the city gates with their condemned 


_ prisoner. 
; Simon of Cyrene enters history at this hour as one of the most favored men in 
_ ail the world’s story. It must be nearly nine o’clock when this journeying Jew, from 
dt Tunis, in North Africa, suddenly stops, just before his pilgrimage to Jerusalem is to 
~ conclude satisfactorily, and finds himself unpleasantly interested in this poor, worn 
@retre, who has been fainting beneath the heavy + shaped or Latin cross, which 
was corded upon his back. Jesus has now fallen beneath the post and bars, which 
are soon to be set up in place for His crucifixion. The stranger has no opportunity 
Bro utter a word of pity. We know not if such a word suddenly started in the man, 
_ who is doubtless an alien Jew, having only the mental and spiritual point of view 
"possessed by that large number of pilgrims, who, coming up to Jerusalem, still deplore 
their ancient exile, as a people, to North Africa, and always hold to patriotism by 
_ coming up each year to the feast. Meantime the soldiers have gladly seized upon 
him. His joy at the annual festivity is broken in upon, for the quaternion of soldiers 
_ are weary, and without his knowing it, he is relieving the most burdened of human 
beings from the shameful load under which they have made Him to stagger and at 
_ length to fall. They “compelled” this pilgrim, whose foreign dress, and probably his 
_ apparent physical strength, marked him as one able to do this perplexing drudgery 
_ without causing a tumult. It is his “to bear the cross” of Jesus. Shall the glorious 
_ thing be done without the appearance of a ray of its splendor entering into the heart 
of the man who does it? This foreign Jew must know that the cross signifies a mode 
of punishment to which even Rome did not resort until recently. He must hate 
Rome, as never before, when he thinks on her decadence by way of unnecessary 
cruelty. 


____ All modern history of human hearts sadly repeats this episode in the career of the 
ever-living Christ, as He comes again to our world. He walks from the Pretorium 
to Golgotha, in the needy cause or in the persecuted ideal which trembles and falls 
‘somewhere, under the weight of the cross upon which a temporary fashion, a social 
bigotry, or an ecclesiastical formulary crucifies it. Fortunate, indeed, is that Simon 
of Cyrene who does anything to help, willingly or unwillingly. Happier he who so 
yields himself, in the gladness of intelligence and faith, to the Christ whose cross he 
bears, that it all becomes an understood and joyous service. The saying, “Him they 
‘compelied to bear the cross,’ and Paul’s saying, exultant and free in its devotion, “God 
forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” will ever be 
associated. It is ever the same cross borne by different men, but men differ only in 
attitude and spirit. 


280 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Done at first because of coercion, Simon’s act was glorified by love: and there is 
excellent reason for supposing that Simon’s moment of sympathy with Jesus opened — 
out into an eternity of blessedness. Well-founded appears the tradition that he was 
converted, then and there, by the majestic Sufferer whose lacerated back had borne the 
cross as far as He could, on the way from the Pretorium to Calvary. This same 
Simon is known as the “father of Rufus,’ of whom and of whose mother, Paul writes 
with loving gratitude at a later time. Mark is very clear in calling him “the father of 
both Alexander and Rufus.’—Mark 15:21. The work of grace was therefore accom- 
plishing itself, while the saving power of the Nazarene was being made perfect by the 
cruelty and odium of the Via Dolorosa. 

It is not possible to make accurate statements with regard to the case, and even 
the enthusiasm, with which the influential Jews would have adopted Jesus as their 
champion, if, at any critical hour, such as was the hour of His Temptation, He had 
been willing to be a politician and to abandon His moral divinity for a human 
triumph. It is true that all those kingdoms would have been His, if He had given an 
instant’s allegiance to the un-Christlike method of gaining power. Such hours came 
often; but the hour of all hours in which it was possible for Him to be the Messiah 
of the Jews with speediest acclaim, lay just behind Him. Evil forces were so nearly 
driven to despair with regard to what could be done with Him that nothing remained 
save to get Him out of the way quickly, lest the people should compel the powers to 
take Him as leader and champion. Every step of His career from that moment on, 
however, made Him less the Messiah of the Jews and more the Messiah of humanity. 
He had seen the last of those moments in which puzzled and irritated Judaism would 
have adopted Him as the head of the revolution it fretted to undertake against Rome, 
if He had made a single concession to its bigotry and narrowness. His plan for the 
redemption of Israel included His plan for the redemption of the world, and He was 
now on His way to the great moment in which Judaism was to make Him more 
revolting to itself and more dear to man, by stretching Him on the most shameful 
symbol which punishment had devised. He must now speak. He concludes the 
deeply eloquent silence which has held His lips shut since the early morning, whea 
He declared Himself Messiah in a way which indicated that the destiny of mankind 
nestled in His anguished heart. He utters a brief word to the women who stand in 
line with the multitude of spectators on the roadway. Breaking in on the mournful 
sound of their wailings, which strangely contrasted with the hoarse clamor which He 
had heard for many hours, He said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but 
weep for yourselves.’”—Luke 23:28. Jesus Christ had already restored the balance of 
humanity, by illustrating in Himself the divine beauty of the qualities characteristic 
woman. He found this a masculine world, in which the feminine was only an incident; 
He left it a human world in which the feminine was essential. These who lamented 
Him were the advance guard of that great army and sisterhood who perceive in Jesus 
the true Son of humanity in whom truly there is neither man nor woman. A brutal 
and entirely masculine world had already hewn out His crucifix; a new world which 
should hail Him as the King of humanity was discoverable through the tears of the 
women who lamented Him. 


The moment of this profound pathos revealed another ray of His moral sublimity. 
He was touched by their tears, and yet His kingliness must decline to be considered 
an object of pity. He knew by the forelook of a wounded heart the calamitous fate 
which was even then gathering over His beloved Jerusalem. He could not help 
feeling the certainty of those tears of repentance, to be mingled with countless tears of 
gratitude, which should flow, age after age, when men and women were to remember 
this day of shame. He was enough of a statesman to feel that these things were don 
in what the common phrase called “the green tree.” His statesmanship looke 


The Uplifted C hrist—Gunsaulus. 281 


forward with foreboding and warning to that hour in the history of Jerusalem when 
the sapless trunk of national life would be ready for the conflagration—‘‘the dry tree.” 
Withered and fruitless, leafless and dead at the heart, Judaism would then kindle with 
th heat of passion and the blast of wickedness and consume away. He therefore 
pou ed His soul into the words: “Behold, the days are coming, in which they shall 
say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never 
gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, 
Cover us. For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” 
Luke 23: 29-31. 

It must needs be that only the greatest son of Israel shall be Israel’s condem- 
‘nation; and as Jesus is come in sight of Golgotha, we perceive that, at every step, He 
is becoming more indisputably the Messiah of mankind. Nothing more profoundly 
illustrates the spiritual grandeur of Christianity, its entire independence of earthly 
lo ations, its deepest dependence upon facts known only and known surely in the 
‘geography of the human soul, than the truth that even today no man can point out 
the spot on which the King of Kings rose to undeniable sovereignty over the race of 
men. It is a vast gain for the spiritual culture of mankind that we do not know even 
the pile of debris which probably conceals the spot where bled 


“Those blessed feet 
Which eighteen hundred years ago were nailed, 
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.” 


“To a place called Golgotha” is the only phrase by which we may locate Calvary, 
Save as a reality in the experience of men. It is a phrase which satisfies the spiritual 
‘thinker, because it leaves his Lord to the spiritual and the infinite. It does not 
abandon Him at an instant when we are the most interested to know just where on 
this planet He was lifted into changeless royalty, except to locate the event and its 
‘circumstances more deeply in the soul of man. The Latin form Calvary seems to have 
‘won the permanent place in the vocabulary of men, rather than the Aramaic word 
Golgotha; and Calvary signifies “a skull.” It may have suggested the peculiar 
' configuration of the little elevation in one of the suburban gardens, or the fact that it 
‘was a well-known place of horrible associations, because there many offenders had 
suffered sentence of death. We have lost nothing by ignorance on this point. Christ's 
k ingdom is an affair internal and spiritual; and the Calvary upon which we put Him 
to death is to be found within us. From many a Pilate-like passion of prejudice within 
there stretches through the human heart many a Via Dolorosa. The point where that 
Toad sadly terminates in our experience may have been lost sight of, the location of 
¢ vary has been obliterated by contending armies; yet we know that the tragedy of 
Jesus is authentic, and no carelessly-piled rubbish can hide it from the supreme light 
__ of conscience. 
_ And now we are standing with Him on the spot where His cross will soon be 
_ erected. It is not quite noon, yet the tremulous blaze from out of that Syrian sky falls 
_ like a revealing radiance upon the white grandeur of Jerusalem. There are glances 
st fom Calvary toward the city, from eyes that have the spiritual depth and force which 
entertain memories and prophecies. Yonder the sacred hills which have been trodden 
_ by the psalmists and prophets, who accepted the vision of Him as the inspiration of 
their song and the theme of their eloquence, stand green with olives and holy with 
us associations. The deep blue sky which arches up and on, until it deepens 
hitely at the zenith, bends downward again, and falls like a curtain of sapphire 
beyond Bethany, which has given to this homeless man that which was the nearest 
home He had ever known on earth. Perhaps His own eye is detained for an instant, 
as He looks upon the city for the last time, by the little road entering the town by the 


282 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Damascus gate, for that is the road from Nazareth, and now, as never before, He 
seems to be Jesus of Nazareth. 

There is perfect quiet in the luxurious mansions, half-concealed in the umbrageous 
growth out of which they rise to crown the hills; the peril of the rich citizens who 
inhabit them is nearly gone. Property, however wickedly obtained, is safer now, they 
think, for the pale and too interesting idealist is going to be put to death very soon. 
He will trouble them no longer with telling them how hard it is for a rich man to enter 
the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps they are half-reconciled to the thought that He 
might have been disposed of by the scourging, being only a ‘harmless enthusiast. 
Rough usage was not necessary for even a reforming democrat who had addressed 
His impecunious followers, telling them: “In My Father’s house are many mansions. 
If it were not so I would have told you.”—John 14:2. Ill-gotten wealth was willing 
even then to contribute to the support of a religion which would make the poor 
content to look for a home in some other world. Yet it is likely that these homes 07 
the rich have made a contribution a little earlier; for the daughters of Jerusalem who 
wept for Him as He came from the Prztorium were probably members of a society 
in which the eternal womanly devised schemes for the utterance of that tenderness 
which is in woman’s heart; and these wealthy ladies have made the usual provision 
so that He and the other malefactors will be offered, at the right time, the stupefying 
drink of myrrh and sour wine, that their agonies may be a little mitigated. 

Still the eyes wander away from the dolorous spot and toward the city; but the 
city has already gained an infamy. It is now memorable for its outrage upon Him. 
One cannot keep from beholding the Court of the Priests, nearly four hundred feet 
higher than the Pool of Siloam, wherein blind Judaism refused to wash its eyes with 
the beggars. That place below Mount Zion, dark with the foliage which Jesus 
declined to use to conceal Himself from Judas, is the garden of Gethsemane. He 
alone knows the significance of these things. 

They nail together the cross-pieces; the sharp report from the mallet breaks in 
upon the silence with intrusive violence, but it is part of the music of salvation. No 
final chorus in Gounod’s Redemption, no Hallelujah strain in which the music of any 
Handel’s Messiah culminates, is completely true without the sounds which quiver upon 
that air as the cross-bars are fastened to the upright beam. Still stands the lonely 
Figure, penetrated with a sorrow so awful and so divine as to isolate Him from the 
very humanity which He saves. Yonder is Olivet waiting. It shall be the place 
whence His feet shall leave the rock, when He shall ascend to His Father and His God. 
But Calvary must be first. Enough, then, from memory, and enough from prophecy! _ 
Let the pinnacle and the roof of the Temple burn under the fiery noon that fills the 
dome of blue above the snowy walls and towers; here is One about to make the 
temple of humanity so much more white and grand and sacred that the brilliant pile 
upon Mount Zion shall vanish away. They are now stripping Him, and He who was 
scourged more deeply and cruelly by those to whom He offered His heart of love than 
He could have been by Roman bullies, is waiting for crucifixion—for enthronement. 
Never has there been such a divine challenge in the history of this planet as that which 
He offered to evil when He said: “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto Me.”— 
John 12:32. The challenge.has now been fully accepted; they are about to lift Him 
up. They have gotten rid of the King of the Jews; they are making Him King of 
humanity. It is the superlative blunder made by bigotry, intolerance and despotism. 
The more ferocious the hate they visit upon Him, the heavier the indignity they offer 
Him, the wilder the fanaticism with which they blast Him—the mightier and tenderer, 
the more meek and royal He comes to be, until sovereignty of earth and man passes 
into His hands. 

They have adopted the most shameful method of dealing with the most dreadfpi 


The Uplifted Christ—Gunsaulus. 283 


or the most debased of criminals—crucifixion. Against that dark villainy which they 
furnish shines the Light of the World. Only the fierce passion of the Orient could 
have invented and inaugurated so horrible a method of executing a capital sentence. 
It is almost alien to the Jew, but the instrumentalities of cruelest paganism must now 
be taxed to furnish a scene revolting enough to express their bitterness and hate. 


The strong wooden pin has been placed midway from the bottom to the top of the 
beam, in order that the body may partially rest upon it, so that it shall not tear itself 
away from the cross. The women whose pity still expressed itself in tears, have their 
e special task of mercy to perform, and the potion, whose opiate is expected to render 
‘His pain less acute, is now offered to Him. Death has never been met by one intel- 
lectually and spiritually able to make complete discovery of all the treasures and 

sources of his realm. Jesus refuses the draught! He cannot save man by stupefying 
His own faculties. He must see and feel and know the last cruelty of man, the last 
‘malice of evil, the last spear-point of death. He will “taste the whole of it; then He 
cannot taste this medicated wine. Let the other two offenders, whose crosses still lie 
‘on the ground with His, do as they will—they have no world to save. If the King of 
Terrors is to be despoiled or to be vanquished by a divine man, it must be done with 
divine fairness. 


Thus open-eyed and calm, Jesus was ready to die on the center cross, which 
probably was not yet upreared and fixed firmly in the earth. He was now laid upon 
it. The arms which had taken into their embrace His mother and John the Beloved, 
_were stretched along the cross-beams, and a large iron nail was driven through eacn 
of the palms of those hands which had blessed the little children. Cruelty of the most 
calculating sort could add nothing else save to bend the legs upward until the soles of 
the feet lay against the post, when either one very large iron spike was driven through 
both, or two smaller nails penetrated the feet in response to the pitiless blows of the 
mallet. Thus were they fastened to the upright beam. The crowd which had come 
_ from Jerusalem had never beheld a more frightful condemnation of that Judaistic hate 
_ which had now called in Roman brutality and Carthagenian cruelty to produce in this 
forsaken man the extremity of physical agony. The torture which penetrated His 
soul, however, was more than this; and in a less sweet and gentle heart it would have 
turned all to bitterness. No human device could intensify the inconceivable pain 
_ which quivered and throbbed along the torn and trembling nerves, yet He might have 


| he intense misery of His thirsting frame which hung there surcharged with anguish 
bi of soul, would ordinarily have robbed reason of every right and thought of every 
' prerogative, in that ghastly hour. But just then He rose to a height known only to 
" God, and surveying the whole mental and spiritual situation, knowing the dull-eyed 
fanaticism which had hounded Him to that place, comprehending the terrible result 
of that ignorance which allies itself with religious bigotry, and above all, conscious of 
_ the divine power of compassion and forgiving love, He looked to the only spot in the 
universe where He was understood—to heaven, and He said: “Father, forgive them, 
- for they know not what they do.”—Luke 23: 34, 


e As has already been intimated, this prayer had been inmate. itself on His lips for 
hours. His was’a spontaneous, but not an extemporaneous nature. Jesus’ actions 


darkness out of which this bolt of moral wrong flew into His bosom. There is the 
‘patience of ignorance which looks upon ignorance without seriously condemning it. 
“ It is better called stupidity or dullness. But here was the patience of infinite intelli- 


— 


284 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


conceived in gentleness, benevolence, and an all-embracing love for humanity. He 
has been lifted up. As the rough tree upon which He hung helpless and tortured 
held Him high enough to meet the coarse gaze of men who were intoxicated with the 
horror, He proved His profound faith in the one great fact in the nature of God which © 
His perfect Sonship had revealed—God’s Fatherhood. For the first word that came 
from the heart of the tragedy was His word: ‘‘Father.” Nothing that Jesus ever 
did or said, to publish or illustrate the Fatherhood of God, so outlined the amazing 
sweep of His faith, as the fact that He drew upon it just then, and so mightily. 
Because His suffering spirit went far enough into the depth of the Fatherhood of God 
to obtain His own solace, He could predicate forgiveness. And what far-reaching ~ 
forgiveness! Jesus would have it reach these ignorant children of the All-Father who 
were even then murdering Him, the Father’s true Son, their Messiah, with unsur- 
passed cruelty and deepest shame. So was He the Christ of God. 

The anguish of this cry was thus softened by Jesus’ charity. His charity and 
forgiveness sprang out of His love. He knew the ignorance with which the soldiers 
nailed Him to the cross, as they had nailed others to similar crosses, according to 
their duty; He knew also that the chief priests and Pilate, who would have been the 
last to admit that they knew not what they were doing, were actually in deeper dark- 
ness than the soldiers, because they were disobedient unto a higher law. But Jesus 
included them all in His prayer. 

Scorn and ribaldry disported themselves beneath the crucified Man, while the 
Syrian heat poured out its fierceness upon Jesus, and the helpless One who alone 
could help the world was enduring extreme internal agony. If ever a bitter thought 
had right to utter itself forth, this was the moment; but the most maligned and cruelly 
treated Son of God had nothing to speak out of harmony with His sweet and comfort- 
ing word of forgiveness. The powers of mind and body were besieged. Still the 
secret of God was His, and even when memory was assaulted by the tortures of the 
hour, He did not forget to draw a stream of forgiveness for all His sinning brothers, 
from the fountain of God’s Fatherhood. 

Now the Jewish leaders began to get some clear idea of what had happened to 
their Hebrew dignity, by calling in Rome to complete the death of Rabbi Jesus, under 
disgracing circumstances. Not only had Pilate sneered at them by his saying at the — 
Judgment Hall: “Behold your King!” and silently warded off the reply: “We have 
no king but Czsar”—John 19: 15—in a manner unfavorable to their pride; but the 
chief priests now saw the soldiers of Rome, having filled themselves with the common 
wine, which on such occasions was furnished in abundance, staggering gleefully | 
beneath the dying Jew and deriding Him as the Jewish King. Their derision, 
however, was a scornful laugh in the face of the Jew. They shouted to the King of 
the Jews to save Himself, while they lifted up their cups of wine and proposed a 
health to Him, or asked His response to their revelry. Blind to the fact that He 
incarnated every fair dream of Israel, and that He had manifested forth every precious 
anticipation of poet and prophet, the chief men of Israel were now beholding them- 
selves ridiculed by their servants. They were no longer guiding the events of that 
shameless murder! The Rome they detested was in control. A frenzied mob of 
Romans and street-loafers led them into fathomless degradation, at the hour when all 
that Israel had stood for was being lost. For the time being, they were compelled to 
mingle their derision with that of contemptuous foes. 

The doomed man had been taken to Calvary with His sandals, girdle, outer cloak 
and head-dress, as the only visible property which cruelty and cupidity could parcel 
out. Perhaps they were not worth much and did not detain their curiosity long, as 
the four soldiers, who had been especially concerned in the labor of crucifying Him, 
looked about near the foot of the cross which bore Jesus, and thought of their 


i 


4 The Uplifted Christ—Gunsaulus. 285 


“perquisites. They gambled for the inner garment only. It was a priestly vesture, 
finely woven and seamless. The dice were thrown in the hot Syrian light. Little 
‘cal ed they for the whispers of the past, and less for a symbol which would fascinate 
the piety of the future. To divide this seamless robe, as they had doubtless rended 
the larger cloak into four parts, would be to ruin something valuable. Neither can 
the unit of Christ’s influence be divided. The integer of Jesus’ life and words is 
beyond human power of destruction. The prophecy is ever fulfilled: “They parted 
“my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.”—Matt. 27:35. But the 
fact is also made forever secure that the priesthood of Jesus is never to be divided. 
Men may gamble for His priestly tunic; they cannot rend it. 
Still the miserable fanatics were joining with the half-drunk soldiers in offering 
their contempt to the sufferer. Coarse mockers went by with scornful Sanhedrists, 
challenging Him, flinging taunts at Him, entertaining the blatant populace with 
“grimaces, while the veins of the Son of Man were swollen with agony, and His heart 
‘was breaking. Rulers cried out, as they jeeringly walked close to His cross: “He 
saved others; let Him save Himself, if He be Christ, the chosen of God.”—Matt. 27: 42. 
What “rulers!” No man ever ruled in God’s world, for long, who ruled on their 
theory. There was the true Ruler—the Ruler of time and eternity, and, because He 
was Christ, He could not save Himself. To have saved Himself for an hour or for a 
life-span would have been to lose Himself and all the race forever. 
; The mocking soldiers took up the refrain of contumely, and, coming close to the 
‘cross, with hearts untouched by His prayer for their forgiveness, they yielded a little 
to the impulse of kindliness, and offered Him some of the sour wine which was left 
after their drinking. Servants of Rome as they were, careless of the feelings of the 
_ Jews whom they now scorned in their derision of Jesus, they said: “If Thou be the 
King of the Jews, save Thyself.” 
They had read the words written on the Titulus. Indeed, the attention of all was 
attracted by the superscription inscribed upon the placard which either hung from the 
neck of Jesus, or was firmly and conspicuously fixed on the topmost portion of the 
cross above His head. This bill or titulus, whose use in particular lay in the fact that 
it published the name of the condemned person, had been affixed to the victim or to 
the cross at an earlier time, and, on sight of it, the leaders of the Jews had strenuously 
objected to its statement, which soldier, priest, and alien could read. The inscription 
was to the effect that this man, who was crucified with so much of circumstance and 
disgrace, was “the King of the Jews.”—Matt. 27:37. The title was written by Pilate, 
and the Roman Governor was partly avenged upon the chief priests of the Jews, who 
had almost forced him to give up Jesus to their fanaticism and brutality. Nothing 
} could have been more to his liking than the opportunity of calling Jesus “The King of 
‘the Jews,” in this public way. Coming from the Temple, as these priestly devotees 
did, they at once had hurried to the Pretorium, and sought to influence Pilate not to 
_ permit this abominated title to be set up. The chief council knew that they must be 
ic eful of public opinion, for a revolt could easily break forth and become uncon- 
trollable, and Pilate was evidently not inclined to give up this opportunity for 
_ discounting the influence of the Sanhedrists. There the title, as John describes it, 
Plainly showed Pilate’s skill at uttering contempt. It ran as follows: “Jesus of 
Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”—John 19:19. Nothing could have been more 
offensive to the rulers of Israel than the scorn contained in the word Nazareth. 
_ “Write not, the King of the Jews; but that He said, I am the King of the Jews,” 
begged the chief priests.” Pilate’s stern reply was: ‘What I have written I have 
_ written.”—John 19: 22. 
o. The age-long conflict between evil and good had reached its Waterloo. The 
_ hour had struck for the decisive struggle. Every contest which the soul of man had 


al 


t 


286 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


felt from the beginning, every silent advance of right upon retreating wrong, every 
sharp defense of truth against error, every dreadful fight against sin, every bloody 
march upon selfishness, every terrific charge upon the beast, every defeat, every 
triumph, was but a prelude to this awfully tragic moment when the Son of God, nailed 
to the cross, was first to hurl the arrogant power of sin from that solemn height and, 
next, to make the cross His undisputed throne. Is it wonderful that such an hour 
should bring out the human soul into such a definiteness of feature that its deepest 
nature and loftiest possibility might be seen? 

Jesus came to be the Savior of the human spirit—the whole man. He could never 
be content to merely redeem the intellectual life, or the life of the sensibilities, or that 
of the purposes and choices of mankind. At His cross, as a trinity in unity, stood 
the God-like human soul. Thought came in the language of Greece, the land of the 
intellect; sentiment and feeling came in the language of Hebrewdom, the land of the 
sensibilities, the home of the human heart. Will came in the Latin tongue, the 
language of imperial Rome, where human purpose had made its arches of triumph. 
In all these, came human nature, once dissevered, but now united before the cross of 
Jesus of Nazareth. 

We must not forget that this inscription was presented to the eye of the foreigner, 
in Greek, that the alien might understand it; it was given to the Jew in Hebrew, 
because Jerusalem and Calvary were located in the province of Judea, a Jewish country; 
it was put into the Latin language because this same Judea was a Roman province, 
and this was the official tongue. The assertion it contained was probably made in 
bitterest irony. But behind these facts lies a greater fact. There these three particular 
languages were. The powers which make history had so moved in the past and were 
so moving in the present, that these three great streams of human life and experience 
met at the foot of that crucifix, as they had taken their rise long ago in the deep 
springs of the human soul. There was a wondrous drawing power in that cross. 
Human nature had been dissevered by evil. Human life everywhere was fragmentary. 
The soul of man was to be reconstituted. 


[This sermon and the Three Inscriptions are considered among the most powerful 
of Gunsaulus’ sermons. He is generally considered the leading preacher of Chicago. 
By permission of the Monarch Book Company, Chicago, this sermon is reproduced 
from “The Man of Galilee.” 

Frank W. Gunsaulus was born at Chesterville, Ohio, January 1, 1856, graduating 
from Ohio Wesleyan University. After four years in the Methodist ministry, he 
became pastor of Eastwood Congregational church, Columbus, Ohio, serving in 
Newtonville, Mass., and Baltimore, Md. During 1887-99 he was pastor of Plymouth 
church, Chicago, and since then of Central Church. He is also president of Armour 
Institute. His literary works are varied:—the Life of Gladstone, Songs of Night and 
Day, Monk and Knight, etc.] 


‘ 


_ SPIRITUAL UNITY IN THE NAME OF 
CHRIST. 


CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL, D. D. 


Tam conscious of three controlling desires and aims. First of all, to exalt the 
Lord Jesus Christ so that His divine essence and glory shall appear. Second, to do 
his by setting forth the very teaching of the holy Scripture. I bring nothing of my 
n; my sole hope is in what the Spirit may do with the very Word of God as it is 
set forth to you. And third, to carry your minds point by point along a course of 
hought which the Lord has given to me, and which has come to me as a new flood of 
light from the pages of His Word, a new vision of the glory, the sufficiency, the 
luliness of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
I may thus state the theme: The Quadrilateral of spiritual unity in the name of 
Christ. You will see why I use this expression, the quadrilateral—a plane four-sided 
e—in connection with unity. 
__ A few years ago there was issued in London, by the church of England, a quadri- 
ateral of ecclesiastical unity, which was offered as a basis of union for the various sects 
of Christendom. The four members of that quadrilateral unity were the Holy 
sriptures, the sacraments, the creeds, and the historic episcopate. Now, to me, 
ecclesiastical unity on this or on any basis, is remote and problematical, and I am not 
ure it is desirable, if it were practicable. But spiritual unity through Jesus Christ is 
_ the great message of the New Testament, and is the immediate possession for those 
who will receive it. This is the great message, of how the confusion and disorganiza- 
fion in our own lives and in the life of the church may be done away in Christ, that 
God has shown me marked out upon the pages of the Word of God, as with the 
‘distinctness of a quadrilateral. Here I find the secret of unity unveiled on all sides; 
the unity of God, the unity of man with God, the unity of the powers and forces of 
man within himself, and the unity of Christians with one another. 
The four members of “the quadrilateral of spiritual unity in the name of Christ” 
these: 


I. Union through Christ, or the vital importance of the atonement; that is, the 
Union with God of the soul that has been alienated from the life of God by wicked 
works. 

II. Union with Christ, or the essence of spiritual experience; that is, that 
yondrous fellowship with the Savior, which is the characteristic note of a truly 
consecrated life. 


III. Union in Christ, or the basis of enduring fellowship; that is, Christ in our 
earthly relationships to keep them holy, to save them from confusion and disin- 


IV. Union for Christ, or the platform of statesmanship in Christian service; that 
‘Christ the rallying point for a church divided by many theological and ecclesiastical 
ms; Christ, the common ground on which Christians can stand together and work 
her for the reformation of society and the evangelization of the world, 


288 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE FOUNDATION OF UNITY. 


But I cannot bring out the full glory of this quadrilateral of spiritual unity, until 


I have first pointed out the deep foundations upon which it rests. This mighty 


thought—that Christ can transform life from discord and disintegration into peace; 
from confusion and contradiction into unity—is, indeed, built upon the granite foun- 
dations of the deepest truths in the Bible. We will first develop out of God’s Word 
three fundamental propositions underlying the quadrilateral of spiritual unity in the 
name of Christ. 


1. Unity is the note of God’s perfection and of man’s completion. 
2. Sin is the interruption of unity and the incoherence of life. 
3. Christ is God’s self-revelation for unity. 


1. Unity is the note of God’s perfection and of man’s completion. You may 
remember in Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” that superb chapter entitled, “Unity the 
Type of the Divine Comprehensiveness,” in which he points out that the unity of God 
is realized in His essential presence in all His works. But far more gloriously do the 
Scriptures themselves bring forth this idea that God’s life is full, rich, manifold, 
harmonious with Himself. 


(1) That unity is the note of God’s perfection appears most marvelously in 
connection with the mystery of the Holy Trinity. May I suggest a few Scriptures 
that bring out this thought? We read in Luke 3: 22 the account of the baptism of our 
Lord: The Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape upon Him, and a voice came 
from heaven which said, “Thou art my beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased.” In 
John 10:30 our Savior said, “I and my Father are one.” In Matthew 25:42, “My 
Father, Thy will be done;” and in John 8:29, “I do always the things that please 
Him.” Not only are the Father and the Son thus revealed to us in this wonderful 
unity, but the Spirit likewise. (Read also John 14:26, and John 16: 13.) To me it 
is one of the most exalting and blessed things in the world to stop sometimes to think 


of the completeness, the perfect unity of the life of God, the absolute oneness of will, 


the absolute unity of purpose, the absolute perfection of character. The more this 
thought of the perfection of God in the unity of His eternal Godhead grows upon us, 
the more do we find a basis for the belief that unity is God’s law for all life, and that 
He would have us sharers with Himself in the unity of a perfect holiness and a 
perfect joy. 

But not only is the fact brought out that God’s perfection is in His unity in the 
Holy Trinity—it is brought out in the comprehensiveness of God's life in His world. 
We read in John 1:3, “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not 
anything made that was made;” and in Ephesians 1: 23 the great verse, “The fullness 
of Him that filleth all in all.” We are reminded in I Cor. 14:33 that that fullness 
of God is not a disorganized and confused fullness, “For God is not the author 
of confusion, but of peace.” Where shall we find in all the Scriptures a more 
moving account of God’s fullness in all the world than in the one hundred and thirty- 
ninth Psalm? Thus unity is the note of God’s completeness, a life that fills all in all, 
that is in perfect harmony with itself and in perfect relation with all His works. 


(2) But in unity is also represented to us the note of man’s completion. in 
Gen. 1: 26 we read that man was designed by God to be the reflection of His own 
unity. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And after we have gone 
on through the whole story of the fall and of sinful man, with what wonderful refresh- 
ment comes to us that prayer in I Thess. 5:23, “Now the God of peace sanctify 
you wholly; and I pray that your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved 
entire unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” What is that but the prayer that 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Fall. 289 


ity may be brought back into our disorganized lives, a divine, Godlike unity; that 
fhere sin has disorganized, God may sanctify; that where sin has broken up, God 
may rebuild? (Read also I Cor. 12:25.) Above all, when we speak of unity among 
uman lives we find ourselves coming back at the last to the prayer of our blessed 
avior in John 17:21, “That they may all be one, even as Thou, Father, art in 
e and I in Thee; that they also may be one in us, I in them and Thou in me, 
hat they may be perfected into one.” I hope that down at the bottom of all our 
‘inking about spiritual unity we have come to the thought that God is perfect unity 
Himself, and that God’s will for man is perfect unity in the human life. 


} SIN IS THE INTERRUPTION OF UNITY. 
2. Now, 


if this is true, we pass to the second of these three fundamental 
lany ways in which to think and speak of sin. There are many points of view from 
hich to study the awful problem of sin in our own hearts and in the world. But 
= are especially interested at present in speaking of sin as that which breaks up the 
nity of life and makes life incoherent and scattered, and finally wrecks life, even as 
are told in the Word of God, “The wages of sin is death.” 


(1) Sin is the interruption of unity. In Gen. 3:10 we read words that I am sure 
‘one time and another have had an echo in the life of all of us. “I heard Thy 
fice in the garden, and I was afraid and hid myself.” There is the evidence of a 
oken unity between the soul and God. It is the disposition of the soul under the 
power of sin to go away from God, to hide from God, to turn into some other path, 
seek out a way that is not the way of fellowship. Is not this the testimony of our 
uls in the deepest experiences of sin that we have ever had? What is there that 
fits us for communion with God, and makes the thought of God unwelcome, as 
cherishing of sin in our life and the submission of our wills to the bidding of the 
fl one? Then, indeed, the voice of God is to us a note of alarm and disquiet. It ' 
m akes us wish to get farther and farther away from Him. We hear His voice, and 
we are afraid and hide ourselves. In Isaiah 53:6 is that great verse about the 
verging paths, the path which we choose leading us away from the unity of the life 
h God, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own 

” Then in I Peter 2: 25 is the echo of that thought, only brightened up with the 
ssed news that we can come back from our erring ways to Jesus Christ, ‘“‘Ye were 
sheep going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your 
als.” (Compare Prov. 4: 18.) 


This thought takes hold of one’s very soul—the thought of sin being the interrup- 
m of unity. The bitter experiences of our lives have revealed this to us. How 
ny, who once were walking in union with Him and who have lapsed into other 
, have come to realize that sin, whatever else it does, breaks us and drags us 


er away from Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 


(2) Following upon this thought, that sin is the interruption of unity, comes the 
Sadder thought that sin is the incoherence of life. How many people there are in 
world without a definite aim, without a great high purpose, without a settled 
ef, without any clear relation to God, who are simply drifting on, wandering 
ough life, restless, unhappy, miserable, with no peace in their souls—leading 
Sherent lives. And what is this but the natural outcome of sin? As it is written 
Is. 57: 20, “The wicked are like the troubled sea, for it cannot rest, whose waters 
up mire and dirt.” It is the nature of sin in the soul to work out in us this 
cing up of purpose, this incoherence of life, this strange restlessness, this lack of 


290 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


a settled and high ambition, this powerlessness to take the initiative for great and 
holy things. It is the doom of sin in the individual to make life incoherent. The 
most terrible account in the whole New Testament of the incoherence of life which — 
sin develops is found in Rom 1: 28-34. It begins with these words, “As they refused 
to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those 
things which are not fitting.” Then follows the list of the incoherent acts that people 
commit who are given up to the life of sin—the incoherent life that is without Christ, 
without the new motive that Christ puts into life; above all things, without the union 
with God which is through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

On into the Christian life, from time to time, by reason of our lack of faith and 
our lack of prayer and our lack of communion with God, we are haunted with 
visitations of incoherence in our lives, by reason of conflicting moral interests. Paul 
says in Romans 7: “I find then the law, that, to me who would do good, evil is 
present. For I delight in the iaw of God after the inward man; but I see a different 
law in my members.” Then the thought of how miserable this incoherent life is, now 
dominated by the Spirit of God and now drawn off into forbidden paths, grows upon 
him, until he cries out in an agony of mind, “Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall 
deliver me out of the body of this death?” 


CHRIST IS GOD’S SELF-REVELATION OF UNITY. 


3. The third proposition which underlies the great quadrilateral of spiritual unity 
in the name of Christ; and as that second was dark and dreary as an alkali plain, so 
this third proposition comes to us like the very glory of heaven. Christ is God’s seli- 
revelation for unity. Many persons who have a desire to know Christ, and who do, 
in a certain sense, have a knowledge of Christ, do not at all comprehend what is the 
position of the Bible regarding Jesus Christ. A great many look upon Christ as the 
most beautiful, wise, and glorious being that ever lived upon the earth. But when you 


present Christ as something vital, something that must come into our experience if we 


are to have peace with God, then many are confused, and turned aside, and troubled, 
and they say: “I do not see why you should put Christ between me and God. Why 
cannot I go straight to God and live my life straight to God without having this 
arbitrary factor of Christ put in between?” 

In the beginning God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;” 
and then sin came in to darken the sun, to defile the image, to obliterate the likeness; 
but God is not turned from His purpose by the intervention of sin, and by the black- 
ening influences of sin upon human life, and God reveals Himself in the fullness of 
time in the incarnate form of the holy and eternal Lord, that He may bring again the 
unity that is broken and dissolved through sin; and therefore, Christ is God’s self- 
revelation for unity. 


Have we any idea of what must be the sorrow in God’s heart as He looks upon 
the world as it is today; upon the miserable incoherence of human lives, when all His 
plan was so glorious, so eternally beautiful, so worthy of Himself, and when things 
are so absolutely contrary to what He would desire and what He has chosen for man? 
If an earthly parent, who has done everything that love and wealth can do to train up 
a child in the noblest way, is heart-broken when that child, casting aside all its 
privileges and oppcrtunities, loves darkness rather than light, and untruth rather 
than truth, what must be the grief in the heart of God? What must be God’s sorrow 
for a fallen world, when the whole world, as St. John says, lieth in the evil one? But 
Christ is God’s self-revelation in order to bring once again the unity defiled and 


broken through sin. 
Lae OWs let us see whether this position is borne out in the Holy Scriptures, 
Three things appear in this connection: (1) Christ, in His glorious person, is God's 


y 
‘ 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Hail. 291 


self-revelation of His own unity. When God would bring back again unity into life 
which was broken through sin, first of all He reveals Himself that we may know Him. 
esus said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” “No man cometh unto the 
‘father but by me;” and therefore, Christ in His glorious person is God’s self-revelation 
His own unity. Read Colossians 1:19, “It pleased the Father that in Him should 
the fullness dwell; and Colossians 2:9, “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the 
dhead bodily.” This, then, is the view of Christ as it is set forth to us in the New 
Testament, and need I ask you to discern between such a view of Christ, and the 
ethical view of Christ which simply represents Him as the loveliest member of the 
‘human race, the one in whom all beauties of manly character unite? That is true, 


f-revelation of His own unity, “in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead 
dily.”’ 

(2) Christ is God’s self-revelation to repair the broken unity between God and 
man.» The Bible tells us that at the beginning there was a perfect unity between God 
and man, and that sin was the rupturing of that unity and the alienation of man from 
he life of God. Now we are distinctly told in the Word that Christ is God’s self- 
elation to repair the broken unity between God and man. Read I Peter 3: 18, 
( hrist also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us 
God.” And II Cor. 5: 18-20, “All things are of God, who hath reconciled us 
o Himself through Christ and gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, 
hat God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” Perhaps the grandest 
sage of the New Testament on this subject is Col. 1:19: ‘Having made 
eace through the blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; 
Him, I say, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven. And you, that 
ere sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath 
de reconciled.” This is the teaching of the Word of God itself, that Christ is the 
elf revelation of God to repair the broken unity between God and man. 


(3) The last thought is this: Christ is God’s self-revelation to recover the lost 
nity in our own human lives. “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily, and in Him ye are made full.” (Col. 2:9.) The empty life, the disorganized 
ife, the scattered life, the life that has had no motive, no continuity, no peace, no 
oy, finds all given back to it when it receives the fullness of Christ. So, also, 
tom. 8:10, 28, “If Christ be in you the Spirt is life,” and “All things work together 
ir good to them that love God.” What a contrast between the time when all things 
rked together for evil; when everything was at loose ends in our life; when there 
yas no plan, no comprehensive motive and purpose, no peace of God passing all 
understanding; when life was like the troubled sea that could not rest, whose waters 
ast up mire and dirt—what a contrast between such a state and what is here depicted! 
Tf Christ be in you the Spirit is life, and all things work together for good to them 
hat love God—to them that are called according to His purpose. 

I. Now, taking up the first member of the quadrilateral of spiritual unity in the 
name of Christ, we shall consider first 


UNION THROUGH CHRIST. 


e vital importance of the atonement—the union with God of the soul that has been 
ated from the life of God by wicked works. I shall take two key texts for this part 
of our subject: Rom. 5:1, “Being justified by faith, let us have peace with God 

‘ough our Lord Jesus Christ; through whom also we have had our access into this 
ice wherein we stand.” Luke 9:30, 31, “Behold there talked with Him two men, 


292 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


which were Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which 
he should accomplish at Jerusalem.” That verse brings the mount of the transfigur- 
ation into touch with the mount of the crucifixion. We all feel the wonderful 
sacredness of the transfiguration scene, especially in the importance of the theme of 
which they talked—‘‘His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem.” Observe 
in what relation they talked of the death of Christ. They talked of it as a great work 
which He was under obligation to accomplish and fulfill in the fullness of time. It is 
this conception of the death of Christ as an act foreseen and foreknown—a sacred 
fulfillment to be made, a decease to be accomplished—that is now before us as we 
speak of the vital importance of the atonement, or union through Christ. 


There are at least three ways in which the death of Christ is regarded. Some have 
looked upon the death of Christ simply as a catastrophe, the sudden result of excite- 
ment in a crowd, whereby a young, beautiful life perished before its time, and its 
work was reduced to failure. Others look upon the death of Christ as a heroic 
martyrdom, wherein a noble soul met the consequences of its own fearless teachings. 
They feel that Jesus might have escaped His martyrdom if He had been willing te 
withdraw from the position that He took; but that His soul was too heroie to 
withdraw, and therefore He went on to win His crown of martyrdom and to seal His 
testimony with His blood. But there are others who have been willing to take the 
teaching of the Word of God concerning the meaning of the death of Christ; and to 
such the death of Christ appears as the supreme mission of the Lord Jesus Christ, in 
the accomplishment of which He fulfilled the chief end of His incarnation. There was 
more than one end in view in the incarnation of our blessed Lord. He came to be 
the revelation of the Father (John 14: 9). He came also to be an example that we 
should follow His steps (I Peter 2: 21). These were ends in view in the incarnation 
of our Savior. But I believe we may say, on the authority of the Word itself, that the 
chief end of the incarnation of Christ is His sacrifice, His sin-offering, His propitia- 
tion for the world as the Lamb of God bearing away the sin of the world. I John 
4: 14—“The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.” From this point of 
view the death of our Lord is to us not a mere catastrophe, not even a mere martyr- 
dom; it is a voluntary sacrifice, it is the decease which He was to accomplish at 
Jerusalem, it is the supreme mission which brought Him to the earth in His incarnate 
form. It seems to me to be absolutely fundamental to Christian experience to have 
large, loving views of the atonement; to make the cross the central fact of life—Jesus 
Christ and Him crucified. If we construct a system of religion which does not center 
around the cross we imperil spiritual life, for we give it a mistaken point of view. If 
we limit our thought of Christ to the moral influence of His example, or to the 
religious value of His death as an object lesson in heroic self-sacrifice and devotion 
to principle, we lose the essential feature of the gospel, which is the historic reality of 
the sacrifice on Calvary for the redemption of the world. 


But the question is, How are we to obtain a deeper and more vital view of the 
meaning of Christ's death? I answer, Not by a mere effort of the imagination to 
picture the terrible details of the crucifixion. It is necessary, of course, that so far 
as possible we should realize the crucifixion; but the mere dramatic conception of the 
crucifixion does not necessarily imply any adequate spiritual appreciation of the work 
of the Crucified. And again, not by an unreal attempt to force a sorrowful state of 
mind in the presence of the cross of Christ. There is a grief for sin and a grief for 
the effects of sin in ourselves and in the world which must deepen as all spiritual 
experience deepens; but this is something very different from the attempt to foster 
an imaginative and artificial sadness by dwelling upon the physical horrors of the 
crucifixion. No, there is, I believe, but one way to be lifted up to anything like a true 
sense of the large meanings of Christ’s death, and that way is the deep study of the 


« 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Hall. 293 


Bible. The Bible not only records the historic fact of Christ’s death, the Bible sur- 
rounds Christ's cross with truths that reflect its glory and that interpret its meaning; 
and the strange inconsistency of many minds seems to be a willingness to accept from 
the Bible the historic fact of the death of Christ and at the same time to reject the 
‘truths that surround the death of Christ in the same Bible to set forth its meaning 
and to reveal its unspeakable value and necessity. 

These truths that stand forth all through the Bible, explaining the meaning of the 
‘death of Christ, are far too great in number, as well as too great in scope, to be pre- 
‘sented at any one time. All the fullness of God is in them. They deal with every 
aspect of our Lord’s death—as a sacrifice for sin, as a manifestation of the love of 
_ God, and as a means of union of the soul with God. But while we realize that a com- 
plete presentation of these great and world-wide thoughts is entirely impossible, I 
_may yet briefly lift your minds toward seven world-wide thoughts that make the cross 
of Jesus glorious. 


1. The death of Christ is the consummation in time of an eternal plan of God. 
- Luke 9:31 presents this thought, although not in its fullness: “They spake of His 
decease, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” But Rey. 13:8 brings out 
this thought in all its majesty: “The Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation 
_ of the world.” The atonement, historically consummated in time in the sacrifice of 
Christ, is a part of the eternal plan of God's love for man; and it is just because 
I ople have overlooked this entirely that the atonement, the death of Christ, has 
emed to many not only unnecessary, but abhorrent. Never was any truth so per- 
verted as the death of Christ. It has been represented that the atonement is the cause 
of God’s love; that God hated man and that the gentle Christ threw Himself in 
tween God, who hated man, and man, who was trembling under God’s hatred, and 


of the atonement, and the death of Christ is the consummation in time of the eternal 
plan of God. ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that 
_ whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3: 16.) 
2. The first thought has taken us back into the eternal past; the second takes 
on into the eternal future. The death of Christ is the theme of rejoicing in heaven. 


als thereof; for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood, out of 
very kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”’ There we catch a glimpse of the 
eternal glory; there we catch.an echo of the eternal hallelujah; and the light of that 
glory and the burden of that song is the death of ‘Christ. 


8. The Lord’s death is the covenant of hope for His church. In that most 

affecting interview of St. Paul with the leaders of the Ephesian church at Miletus, 
_ recorded in Acts 20, he says, “Feed the church of God, which He hath purchased with 
H s own blood.” Here is the ground of my hope concerning the church. Not her 
orldly power, not her active work, not her numerous membership, not her material 
alth. God forbid that we should trust in any of these signs, for these signs may all 
fail. The only hope that is reasonable for the future of the church of Christ is found 
in the death of Christ. This is the only thing that lifts me above discouragement and 
“apprehension in view of the many undesirable and unhappy circumstances that attend 
the life of the church in the present day. Her worldly conformity, her sad dissensions, 


hope if one were not held fast by that blessed word. The death of Christ is the 
covenant of hope for the church. 


294 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


4. The death of Christ is the door of access into the very heart of God. Christ 
was not setting up any barrier between man and God when He said, “No man cometh 
unto the Father but by me;”’ He was opening unto us a door of access to the heart of | 
God. We cannot find our way to the heart of God unless we go by that new and 
living way. Read again Rom. 5:1, 2: “Being justified by faith let us have peace with 
God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have had our access by 
faith into this grace wherein we stand.” Read also that thrilling passage in Eph. 
2:13: “But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood 
of Christ. For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall 
of partition; for through Him we have our access in one Spirit unto the Father. So, 
then, ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but ye are fellow citizens with the 
saints, and of the household of God.” What a wonderful note of union is there—the 
door of access to the very heart of God through the death of Jesus (Christ our Lord. 


5. The death of Christ has a direct relation to the personal experience to each 
one of us. Nothing is more true, I think, among earnest young lives than a desire to 
receive all the gospel, and yet a comparative failure to see that so great a truth as the 
atonement has really any personal relation to oneself. It seems so far off; it seems 
as if it belonged to history, as if it belonged to the ages and the dispensations, but not 
as if it belonged to the individual soul. It is at this point that the Word of God comes 
in with this great, great truth. The two texts that I quote here are wonderful in their 
tenderness. Hebrews 2: 9: “We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the 
angels, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor: that He by the 
grace of God should taste death for every man.” That, indeed, is wonderful! It 
brings the cross right into touch with our own life. The other text, Galatians 2:20: 
“T am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: 
and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who 
loved me, and gave Himself for me.” I once heard Canon Liddon in St. Paul’s 
Cathedral, speaking from that text, say that to St. Paul, the appropriation of Jesus 
and of the love of Jesus Christ to his own soul was just as real and personal as if 
there had not been another soul in the whole universe to be blessed and benefited by 
the sacrifice of the cross. That is the point we want to reach. We want to see that 
the door of access to the heart of the Infinite is opened for us individually by the Son 
of God, who loved each one of us, and gave Himself up for each one of us. 

6. The death of Christ is the basis of testimony in the life of the Christian. You 
call yourself a Christian, and you conceive of yourself as a witness for Christ. But 
what is the burden of your witness? The answer brings you again to the cross. Asa 
Christian you take your stand at the Lord’s table; as a Christian you receive the 
bread and wine of the communion. What is the meaning of that sacrament? “As 
often as ye eat this bread and drink the cup, ye proclaim the Lord’s death till He 
come.” (I Cor. 11: 26.) That is your Christian witness-bearing; to bear witness to 
the Lord’s death; far and wide, by spoken word, by crucified life, to bear witness to 
the reality, and the value, and the personal application of the Lord’s death till He 
comes. 


7. Lastly, the death of Christ is the great motive for personal consecration. 
Hebrews 10:19: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy. place 
by the blood of Jesus, by the way which He dedicated for us, and having a great priest 
over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in fullness of faith, having 
our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our body washed with pure water: 
let us hold fast the confession of our hope that it waver not, and let us consider one 
another to provoke unto love and good works; not forsaking the assembling of our- 
selves together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much 
the more, as ye see the day drawing nigh.” What day? The day of His second 


— 
Ai 
3 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Hall. 295 


.. 
coming, the day of which we have just been singing in that hymn about the return 
‘of Christ. You do not need anything beyond this to bring the death of Christ close 
home to your life. It is the great personal motive for consecration. 


UNION WITH CHRIST. 
II. Now we may speak a few moments about the second member of the quadri- 
lateral: Union with Christ, or the essence of Christian experience; that is, the 
wondrous fellowship with the Savior, which is the distinctive note of the consecrated 


4] 


‘eB 


¥ We take two key texts: Matthew 28: 20 (margin), “I am with you all the days,” 
md John 15: 4 and 5: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit 
of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in me. I am 
the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth 
much fruit: for apart from me ye can do nothing.” Here we get the thought that 
union with Christ is the essence of Christian experience. “Apart from me your life 
amounts to nothing; it is futile so far as it claims to be a Christian life.” The essence 
‘of Christian experience is union with the living Lord, who is with you, as He says, 
all the days. 

_ I shall just outline this member of our quadrilateral to show that to be in union 
with Christ brings to us eight essential elements of Christian experience. 

1. It brings to us the essential aspiration. “That I may know Him, and the 
power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conform- 
able unto His death.” (Philippians 3: 10.) The great aspiration in all college life. 
is for more knowledge. The essential aspiration in Christian experience is the same 
thing, more knowledge. If we are in union with Christ we want to know more and 
more about Him. 

2. Union with Christ brings to us the essential hope. ‘Looking for that blessed 
Rope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” 
Titus 2: 13.) More and more I feel that this hope is essential; that we cannot limit 
our thought of Christ to His past manifestation in the world, or to His present life in 
glory; that we are bound, if we take the New Testament at all, to take it all, and to 
as an essential part of Christian experience the blessed hope of a new manifesta- 

on of Christ a second time for those who look for Him. 


38. Union with Christ brings into our life the essential aim. What we want is 
B aim in life if our life is going to amount to anything. Philippians 3:14 gives us the 
m, the very opposite of an incoherent life: ‘‘Not as though I had already attained, 
ther were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which 
also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have appre- 
hen nded; but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and 
ching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the 
ze of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” There you have an aim in life that 
worth having, that never wavers, that delivers from incoherence. To press toward 
| a ‘mark is what gives coherence, shapeliness, continuity, progress to life. 


_ 4 To be in union with Christ gives to us the essential dynamic. What one wants, 
I th the best intentions in the world and the noblest aim, is the power to carry those 
ntions out. A man may dream all day of living a noble life, yet live a most 
ble one. What we want is power, a dynamic to make it possible to bring into 
these great aims of Christian experience. Philippians 4: 13 tells what that 
dynamic is: “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.” In the life that is 
consecrated, that is filled with the great essential aim, this means not only a spiritual 
fengthening, but an intellectual and physical strengthening many, many times, 
ring the mind and making it able to think when it is disturbed by weakness, lifting 


296 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


: 


up the body which is almost ready to sink down with fatigue, and sending it on to 
service as if by a miracle. You remember that word of the poet about Sir Galahad, 
“whose strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure.” So is every 
one who lives near to Christ. A weak man, a weak woman feels in Him almost limit- 
less power to go on in service; and yet there is not a bit of boasting or a bit of pre-— 
sumption in that claim of power, for with the same breath we say, “Apart from Him 
I can do nothing.” 

5. This union with Christ brings to us the essential victory over circumstances 
and external conditions. If we are going to defer the larger spiritual expression oi 
ourselves in this world until our circumstances have shaped themselves favorably and 
until all our conditions are the very best, we shall simply pass out of this world with- 
out having fulfilled a mission in it. The thing to know is that in Him is the secret of 
victory over untoward circumstances and undesirable conditions. It is the over- 
coming of the world. I John 5: 5—‘‘Who is he that overcometh the world but he 
that believeth that Jesus is the Christ?” Oh, the wonderful victory over untoward 
circumstances that has come again and again to God’s servants! Everything the very 
worst possible for them, everything against them; and yet, because they have lived 
in this absolute union with Christ, they have overcome the world, they have risen 
above adverse conditions, they have snatched victory from defeat! 

6. This union with Christ brings to us the essential assurance of courage. Who 
has not had his dark times? Who has not had her moments of depression when she 
was almost ready to give up the fight for the nobler life and the nobler things? But 
Romans 8: 35 comes to us with a note of dauntless courage: “Who shall separate us 
from the love.of Christ? Shall trikulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or 
nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors 
through Him that loved us.” There is a note of dauntless courage for you! 

7. This union with Christ brings to us the essential refreshment of our ideals 
and motives and views of living. There is nothing sadder in life than a faded ideal, 
when our enthusiasm for service wanes and our familiarity with spiritual things 
degenerates into commonplaceness, and our life looks threadbare and mean. That 
cannot be if we live in union with Christ. Read II Corinthians 5:17: “If any man be 
in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are 
become new.” How marvelously fresh God’s world is every new day! How He brings 
the dawn and the sunrise and the dew and the fresh glory of sky and cloud and field, 
as if there never had been a day before in all the world! So may our life be if we 
live in Christ. This refreshing of life’s ideals may be wrought out in us day by day. 
“Tf any man be in Christ, he is a new creature,” may be a promise verified to us 
morning by morning. 

8. This union with Christ brings to us the essential key of living. Philippians 
1: 21—“‘For me to live is Christ.’’ That is just what we want—a key to living. Living 
is the greatest problem and mystery that we have to deal with—to live our own lives, 
to work our own way through our own problems, to be extricated from our own 
tangles and confusions. Christ is the key to living. Christ solves every difficulty, 
answers every question, leads through every tangle, nerves for every effort—is the 
way, the truth and the life. Revelation 3: 14 is a part of the epistle to the church at 
Laodicea—the church of the luke-warm people, the people that were neither hot nor 
cold, whose lives were all involved in indeterminate relations to God and to evil. 
They were neither one thing nor the other; they were just like multitudes of us, who 
find our lives such a problem because our relations with God and with evil are so 
obscure and indeterminate. In His message to that church of the Laodicean people 
who were neither hot nor cold, Christ calls Himself “the Amen.” “These things 
saith the Amen.” There is something marvelously final about the Amen. It is the 


ss 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Hall. 297 


end of discussion; it is getting to a point. Christ gives the key of living in that way. 
When we are all in confusion as to right and wrong, when our whole life is a tangle, 
Christ is to us the great Amen to set things right. On and on through the days one 
- finds in Christ the Lost Chord, that Great Amen! It links all perplexed meanings in 
one infinite peace. Oh, may we all know how Christ gives us the key of living! May 
_we all know how Christ links the perplexed meanings into one infinite peace! 


UNION IN CHRIST. 


III. The third and fourth members of otr quadrilateral are union in Christ, or 
the basis of enduring fellowship; that is, Christ in our earthly relationships to keep 
them holy, to save them from confusion and disintegration. Nothing is more evident 
in our Lord’s life than that He Himself believed in and depended upon fellowship as 
a source of comfort and a means of strength. He, in whom dwelt all the fullness of 
the Godhead bodily, was yet so perfectly and truly human, one with us and one like 
us, that His heart hungered after human fellowship and His soul rested on human 
friends. We see this brought out in Christ’s choice of His disciples. Instead of going 
out upon His mission alone He begins His public ministry by gathering around 
imself a select circle of friends, to whom He confided the deepest thoughts 
“of His soul, and whom He took with Him up and down the walks of His 
“ministry as His companions and His comforters. We see it still more forcibly in the 
‘selection of some out of this number to be specially near to Him in the great crises 
of His earthly experience. There were three out of the twelve—Peter, James and John 
-whom He seemed to admit still more closely into the confidence of His heart, as 
_ though through this circle within the circle He is showing us more clearly His rever- 
ence for human friendships and His dependence upon them. Still further does He 
“reveal this characteristic of His humanity in the selection of one out of the three, upon 
whom He especially leaned, and to whom He particularly turned as to one most of 
all in spiritual kinship with Himself. This is the disciple whom Jesus loved. I believe 
_ that this was a truly human friendship, the drawing to one another of two souls that 
‘were mutually congenial, each finding its best self-expression through the other. 
How gratefully and how touchingly our Lord expresses His obligation to these human 
friends! In Luke 22: 28 He says, ‘““Ye are they which have continued with me in my 
temptations.” Not always were they worthy of that high word from Him. There 
yas a time when they forsook Him and fled under the terror of men; yet Jesus trusted 
them, leaned upon them, and was grateful to them for what they gave to His life. 


__ I think, also, that nothing is more evident than that Christ desired the element 
of fellowship to be a part of the religion that He founded. He desired that the spirit 
and crowded out, instead of His disciples drifting apart into individualism, He longed 
that fellowship should be cultivated among them and that mutual dependence and the 
pve of one for another should be strengthened with time. This is very affectingly 
n in His institution of the communion. The sacrament of His body and blood 
gnifies much else, but it certainly is also a sacrament of fellowship. The disciples 
gathered around the common board, and He provided them with the common food. 
‘In the early days of Christianity this sacrament was the seal of fellowship in the Chris- 
tiar church and for a time every meal was looked upon as the Lord’s supper, and in 
the most simple and unaffected way the disciples of Jesus gathered day by day for the 
feasts of love.” 


* But the striking thought is that the fellowship which Christ blesses most evidently 
is the fellowship in which He Himself is a part; a medium, as it were, through which 
he human friends find one another, and the human friendship takes up into itself, 


; through Him, a saving, sanctifying, and glorifying element. It is the joy of one who 


¥ 


ea 


298 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


has learned what it is to have fellowship with Christ, to wish that that divine element 
shall continue to be a part of every closest relationship that we form, and that every 
such relationship may be kept holy and saved from disintegration, and loss, and con- 
fusion, and sin, by His presence in it. “That which we have seen and heard declare 
we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us; yea, and our fellowship is with 
the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. If we walk in the light, as He is in the 
light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanseth 
us from all sin.” (I John 1: 8, 7.) : 

Now the thought of a union of human hearts in Christ is no vain dream. It may 
be realized in all stages of our life. Perhaps one of the most pathetic remembrances of 
life is the remembrance of the supposed friendships that came to nothing; that rushed 
into our life as warm affinities; that influenced our life, and not always well; that were 
easily broken, and that passed away and drifted astern as the wreckage of things that 
might have been, but never came to fulfillment. But I want to speak of the union of 
human hearts in Christ and in five relations. : 


1. Inthe region of our personal friendships. I believe devoutly in friendship, and 
there is nothing earthly upon which I more intensely depend; yet more and more E 
feel the mystery of friendship. Friendship is a strange and mysterious commingling 
of involuntary affinity and conscious choice; and because we so often fail to understand 
that Christ wants to enter into our friendships, and that He will enter in wherever a 
pure friendship is ready to welcome Him, we make many mistakes, lose many bless- 
ings, and greatly impoverish and injure our own lives many times over. In the beau- 
tiful friendship of David and Jonathan we see one into which God came, and through 
which God worked as the medium, whereby friendship rose to the level to which it 
is always intended to rise. First Samuel 23: 16 contains the beautiful words spoken 
at a time when one of those friends was in the greatest difficulty and had taken refuge 
in a dense forest; and of the other friend it is said, “Jonathan went to David in the 
wood and strengthened his hands in God.” Long years ago that verse came into my 
life as the type of what friendship means. I believe God has a meaning in making us 
capable of great friendships just as much as He has a meaning in enduing us with 
any other quality or capacity. But too often this divine element is excluded; too often 
we make no provision for it, or fail to realize its value; too often the friendships of life, 
or what are so called, are merely its unspiritual affinities. Unspiritual friendships are 
the limitation of many lives, and the ruin of not a few. I have seen nothing more 
striking in the study of human life than the strong influence of an unspiritual nature 
through friendship or affinity, over a spiritual nature weaker than itself. In II Corin-— 
thians 6: 14 there is a very wonderful verse. You can apply it almost as far as you 
will. “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath 
righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” 
Those words apply themselves, under the touch of the Spirit, to those who will.receive 
them, I think they raise this question—not the mere legal or technical question 
whether it is right for one who is a Christian to marry one who is not a Christian—- 
not merely that legal and technical question, but this far deeper, richer, and more 
exhaustive question, whether it is possible for one soul that has within it Jesus Christ, 
to give its best out to any other soul unless Christ goes with that best and is a part 
of it. I'am convinced, and with great earnestness I affirm the conviction today, that 
the only perfect friendship is the friendship in which Christ is the medium between the » 
two souls that call themselves friends. 

But if this law is to prevail and we are to keep ourselves back from those who are 
not Christians, how can the consecrated life give itself to those that are not Chris- 
tians, that it may bring them to Christ? The answer is found in Christ Himself. Two 
phrases concerning Christ form one of the most beautiful paradoxes in the New Testa- 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Hall. 299 


” 66 


ment: “The friend of sinners;” “separated from sinners.” Christ was, of all souls, 
he one that yearned most to give itself out to the sinful, but Christ felt so supremely 
hat the communion of soul with soul is along the highest walks of friendship, that 
He could give Himself forth only in that deeper life to those who were of kindred 
spirit with Himself in things divine. . 
4 2. Now, may I say a word regarding the union with Christ in the home life? 
What is more precious in this world than the realization of Christ in our home relation- 
hips! In the fifth and sixth chapters of the Epistle to the Ephesians you will find 
most every relationship of the home brought out in this Christian light. “Speaking 
to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in 
i heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father 
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourselves one to another in the fear 
if God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. Hus- 
bands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. 
. - - Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. . . . . Servants, 
‘be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and 
trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” I will not dwell upon this; 


home as the Master of the house, the Lord of the home life. 
8. Consider this thought of union in Christ in relation to the efforts of small 
es for spiritual aims. In Matthew 18: 19, 20, we read: “I say unto you, that if 
_ two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be 
done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered 
_ together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”” How many small circles there 
re that have been formed in the colleges within the last few years for Christian effort; 
nd how often those circles have been formed by fainting hearts that realized the almost 
yerpowering weight of worldliness and agnosticism against which they were striving 
make headway. Christ loves to enter in and be a part of these efforts of a few for 
d higher and greater things. How cheering is this thought! Christ not only takes 
lote of numbers, but Christ sees with equal joy and equal sympathy the effort of the 
_ few, of the two, the three that agree together to seek for the higher things. It is a 
word of the greatest encouragement to some who are thinking, it may be, of the social 
Tyfe in their own community or in their own college, and ask themselves, what are we 
among so many? It is just at this point that Christ meets you and that you have the 
holy joy of the thought of union in Christ, the basis of an enduring fellowship. Be 
_ mot afraid if He is with you, to go forward in seeking to bring others to higher 
dards of thought, and to higher levels of living. 
_ 4. In the larger life of the Church. The law that Christ has laid down for the 
church is union in Himself. In Eph. 4, we read: “He gave some, apostles; and some, 
fophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of 
€ saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we 
come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a 
ct man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ: That we, speak- 
ig the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, which is the Head, even 
‘Christ: from whom all the body, fitly framed and knit together through that which 
joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, 
‘eth the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.” Would that 
at ideal of the church of Christ might be brought forward in these days of confusion 
dismemberment, that the larger life of the church in the view of Christ might every- 


300 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. : 


where be seen to be the life of a body compacted together in Himself, every member 
thereof contributing to the unity and the harmony of the effective and perfect whole. 


5. I cannot pass from this thought without speaking of that which is present with 
me every day as I carry along in life the blessed memory of some whose faces I no . 
longer see upon the earth—fellowship in Him with those who are with Christ in | 
paradise. Our fellowships would be brief and transitory indeed if they ended with 
death. How many a glorious fellowship, that had in it the fullness of Christ's presence 
and the joy of Christ’s life, suddenly ended in this world by the death of one of the 
friends. How many a home, perfectly beautiful and united in Christ, every relation- 
ship of the home sanctified by His presence and uplifted by His example, has been 
darkened and saddened by the going forth from it of some cherished and beloved one. 
Can we for a moment believe that the thought of union in Christ is not great enough 
to transcend this break, which comes through death, and to join us with them and 
them with us? In Eph. 3: 15 Paul says that he bows his knees to God, for whom the 
whole family in heaven and on earth is named. Yes, as that great hymn says: 


“One family we dwell in Him, é 
One church above, beneath.” 


Death has no power to break the union that is in Christ, and those that are with 
Him in paradise are as much one with us and we one with them, as if they were here 
by our side. How sweetly does Paul speak in I Thess. 4:13: “I would not have you 
to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even 
as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even 
so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him.” 

Ah, friends, is it not worth while to seek to bring Christ into all our earthly 
relationships? Is it not worth while to seek only for those friendships into which He 
can come and of which He can be a part; not only that our friendships may be saved 
from disintegration and confusion here, but that théy may not be broken when death 
comes to rend the earthly bond; that we may have entered into a union with hearts in 
Christ which is eternal, which death cannot sever, and which shall be consummated, 
again in its fullness in the day when the vision opens before us? 


UNION FOR CHRIST. 

IV. The fourth and last member of our quadrilateral indicates a still larger aspect 
of the great unity of which we are speaking: Union for Christ, the platform of states- 
manship in Christian service; Christ, the rallying point for a church divided by many 
theological and ecclesiastical systems; Christ, the common ground on which Christians © 
can stand together and work together for the reformation of society and the evangeli- 
zation of the world. 

A key text for this is found in John 17: 20, 21—a part of Christ’s high-priestly 
prayer: ‘Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me 
through their word; that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, 
that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me.” 
Taking that magnificent text, there are presented to us three vital thoughts concerning 
the true state and mission of the church as regarded from Christ’s point of view. 


1. The great object of Christ is to convince the world of His divine mission. That 
is exactly what the world does not believe, and what the world fails to believe so long 
as it sees Christians warring among themselves. The great mission of the church is 
to convince the world, through the Spirit, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; that 
He is sent of the Father to redeem. the whole world, ‘‘that the world may know that 
Thou hast sent me.” , 


| 
; 
5 
‘ 
: 


Spiritual Unity in the Name of Christ—C. C. Hall. 301 


_ 2. This aim of convincing the world of the divine mission of Jesus Christ is to be 
obtained through the unity of believers. “That they all may be one, that the world 
nay know that Thou hast sent me.” Here we come, I think, to the largest aspects of 
his thought of unity; and we feel the responsibility to speak for unity and to work for 
nity, because here is a world lying in the evil one, which is prevénted by the loss of 
inity in the church of Christ from believing that the Father has sent the Son to 
redeem the world. 


3. This unity is not uniformity, a mechanical unity that everybody shall be like 
verybody else. But it is unity like that within the Holy Trinity, “that they may be 
one, as Thou art in me and I| in Thee’—a unity that allows for differences, a compre- 
ensive unity, a unity on earth which is like the unity of the Trinity in heaven, a unity 
_of many members in one body. 

Starting from this great key thought which is supplied by the Lord Himself, I 
have found a series of seven noble and commanding propositions presenting them- 
selves to me. 


(1.) Christ regards Himself as in vital relations with the whole world of men. 
John 12: 32: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.” What 
magnificent point of view—Christ regarding Himself as in vital relations with the 
hole world of men! In the Epistle to the Hebrews it is said of Christ that He, “for 
the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross.” That phrase means, for the joy 
was set forth before Him like a great landscape, a great prospect that was set 
h before Him as He was lifted up on the cross. The joy of Christ in His sacrifice 
was the consciousness that He stood in vital relations to the whole world of men. 
Now, in thinking of unity for Christ, let us start with Christ’s own idea of His relation 
© the whole world of men. 


(2.) The death of Christ has reference to the whole world of men. I John 2: 
2: “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the 
ghteous: and He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for 
4 sins of the whole world.” Grasp this thought, which I cannot pause to amplify, 
‘that Christ’s death has reference to the whole world of men. 


; (3.) The gospel of Christ has a message for the whole world of men. Mark 16: 
15: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” What could 
‘be more broad, more catholic than that thought? A gospel issued to all the world, 
be preached to the whole creation! 


(4.) This message of the uplifted Christ can be understood and appropriated by 
he whole world of men. Colossians 3:10, 11: “The new man, which is renewed in 
nowledge after the image of Him that created him: where there is neither Greek nor 
y, nor circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but 
ist is all and in all.””. When we remember how complicated religious thought has 


raised in the controversies of the church, it is refreshing to go back to the begin- 
g and see Christ not only beholding His relation to the whole world of men, but 
ending out a gospel which is intelligible to the whole world of nen. The message 
of Christ is something that all men can receive and appropriate. 


_ (6.) The development of the church is under the law of unity rather than under 
he law of uniformity. I Corinthians 12:4: “Now there are diversities of gifts, but 
the same spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same law. And 


* oe 
‘ 


302 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.” I 
rejoice to feel that Christ has contemplated that the church would involve differences; 
that men by their different temperaments, and by their different training, would see 
things from different points of view; but there is one God that worketh all in all; there 
are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; and although there is this diversity in the 
church of Christ, yet there is a larger comprehensive unity in the gospel message 
which is given to the church to deliver, that rises above all the minor differences that 
may from time to time develop. 


(7.) In this complex church, where due allowance is made for human variations 
of point of view, Christ is absolutely supreme. Ephesians 1:20: “God put all the 
things ‘in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the 
church, which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all’ This leads up 
to our conclusion: Union for Christ is the method of statesmanship for the church of 
the future. The master stroke of the devil is to divide Christians among themselves. 
What we need is a larger comprehension of one another among Christians; a greater 
trust of one another as Christians; a zeal for evangelism that shall swallow up the zeal 
for controversy; a concentration of forces around Christ to exalt Him by common 


testimony as the Head of the church and the Redeemer of the world, that the world 


may know that His mission and Himself are divine. Who then will be a peacemaker 
in the church of Christ, and so a witness bearer in the world? Shall it not be our 


prayer so far as we have any influence in the church of Christ, to work for that larger. 


unity, union for Christ, that we may realize over and above all local differences and 
distinctions these great thoughts, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto myself.” 
“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” 

I trust that God in His grace will let this message from His Word so utter itself 
that we shall have a clearer sense of God’s perfect unity in Himself, of His desire that 
our life should attain a perfect unity in its relation to Him, in its relation to the world, 
and in its relation to its own complex powers. 


[This address was delivered in three parts at the Young Women’s conference, East 
Northfield, Mass., and was reported for the Northfield Echoes, being reproduced here 
through the courtesy of Dr. Hall. 

Charles Cuthbert Hall, D.D., was born in New York September 3, 1852, 
graduating from Williams College and receiving degrees from Harvard and the 
University of New York. Studied in London and Edinburgh, serving the First Pres- 
byterian church, Brooklyn, as pastor for twenty years; president of Union Theological 
Seminary since 1897.] ; 


So eae 


: 


{ 


(303) 


MODERN INFIDELITY CONSIDERED. 


ROBERT HALL 


As the Christian ministry is established for the instruction of men, throughout 
every age, in truth and holiness, it must adapt itself to the ever-shifting scenes of the 
moral world, and stand ready to repel the attacks of impiety and error, under whatever 
form they may appear. The Church and the world form two societies so distinct, and 
_ are governed by such opposite principles and maxims, that, as well from this con- 
 trariety as from the express warnings of Scripture, true Christians must look for a 
7 state of warfare, with this consoling assurance, that the Church, like the burning bush 
: beheld by Moses in the land of Midian, may be encompassed with flames, but wiil 
never be consumed. 
When she was delivered from the persecuting power of Rome, she only expe- 
 tienced a change of trials. The oppression of external violence was followed by 
_ the more dangerous and insidious attacks of internal enemies. The freedom and 
_ inquiry claimed and asserted at the Reformation degenerated, in the hands of men 
_ who professed the principles without possessing the spirit of the Reformers, into a 
_ fondness for speculative refinements; and, consequently, into a source of dispute, 
faction and heresy. While Protestants attended more to the points on which they 
differed than to those on which they agreed—while more zeal was employed in 
4 settling ceremonies and defending subtleties than in enforcing plain revealed truths— 
, the lovely fruits of peace and charity perished under the storms of controversy. 
x In this disjointed and disordered state of the Christian Church, they who never 
Booked into the interior of Christianity were apt to suspect, that to a subject so fruitful 
in particular disputes must attach a general uncertainty; and that a religion founded 
¢ on revelation could never have occasioned such discordancy of principle and practice 
among its disciples. Thus infidelity is the joint offspring of an irreligious temper and 
_ unholy speculation, employed, not in examining the evidences of Christianity, but in 
_ detecting the vices of professing Christians. It has passed through various stages, each 
_ ditsinguished by higher gradations of impiety; for when men arrogantly abandon their 
guide, and willfully shut their eyes on the light of heaven, it is wisely ordained that 
‘their errors shall multiply at every step, until their extravagance confutes itself, and 
the mischief of their principles works its own antidote. That such has been the 
_ progress of infidelity will be obvious from a slight survey of its history. 
Lord Herbert, the first and purest of our English freethinkers, who flourished in 
_ the beginning of the reign of Charles the First, did not so much impugn the doctrine 
or the morality of the Scriptures as attempt to supersede their necessity, by endeavor- 
_ ing to show that the great principles of the unity of God, a moral government, and a 
future world, are taught with sufficient clearness by the light of nature. Bolingbroke, 
and some of his successors, advanced much further, and attempted to invalidate the 
proofs of the moral character of the Deity, and consequently all expectations of 
tewards and punishments; leaving the Supreme Being no other perfections than those 
which belong to a first cause, or almighty contriver. After him, at a considerable 
distance, follow Hume, the most subtle, if not the most philosophical, of the Deists; 
who, by perplexing the relations of cause and effect, boldly aimed to introduce a 


i “Without God in the world.”—Ephes. 2: 12. 


304 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


universal skepticism, and to pour a more than Egyptian darkness into the whole 
region of morals. Since his time skeptical writers have sprung up in abundance, and 
infidelity has lured multitudes to its standard; the young and superficial, by its dex- 
terous sophistry, the vain by the literary fame of its champions, and the profligate by 
the licentiousness of its principles. Atheism the most undisguised has at length begun 
to make its appearance. 

Animated by numbers and emboldened by success, the infidels of the present day 
have given a new direction to their efforts, and impressed a new character on the 
ever-growing mass of their impious speculations. 

By uniting more closely with each other, by giving a sprinkling of irreligion to 
all their literary productions, they aim to engross the formation of the public mind; 
and, amid the warmest professions of attachment to virtue, to effect an entire disruption 
of morality from religion. Pretending to be the teachers of virtue and the guides of 
life, they propose to revolutionize the morals of mankind; to regenerate the world by 
a process entirely new; and to rear the temple of virtue, not merely without the aid 
’ of religion, but on the renunciation of its principles and the derision of its sanctions. 
Their party has derived a great accession of numbers and strength from events the 
most momentous and astonishing in the political world, which have divided the 
sentiments of Europe between hope and terror; and which, however they may issue, 
have, for the present, swelled the ranks of infidelity. So rapidly, indeed, has it 
advanced since this crisis, that a great majority on the Continent, and in England a 
considerable proportion of those who pursue literature as a profession, may justly be 
considered as the open or disguised abettors of atheism. 

With respect to the skeptical and religious systems, the inquiry at present is not 
so much which is the truest in speculation as which is the most useful in practice; or, 
in other words, whether morality will be best promoted by considering it as a part of a 
great and comprehensive law, emanating from the will of a supreme, omnipotent 
legislator; or as a mere expedient, adapted to our present situation, enforced by no 
other motives than those which arise from the prospects and interests of the present 
state. The absurdity of atheism having been demonstrated so often and so clearly by 
many eminent men that this part of the subject is exhausted, I should hasten imme- 
diately to what I have more particularly in view, were I not apprehensive a discourse 
of this kind may be expected to contain some statement of the argument in proof of 
a Deity; which, therefore, I shall present in as few and plain words as possible. 

When we examine a watch, or any other piece of machinery, we instantly perceive 
marks of design. The arrangement of its several parts, and the adaptation of its 
movements to one result, show it to be a contrivance; nor do we ever imagine the 
faculty of contriving to be in the watch itself, but in a separate agent. If we turn from 
art to nature, we behold a vast magazine of contrivances: we see innumerable objects 
replete with the most exquisite design. The human eye, for example, is formed with 
admirable skill for the purpose of sight, the ear for the function of hearing. As the 
productions of art we never think of ascribing the power of contrivance to the 
machine itself, so we are certain the skill displayed in the human structure is not a 
property of man, since he is very imperfectly acquainted with his own formation. If 
there be an inseparable relation between the ideas of a contrivance and a contriver, and 
it be evident in regard to the human structure, the designing agent is not man himself, 
there must undeniably be some separate invisible being, who is his former. This great 
Being we mean to indicate by the appellation of Deity. 

This reasoning admits of but one reply. Why, it will be said, may we not suppose 
the world has always continued as it is; that is, that there has been a constant succes- 
sion of finite beings, appearing and disappearing on the earth from all eternity? I 
answer, whatever is supposed to have occasioned this constant succession, exclusive of 


F Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 305 


an intelligent cause, will never account for the undeniable marks of design visible in all 
finite beings. Nor is the absurdity of a aie & a contrivance without a contriver 
| 


every step of the series. 
Besides, an eternal succession of finite beings involves in it a contradiction, and is 
therefore plainly impossible. As the supposition is made to get quit of the idea of 
any one having existed from eternity, each of the beings in the succession must have 
begun in time: but the succession itself is eternal. We have then the succession of 
_ beings infinitely earlier than any being in the succession; or, in other words, a series 
, of beings running on, ad infinitum, before it reached any particular being, which is 
absurd. 
From these considerations it is manifest there must be some eternal Being, or 
nothing could ever have existed, and since the beings which we behold bear in their 
whole structure evident marks of wisdom and design, it is equally certain that He who 
formed them is a wise and intelligent agent. . 

To prove the unity of this great Being, in opposition to a plurality of gods, it is 
not necessary to have recourse to metaphysical abstractions. It is sufficient to observe 
_ that the notion of more than one author of nature is inconsistent with that harmony 

of design which pervades her works; that it explains no appearances, is supported by 
no evidence, and serves no purpose but to embarrass and perplex our conceptions. 

Such are the proofs of the existence of that great and glorious Being whom we 
_denominate God; and it is not presumption to say it is impossible to find another truth 
4 in the whole compass of morals which, according to the justest laws of reasoning, 
admits of such strict and rigorous demonstration. 

But I proceed to the more immediate object of this discourse, which, as has been 
already intimated, is not so much to evince the falsehood of skepticism as a theory, as 
to display its mischievous effects, contrasted with those which result from the belief 
of a Deity and a future state. The subject, viewed in this light, may be considered 
under two aspects: the influence of the opposite systems on the principles of morals 
_ and on the formation of character. The first may be styled their direct, the latter 
_ their equally important, but indirect, consequence and tendency. 


sy I. The skeptical or irreligious system subverts the whole foundation of morals. 
It may be assumed as a maxim that no person can be required to act contrary to his 
; greatest good, or his highest interest, comprehensively viewed in relation to the whole 
duration of his being. It is often our duty to forego our own interest partially, to 
Sacrifice a smaller pleasure for the sake of a greater, to incur a present evil in pursuit 
of a distant good of more consequence. In a word, to arbitrate among interfering 
e claims of inclination is the moral arithmetic of human life. But to risk the happiness 
"of the whole duration of our being in any case whatever, were it possible, would be 
foolish, because the sacrifice must, by the nature of it, be so great as to preclude the 
possibility of compensation. 


9 * As the present world, on skeptical principles, is the only place of recompense, 
_ whenever the practice of virtue fails to promise the greatest sum of present good— 
~ cases which often occur in reality, and much oftener in appearance—every motive to 
_ Virtuous conduct is superseded; a deviation from rectitude becomes the part of wisdom; 
and should the path of virtue, in addition to this, be obstructed by disgrace, torment, 
or death, to persevere would be madness and folly, and a violation of the first and 
‘most essential law of nature. Virtue, on these principles, being in numberless instances 
at war with self-preservation, never can, or ought to, become a fixed habit of the mind. 
_ The system of infidelity is not only incapable of arming virtue for great and trying 
occasions, but leaves it unsupported in the most ordinary occurrences. In vain will its 
advocates appeal to a moral sense, to benevolence and sympathy; for it is undeniable 


| 
.. Whe 


306 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


that these impulses may be overcome, In vain will they expatiate on the tranquility 
and pleasure attendant on a virtuous course: for though you may remind the offender 
that in disregarding them he has violated his nature, and that a conduct consistent 


_with them is productive of much internal satisfaction; yet if he reply that his taste is 


of a different sort, that there are other gratifications which he values more, and that 
every man must choose his own pleasures, the argument is at an end. 

Rewards and punishments, assigned by infinite power, afford a palpable and 
pressing motive which can never be neglected without renouncing the character of a 
rational creature: but tastes and relishes are not to be prescribed. 

A motive in which the reason of man shall acquiesce, enforcing the practice of 
virtue at all times and seasons, enters into the very essence of moral obligation. 
Moral infidelity supplies no such motives: it is therefore essentially and infallibly a 
system of enervation, turpitude, and vice. 

This chasm in the construction of morals can only be supplied by the firm belief 
of a rewarding and avenging Deity, who binds duty and happiness, though they may 
seem distant, in an indissoluble chain; without which, whatever usurps the name of 
virtue is not a principle, but a feeling; not a determinate rule, but a fluctuating expe- 
dient, varying with the tastes of individuals, and changing with the scenes of life. 

Nor is this the only way in which infidelity subverts the foundation of morals. 
All reasoning on morals presupposes a distinction between inclinations and duties, 
affections and rules. The former prompt; the latter prescribe. The former supply 
motives to action; the latter regulate and control it. Hence it is evident, if virtue 
have any just claim to authority, it must be under the latter of these notions; that is, 
under the character of a law. It is under this notion, in fact, that its dominion has 
ever been acknowledged to be paramount and supreme. 

But, without the intervention of a superior will, it is impossible there should be 
any moral laws, except in the lax metaphorical sense in which we speak of the laws 
of matter and motion. Men being essentially equal, morality is, on these principles, 
only a stipulation, or silent compact, into which every individual is supposed to enter, 
as far as suits his convenience, and for the breach of which he is accountable’to nothing 
but his own mind. His own mind is his law, his tribunal, and his judge! 

Two consequences, the most disastrous to society, will inevitably follow the 
general prevalence of this system:—the frequent perpetration of great crimes, and the 
total absence of great virtues. ; 

1. In those conjunctures which tempt avarice or inflame ambition, when a crime 
flatters with the prospect of impunity, and the certainty of immense advantage, what 
is to restrain an atheist from its commission? To say that remorse will deter him is 
absurd; for remorse, as distinguished from pity, is the sole offspring of religious belief, 
the extinction of which is the great purpose of the infidel philosophy. 

The dread of punishment or infamy from his fellow-creatures will be an ineffectual 
barrier; because crimes are only committed under such circumstances as suggest the 
hope of concealment; not to say that crimes themselves will soon lose their infamy 
and their horror under the influence of that system which destroys the sanctity of 
virtue, by converting it into a low calculation of worldly interest. Here the sense of 
an ever-present Ruler, and of an avenging Judge, is of the most awful and indispensable 
necessity; as it is that alone which impresses on all crimes the character of folly, shows 
that duty and interest in every instance coincide, and that the most prosperous career 
of vice, the most brilliant successes of criminality, are but an accumulation of wrath 
against the day of wrath. 

As the frequent perpetration of great crimes is an inevitable consequence of the 
diffusion of skeptical principles, so, to understand this consequence in its full extent, 
we must look beyond their immediate effects, and consider the disruption of social 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 307 


ies, the destruction of confidence, the terror, suspicion, and hatred which must prevail 
1 that state of society in which barbarous deeds are familiar. The tranquility which 
ervades a well-ordered community, and the mutual good offices which bind its 
embers together, are founded on an implied confidence in the indisposition to annoy; 
| the justice, humanity, and moderation of those among whom we dwell. So that the 
jorst consequence of crimes is, that they impair the stock of public charity and 
reneral tenderness. The dread and hatred of our species would infallibly be grafted on 
conviction that we were exposed every moment to the surges of an unbridled ferocity, 
nd that nothing but the power of the magistrate stood between us and the daggers of 
Ssassins. In such a state, laws, deriving no support from public manners, are unequal 
> the task of curbing the fury of the passions; which, from being concentrated into 
elfishness, fear, and revenge, acquire new force. Terror and suspicion beget cruelty, 
and inflict injuries by way of prevention. Pity is extinguished in the stronger impulse 
of seli-preservation. The tender and generous affections are crushed; and nothing is 
sen but the retaliation of wrongs, the fierce and unmitigated struggle for superiority. 
his is but a faint sketch of the incalculable calamities and horrors we must expect, 
hould we be so unfortunate as ever to witness the triumph of modern infidelity. 


2. This system is a soil as barren of great and sublime virtues as it is prolific in 
imes. By great and sublime virtues are meant those which are called into action on 
eat and trying occasions, which demand the sacrifice of the dearest interests and 
prospects of human life, and sometimes of life itself: the virtues, in a word, which, by 
eir rarity and splendor, draw admiration, and have rendered illustrious the character 
of patriots, martyrs, and confessors. It requires but little reflection to perceive that 
hateyer veils a future world, and contracts the limits of existence within the present 
€, must tend, in a proportionable degree, to diminish the grandeur and narrow the 
there of human agency. 
_ As well might you expect exalted sentiments of justice from a professed gamester 
as look for noble principles in the man whose hopes and fears are all suspended on the 
esent moment, and who stakes the whole happiness of his being on the events of 
this vain and fleeting life. If he be ever impelled to the performance of great achieve- 
ents in a good cause, it must be solely by the hope of fame; a motive which, besides 
that it makes virtue the servant of opinion, usually grows weaker at the approach of 
Pal h; and which, however, it may surmount the love of existence in the heat of battle, 
Or in the moment of public observation, can seldom be expected to operate with much 
rce on the retired duties of a private station. 
Tn affirming that infidelity is unfavorable to the higher class of virtues, we are 
s pported as well by facts as by reasoning. We should be sorry to load our adver- 
saries with unmerited reproach: but to what history, to what record will they appeal 
the traits of moral greatness exhibited by their disciples? Where shall we look 
the trophies of infidel magnanimity or atheistical virtue? Not that we mean to 
se them of inactivity: they have recently filled the world with the fame of their 
D loits; of a different kind indeed, but of imperishable memory, and disastrous luster. 
‘Though it is confessed great and splendid actions are not the ordinary employment 
tif but must, from their nature, be reserved for high and eminent occasions; yet 
ph System is essentially defective which leaves no room for their production. They 
iré important, both from their immediate advantage and their remoter influence. They 
ofter eae, and always illustrate, the age and nation in which they appear. They raise 
he standard of morals; they arrest the progress of degeneracy; they diffuse a luster 
pver the path of life: monuments of the greatness of the human soul, they present to 
phe 1 orld the august image of virtue in her sublimest form, from which streams of 
igh band glory issue to remote times and ages; while their commemoration by the pen 
bf h istorians and poets awakens in distant bosoms the sparks of kindred excellence, 


308 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Combine the frequent and familiar perpetration of atrocious deeds with the dearth 
of great and generous actions, and you have the exact picture of that condition of 
society which completes the degradation of the species—the frightful contrast of 
dwarfish virtues and gigantic vices, where everything good is mean and little, and 
everything evil is rank and luxuriant: a dead and sickening uniformity prevails, broken 
only at intervals by volcanic eruptions of anarchy and crime. 


II. Hitherto we have considered the influence of skepticism on the principles of 
virtue; and have endeavored to show that it despoils it of its dignity, and lays its 
authority in the dust. Its influence on the formation of character remains to be 
examined, The actions of men are oftener determined by their character than their 
interest: their conduct takes its color more from their acquired taste, inclinations and 
habits, than from a deliberate regard to their greatest good. It is only on great occa- 
sions the mind awakes to take an extended survey of her whole course, and that she 
suffers the dictates of reason to impress a new bias upon her movements. The actions 
of each day are, for the most part, links which follow each other in the chain of 
custom. Hence the great. effort of practical wisdom is to imbue the mind with right 
tastes, affections and habits; the elements of character, and masters of action. 


1. The exclusion of a Supreme Being and of a superintending Providence tends 
directly to the destruction of moral taste. It robs the universe of all finished and 
consummate excellence even in idea. The admiration of perfect wisdom and goodness 
for which we are formed, and which kindles such unspeakable rapture in the soul, 
finding in the regions of skepticism nothing to which it corresponds, droops and 
languishes. In a world which presents a fair spectacle of order and beauty, of a vast 
family nourished and supported by an Almighty Parent—in a world which leads the 
devout mind, step by step, to the contemplation of the first fair and the first good, the 
skeptic is encompassed with nothing but obscurity, meanness and disorder. 


When we reflect on the manner in which the idea of Deity is formed, we must be 
convinced that such an idea, intimately present to the mind, must have a most powerful 
effect in refining the moral taste. Composed of the richest elements, it embraces, in 
the character of a beneficent Parent and Almighty Ruler, whatever is venerable in 
wisdom, whatever is lawful in authority, whatever is touching in goodness. 


Human excellence is blended with many imperfections, and seen under many 
limitations. It is beheld only in detached and separate portions, nor ever appears in 
any one character whole and entire. So that when, in imitation of the Stoics, we wish 
to form out of these fragments the notion of a perfectly wise and good man, we know 
it is a mere fiction of the mind, without any real being in whom it is embodied and 
realized. In the belief of a Deity, these conceptions are reduced to reality: the 
scattered rays of an ideal excellence are concentrated, and become the real attributes 
of that Being with whom we stand in the nearest relation, who sits supreme at the 
head of the universe, is armed with infinite power, and pervades all nature with His 
presence. 

The efficacy of these views in producing and augmenting a virtuous taste wil 
indeed be proportioned to the vividness with which they are formed, and the frequency 
with which they recur; yet some benefit will not fail to result from them even in thei 
lowest degree. 

The idea of the Supreme Being has this peculiar property: that, as it admits of ni 
substitute, so, from the first moment it is formed, it is capable of continual growtl 
and enlargement. God Himself is immutable; but our conception of His character i 
continually receiving fresh accessions, is continually growing more extended an 
refulgent, by having transferred to it new elements of beauty and goodness; by attract 
ing to itself, as a center, whatever bears the impress of dignity, order, or happiness 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 406 


t borrows splendor from all that is fair, subordinates to itself all that is great, and 
sits enthroned on the riches of the universe. 

_ As the object of worship will always be, in a degree, the object of imitation, hence 
ris s a fixed standard of moral excellence; by the contemplation of which the tenden- 
s to corruption are counteracted, the contagion of bad example is checked, and 

* yman nattife rises above its natural level. 

P When the knowledge of God was lost in the world, just ideas of virtue and moral 
ob igation disappeared along with it. How is it to be otherwise accounted for, that in 
he polished nations, and in the enlightened times of pagan antiquity, the most 
innatural lusts and detestable impurities were not only tolerated, in private life, but 
entered into religion, and formed a material part of public worship; while among the 
Jews, a people so much inferior in every other branch of knowledge, the same vices 
were regarded with horror? 

_ The reason is this: the true character of God was unknown to the former, which 
by the light of Divine revelation was displayed to the latter. The former cast their 
deities in the mold of their own imaginations; in consequence of which they partook 
the vices and defects of their worshipers. To the latter, no scope was left for the 
anderings of fancy; but a pure and perfect model was prescribed. 

False and corrupt, however, as was the religion of the pagans (if it deserves the 
mame), and defective, and often vicious, as was the character of their imaginary deities, 
it was still better for the world that the void should be filled with these than abandoned 
to a total skepticism; for if both systems are equally false, they are not equally per- 
Nicious. When the fictions of heathenism consecrated the memory of its legislators 
ind heroes, it invested them for the most part with those qualities which were in the 
Greatest repute. They were supposed to possess in the highest degree the virtues in 
wh ich it was most honorable to excel; and to be the witnesses, approvers, and patrons 
f those perfections in others by which their own character was chiefly distinguished. 
Men saw, or rather fancied they saw, in these supposed deities the qualities they most 
admired, dilated to a larger size, moving in a higher sphere, and associated with the 
power, dignity, and happiness of superior natures. With such ideal models before 
them, and conceiving themselves continually acting under the eye of such spectators 
and judges, they felt a real elevation; their eloquence became more impassioned, their 
Datriotism inflamed, and their courage exalted. 

Revelation, by displaying the true character of God, affords a pure and perfect 
fandard of virtue; heathenism, one in many respects defective and vicious; the 
ashionable skepticism of the present day, which excludes the belief of all superior 
owers, affords no standard at all. Human nature knows nothing better or higher 
han itself. All above and around it being shrouded in darkness, and the prospect 
onfined to the tame realities of life, virtue has no room upward to expand; nor are any 
xcursions permitted into that unseen world, the true element of the great and good, 
y which it is fortified with motives equally calculated to satisfy the reason, to delight 
he fancy, and to impress the heart. 


a 


2. Modern infidelity not only tends to corrupt the moral taste, it also promotes 
e growth of those vices which are the most hostile to social happiness. Of all the 
ces incident to human nature, the most destructive to society are vanity, ferocity, 
id unbridled sensuality; and these are precisely the vices which infidelity is calculated 
cherish. 

That the love, fear, and habitual contemplation of a Being infinitely exalted, or, in 
her words, devotion, is adapted to promote a sober and moderate estimate of our 
wn excellences, is incontestable; nor is it less evident that the exclusion of such senti- 
Ss must be favorable to pride. The criminality of pride will, perhaps, be less 
admitted; for though there is no vice so opposite to the spirit of Christianity, 

= 


310 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


; 
yet there is none which, even in the Christian world, has, under various pretenses, besa 
treated with so much indulgence. 


There is, it will be confessed, a delicate sensibility to character, a sober desire of 
reputation, a wish to possess the esteem of the wise and good, felt by the purest minds, 
which is at the furthest remove from arrogance or vanity. The humility of a noble 
mind scarcely dares to approve of itself until it has secured the approbation of others. 
Very different is that restless desire of distinction, that passion for theatrical display, 
which inflames the heart and occupies the whole attention of vain men. This, of all 
the passions, is the most unsocial, avarice alone excepted. The reason is plain. 
Property is a kind of good which may be more easily attained, and is capable of more 
minute subdivisions than fame. In the pursuit of wealth, men are led by an attention 
to their own interests to promote the welfare of each other; their advantages are 
reciprocal; the benefits which each is anxious to acquire for himself he reaps in the 
greatest abundance from the union and conjunction of society. The pursuits of vanity 
are quite contrary. The portion of time and attention mankind are willing to spare 
from their avocations and pleasures to devote to the admiration of each other is so 
small, that every successful adventurer is felt to have impaired the common stock. 
The success of one is the disappointment of multitudes. For though there be many 
rich, many virtuous, many wise men, fame must necessarily be the portion of but few. 
Hence every vain man, every man in whom vanity is the ruling passion, regarding 
his rival as his enemy, is strongly tempted to rejoice in his miscarriage, and repine 
at his success. 


Besides, as the passions are seldom seen in a simple, unmixed state, so vanity, 
when it succeeds, degenerates into arrogance; when it is disappointed (and it is often 
disappointed) it is exasperated into malignity, and corrupted into envy. In this stage 
the vain man commences a determined misanthropist. He detests that excellence 
which he can not reach. He detests his species, and longs to be revenged for the 
unpardonable injustice he has sustained in their insensibility to his merits. He lives 
upon the calamities of the world; the vices and miseries of men are his element and 
his food. Virtues, talents, and genius are his natural enemies, which he persecutes with 
instinctive eagerness and unrelenting hostility. There are those who doubt the exist- 
ence of such a disposition; but it certainly issues out of the dregs of disappointed 
vanity; a disease which taints and vitiates the whole character wherever it prevails. 
It forms the heart to such a profound indifference to the welfare of others that, what- 
ever appearances he may assume, or however wide the circle of his seeming virtues 
may extend, you will infallibly find the vain man is his own center. Attentive only to 
himself, absorbed in the contemplation of his own perfections, instead of feeling 
tenderness for his fellow-creatures as members of the same family, as beings with 
whom he is appointed to act, to suffer, and to sympathize—he considers life as a stage 
on which he is performing a part, and mankind in no other light than spectators. 
Whether he smiles or frowns, whether his path is adorned with the rays of beneficence, 
or his steps are dyed in blood, an attention to self is the spring of every movement, and 
the motive to which every action is referred. 


His apparent good qualities lose all their worth, by losing all that is simple, 
genuine, and natural: they are even pressed into the service of vanity, and become the 
means of enlarging its power. The truly good man is jealous over himself, lest the 
notoriety of his best actions, by blending itself with their motive, should diminish 
their value; the vain man performs the same actions for the sake of that notoriety. 
The good man quietly discharges his duty, and shuns ostentation; the vain man com 
siders every good deed lost that is not publicly displayed. The one is intent upo 
realities, the other upon semblances: the one aims to be virtuous, the other te 
appear so, 


a, 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 311 


Nor is a mind inflated with vanity more disqualified for right action than just 
speculation, or better disposed to the pursuit of truth than the practice of virtue. To 
such a mind the simplicity of truth is disgusting. Careless of the improvement of 
mankind, and intent only upon astonishing with the appearance of novelty, the glare 
of paradox will be preferred to the light of truth; opinions will be embraced, not 
because they are just, but because they are new: the more flagitious, the more sub- 
yersive of morals, the more alarming to the wise and good, the more welcome to men 
who estimate their literary powers by the mischief they produce, and who consider the 
"anxiety and terror they impress as the measure of their renown. Truth is simple and 
uniform, while error may be infinitely varied: and as it is one thing to start paradoxes, 
and another to make discoveries, we need the less wonder at the prodigious increase 
of modern philosophers. 


We have been so much accustomed to consider extravagant self-estimation merely 
as a ridiculous quality, that many will be surprised to find it treated as a vice pregnant 
with serious mischief to society. But, to form a judgment of its influence on the 
manners and happiness of a nation, it is necessary only to look at its effects in a 
family; for bodies of men are only collections of individuals, and the greatest nation is 
nothing more than an aggregate of a number of families. Conceive of a domestic 
circle in which each member is elated with a most extravagant opinion of himself, and 
a proportionable contempt. of every other—is full of contrivances to catch applause, 
and whenever he is not praised is sullen and disappointed. What a picture of disunion, 
disgust, and animosity would such a family present! How utterly would domestic 

_ affection be extinguished, and all the purposes of domestic society be defeated! -The 
general prevalence of such dispositions must be accompanied by an equal proportion 
of general misery. The tendency of pride to produce strife and hatred is sufficiently 
apparent from the pains men have been at to construct a system of politeness, which 
is nothing more than a sort of mimic humility, in which the sentiments of an offensive 


ie 
8 


FF tine OF Kee 


4 


re 


SS 2 ee 


: self-estimation are so far disguised and suppressed as to make them compatible with 
Y the spirit of society; such a mode of behavior as would naturally result from an atten- 
¥ tion to the apostolic injunction “Let nothing be done through strife or vain-glory; 
but, in lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better than themselves.” But if the 
‘, semblance be of such importance, how much more useful the reality! If the mere garb 


of humanity be of such indispensable necessity that without it society could not subsist, 
___ how much better still would the harmony of the world be preserved, were the conde- 
scension, deference, and respect so studiously displayed a true picture of the heart. 


; The same restless and eager vanity which disturbs a family, when it is permitted in 
- a great national crisis to mingle with political affairs, distracts a kingdom, infusing 
__ into those intrusted with the enaction of laws a spirit of rash innovation and daring 
empiricism, a disdain of the established usages of mankind, a foolish desire to dazzle 
the world with new and untried systems of policy, in which the precedents of antiquity 
___and the experience of ages are only consulted to be trodden under foot; and into the 
executive department of government a fierce contention for pre-eminence, an incessant 
__ struggle to supplant and destroy, with a propensity to calumny and suspicion, pro- 
scription and massacre. 


We shall suffer the most eventful season ever witnessed in the affairs of man to 
pass over our heads to very little purpose, if we fail to learn from it some awful lessons 
on the nature and progress of the passions. The true light in which the French 
Revolution ought to be contemplated is that of a grand experiment on human nature. 
Among the various passions which that Revolution has so strikingly displayed, none 
is more conspicuous than vanity; nor is it less difficult, without adverting to the 
national character of the people, to account for its extraordinary predominance. 
Political power, the most seducing object of ambition, never before circulated through 


an Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


so many hands; the prospect of possessing it was never before presented to so many 
minds. Multitudes who, by their birth and education, and not infrequently by their 
talents, seemed destined to perpetual obscurity, were, by the alternate rise and fall of 
parties, elevated into distinction, and shared in the functions of government. The 
short-lived forms of power and office glided with such rapidity through successive 
ranks of degradation, from the court to the very dregs of the populace, that they 
seemed rather to solicit acceptance than to be a prize contended for. Yet, as it was 
still impossible for all to possess authority, though none were willing to obey, a general 
impatience to break the ranks and rush into the foremost ground, maddened and 
infuriated the nation, and overwhelmed law, order, and civilization, with the violence 
of a torrent. 

If such be the mischiefs both in public and private life resulting from an excessive 
self-estimation, it remains next to be considered whether Providence has supplied any 
medicine to correct it; for as the reflection on excellences, whether real or imaginary, 
is always attended with pleasure to the possessor, it is a disease deeply seated in our 
nature. 

Suppose there were a great and glorious Being always present with us, who had 
given us existence, with numberless other blessings, and on whom we depended each 
instant, as well for every present enjoyment as for every future good; suppose, again, 
we had incurred the just displeasure of such a Being by ingratitude and disobedience, 
yet that in great mercy He had not cast us off, but had assured us He was willing to 
pardon and restore us on our humble entreaty and sincere repentance; say, would not 
an habitual sense of the presence of this Being, self-reproach for having displeased 


Him, and an anxiety to recover His favor, be the most effectual antidote to pride?. 


But such are the leading discoveries made by the Christian revelation, and such the 
dispositions which a practical belief of it inspires. 

Humility is the first fruit of religion. In the mouth of our Lord there is no maxim 
so frequent'as the following: “Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he 
that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Religion, and that alone, teaches absolute 
humility; by which I mean a sense of our absolute nothingness in the view of infinite 
greatness and excellence. That sense of inferiority which results from the comparison 
of men with each other is often an unwelcome sentiment forced upon the mind, which 
may rather embitter the temper than soften it: that which devotion impresses is 
soothing and delightful. The devout man loves to lie low at the foot of his Creator, 
because it is then he attains the most lively perceptions of the divine excellence, and 
the most tranquil confidence in the divine favor. In so august a presence he sees all 
distinctions lost, and all beings reduced to the same level. He looks at his superiors 
without envy, and his inferiors without contempt; and when from this elevation he 
descends to mix in society, the conviction of superiority, which must in many instances 
be felt, is a calm inference of the understanding, and no longer a busy, importunate 
passion of the heart. 

“The wicked (says the Psalmist) through the pride of their countenance, will not 
seek after God: God is not in all their thoughts.” When we consider the incredible 
vanity of the atheistical sect, together with the settled malignity and unrelenting rancor 
with which they pursue every vestige of religion, is it uncandid to suppose that its 
humbling tendency is one principal cause of their enmity; that they are eager to 
displace a Deity from the minds of men, that they may occupy the void; to crumble 
the throne of the Eternal into dust, that they may elevate themselves on its ruins; and 
that, as their licentiousness is impatient of restraint, so their pride disdains a superior? 

We mentioned a ferocity of character as one effect of skeptical impiety. It is an 
inconvenience attending a controversy with those with whom we have few principles in 
common, that we are often in danger of reasoning inconclusively, for the want of its 


% 
: 


Modern Infidelity C onsidered—Robert Hall. 413 


being clearly known and settled what our opponents admit, and what they deny. The 
persons, for example, with whom we are at eae engaged have discarded humility 


' iew obvious. But there is another light in which this part of the subject may be 
viewed, in my humble opinion, much more important, though seldom adverted to. 


“misery, makes him a creature of incomparably more consequence than the opposite 
supposition. When we consider him as placed here by an Almighty Ruler in a state 
_ of probation, and that the present life is his period of trial, the first link in a vast and 
interminable chain which stretches into eternity, he assumes a dignified character in 
our eyes. Everything which relates to him becomes interesting; and to trifle with his 
happiness is felt to be the most unpardonable levity. If such be the destination of man, 
it is evident that in the qualities which fit him for it his principal dignity consists; his 
: moral greatness is his true greatness. Let the skeptical principles be admitted, which 
"represent him, on the contrary, as the offspring of chance, connected with no superior 
power, and sinking into annihilation at death, and he is a contemptible creature, whose 
existence and happiness are insignificant. The characteristic difference is lost between 
him and the brute creation, from which he is no longer distinguished, except by the 
vividness and multiplicity of his perceptions. 


If we reflect on that part of our nature which disposes us to humanity, we shall 
‘find that where we have no particular attachment our sympathy with the sufferings, 
1 and concern for the destruction of sensitive beings, are in proportion to their supposed 
importance in the general scale; or, in other words, to their supposed capacity 
‘of enjoyment. We feel, for example, much more at witnessing the destruction 
of a man than of an inferior animal, because we consider it as involving the extinction 
of a much greater sum of happiness. For the same reason he who would shudder at 
the slaughter of a large animal will see a thousand insects perish without a pang. Our 
sympathy with the calamities of our fellow-creatures is adjusted to the same propor- 
tions; for we feel more powerfully affected with the distresses of fallen greatness than 
ith equal or greater distresses sustained by persons of inferior rank; because, having 
been accustomed to associate with an elevated station the idea of superior happiness, 
the loss appears the greater, and the wreck more extensive. But the disproportion in 
‘importance between man and the meanest insect is not so great as that which subsists 
between man considered as mortal and as immortal; that is, between man as he is 
_Tepresented by the system of skepticism and that of divine revelation; for the enjoy- 
Mg ment of the meanest insect bears some proportion, though a very small one, to the 
_ present happiness of man; but the happiness of time bears none at all to that of 
- eternity. The skeptical system, therefore, sinks the importance of human existence to 

an inconceivable degree. 
From these principles results the following important inference—that to extinguish 
_ human life by the hand of violence must be quite a different thing in the eyes of a 
age from what it is in those of a Christian. With the skeptic it is nothing more 

than diverting the course of a little red fluid, called blood; it is merely lessening the 
number by one of many millions of fugitive contemptible creatures. The Christian 
Sees in the same event an accountable being cut off from a state of probation, and 
hurried, perhaps unprepared, into the presence of his Judge, to hear that final, that 


J 


Pg 


314 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


irrevocable sentence, which is to fix him forever in an unalterable condition of felicity 
or woe. The former perceives in death nothing but its physical circumstances; the 
latter is impressed with the magnitude of its moral consequences. It is the moral 
_ relation which man is supposed to bear to a superior power, the awful idea of account- 
ability, the influence which his present dispositions and actions are conceived to have 
upon his eternal destiny, more than any superiority of intellectual.powers abstracted 
from these considerations, which invest him with such mysterious grandeur, and con- 
stitute the frmest guard on the sanctuary of human life. This reasoning, it is true, 
serves more immediately to show how the disbelief of a future state endangers the 
security of life; but though this be its direct consequence, it extends by analogy much 
further, since he who has learned to sport with the lives of his fellow-creatures will feel 
but little solicitude for their welfare in any other instance; but, as the greater includes 
the less, will easily pass from this to all the inferior gradations of barbarity. 

As the advantage of the armed over the unarmed is not seen till the moment of 
attack, so in that tranquil state of society in which law and order maintain their 
ascendency, it is not perceived, perhaps not even suspected, to what an alarming degree 
the principles of modern infidelity leave us naked and defenceless, But let the state 
be convulsed, let the mounds of regular authority be once overflowed, and the still 
small voice of law drowned in the tempest of popular fury (events which recent expe- 
rience shows to be possible), it will then be seen that atheism is a school of ferocity; 
and that, having taught its disciples to consider mankind as little better than a nest of 
insects, they will be prepared in the fierce conflicts of party to trample upon them 
without pity, and extinguish them without remorse. 

It was late before the atheism of Epicurus gained footing at Rome; but its preva- 
lence was soon followed by such scenes of proscription, confiscation and blood, as were 
then unparalleled in the history of the world; from which the republic being never able 
to recover itself, after many unsuccessful struggles, exchanged liberty for repose, by 
submission to absolute power. Such were the effects of atheism at Rome, An attempt 
has been recently made to establish a similar system in France, the consequences of 
which are too well known to render it requisite for me to shock your feelings by a 
recital. The only doubt that can arise is, whether the barbarities which have stained 
the Revolution in that unhappy country are justly chargeable on the prevalence of 
atheism. Let those who doubt of this recollect that the men who, by their activity 
and talents, prepared the minds of the people for that great change—Voltaire, D’Alem- 
bert, Diderot, Rousseau, and others—were avowed enemies of revelation; that in all 
their writings the diffusion of skepticism and revolutionary principles went hand in 
hand; that the fury of the most sanguinary parties was especially pointed against the 
Christian priesthood and religious institutions, without once pretending, like other 
persecutors, to execute the vengeance of God (whose name they never mentioned) 
upon His enemies; that their atrocities were committed with a wanton levity and brutal 
merriment; that the reign of atheism was avowedly and expressly the reign of terror; 
that in the full madness of their career, in the highest climax of their horrors, they 
shut up the temples of God, abolished His worship, and proclaimed death to be an 
eternal sleep; as if by pointing to the silence of the sepulcher, and the sleep of the 
dead, these ferocious barbarians meant to apologize for leaving neither sleep, quiet, 
nor repose to the living. 

As the heathens fabled that Minerva issued full armed from the head of Jupiter, 
so no sooner were the speculations of atheistical philosophy matured, than they gave 
birth to a ferocity which converted the most polished people in Europe into a horde 
of assassins; the seat of voluptuous refinement, of pleasure, and of arts, into a theater 
of blood. , 

Having already shown that the principles of infidelity facilitate the commission 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 315 


crimes, by removing the restraints of fear; and that they foster the arrogance of the 


P daring defiance of religious restraints, are the natural ingredients of the atheistical 
‘character; nor is it less evident that these are, of all others, the dispositions which 
most forcibly stimulate to violence and cruelty. 


Settle it therefore in your minds, as a maxim never to be effaced or forgotten, 
that atheism is an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system, equally hostile to every useful 
restraint and to every virtuous affection; that, leaving nothing above us to excite awe, 
nor round us to awaken tenderness, it wages war with heaven and with earth: its first 
object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man. 

; There is a third vice, not less destructive to society than either of those which 
have been already mentioned, to which the system of modern infidelity is favorable; 
that is, unbridled sensuality, the licentious and unrestrained indulgence of those pas- 
sions which are essential to the continuation of the species. The magnitude of these 
_ passions, and their supreme importance to the existence as well as the peace and 
welfare of society, have rendered it one of the first objects of solicitude with every wise 
legislator to restrain them by such laws, and to confine their indulgence within such 
- limits, as shall best promote the great ends for which they were implanted. 


‘The benevolence and wisdom of the Author of Christianity and eminently con- 
‘spicuous in the laws He has enacted on this branch of morals; for, while He author- 
izes marriage, He restrains the vagrancy and caprice of the passions, by forbidding 
polygamy and divorce; and, well knowing that offenses against the laws of chastity 
usually spring from an ill-regulated imagination, He inculcates purity of heart. 
_ Among innumerable benefits which the world has derived from the Christian religion, 
gy superior refinement in the sexual sentiments, a more equal and respectful treatment 
of women, greater dignity and permanence conferred on the institution of marriage, 
are not the least considerable; in consequence of which the purest affections and the 
“most sacred duties are grafted on the stock of the strongest instincts. 


The aim of all the leading champions of infidelity is to rob mankind of these 
benefits, and throw them back into a state of gross and brutal sensuality. In this 
“spirit, Mr. Hume represents the private conduct of the reprobate Charles, whose 
debaucheries polluted the age, as a just subject of panegyric. A disciple in the same 
school has lately had the unblushing effrontery to stigmatize marriage as the worst 
of all monopolies; and, in a narrative of his licentious amours, to make a formal 
apology for departing from his principles by submitting to its restraints. The popular 
“productions on the Continent which issue from the atheistical school are incessantly 
_ directed to the same purpose. 


Under every possible aspect in which infidelity can be viewed, it extends the 
dominion of sensuality: it repeals and abrogates every law by which Divine revelation 
has, under such awful sanctions, restrained the indulgence of the passions. The dis- 
belief of a supreme, omniscient Being, which it inculcates, releases its disciples from an 
attention to the heart, from every care but the preservation of outward decorum; and 
the exclusion of the devout affections and an unseen world leaves the mind immersed 
‘in visible, sensible objects. 


___ There are two sorts of pleasures—corporeal and mental. Though we are indebted 
‘to the senses for all our perceptions originally, yet those which are the furthest 
‘Temoved from their immediate impressions confer the most elevation on the character, 
) since in proportion as they are multiplied and augmented, the slavish subjection to the 

r senses is subdued. Hence the true and only antidote to debasing sensuality is the 
_ possession of a fund of that kind of enjoyment which is independent on the corporeal 


appetites. Inferior in the perfection of several of his senses to different parts of the 


416 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


brute creation, the superiority of man over them all consists in his superior power of 
multiplying by new combinations his mental perceptions, and thereby of creating to 
himself resources of happiness separate from external sensation. In the scale of enjoy- 
ment, at the first remove from sense are the pleasures of reason and society; at the 
next are the pleasures of devotion and religion. The former, though totally distinct 
from those of sense, are yet less perfectly adapted to moderate their excesses than the 
last, as they are in a great measure conversant with visible and sensible objects. The 
religious affections and sentiments are, in fact, and were intended to be, the propef 
antagonist of sensuality—the great deliverer from the thraldom of the appetites, by 
opening a spiritual world, and inspiring hopes and fears, and consolations and joys 
which bear no relation to the material and sensible universe. The criminal indulgence 
of sensual passions admits but of two modes of prevention: the establishment of such 
laws and maxims in society as shall render lewd profligacy impracticable or infamous, 
or the infusion of such principles and habits as shall render it distasteful. Human 
legislatures have encountered the disease in the first, the truths and sanctions of 
revealed religion in the last of these methods: to both of which the advocates of 
modern infidelity are equally hostile. 

So much has been said by many able writers to evince the inconceivable benefit 
of the marriage institution, that to hear it seriously attacked by men who style them- 
selves philosophers, at the close of the eighteenth century, must awaken indignation 
and surprise. The object of this discourse leads us to direct our attention particularly 
to the influence of this institution on the civilization of the world. 

From the records of revelation we learn that marriage, or the permanent union of 
the sexes, was ordained by God, and existed, under different modifications, in the early 
infancy of mankind, without which they could never have emerged from barbarism. 
For, conceive only what eternal discord, jealousy and violence would ensue, were the 
objects of the tenderest affections secured to their possessor by no law or tie of moral 
obligation: were domestic enjoyments disturbed by incessant fear, and licentiousness 
inflamed by hope. Who could find sufficient tranquility of mind to enable him to plan 
or execute any continued scheme of action, or what room for arts or sciences, or 
religion, or virtue, in that state in which the chief earthly happiness was exposed to 
every lawless invader; where one was racked with an incessant anxiety to keep what 
the other was equally eager to acquire? It is not probable in itself, independent of the 
light of Scripture, that the benevolent Author of the human race ever placed them in ~ 
so wretched a condition at first: it is certain they could not remain in it long without 
being exterminated. Marriage, by shutting out these evils, and enabling every man to 
rest secure in his enjoyments, is the great civilizer of the world: with this security the 
mind is at liberty to expand in generous affections, and has leisure to look abroad, 
and engage in the pursuits of knowledge, science, and virtue. 

Nor is it in this way only that marriage institutions are essential to the welfare of 
mankind. They are sources of tenderness, as well as the guardians of peace. Without 
the permanent union of the sexes there can be no permanent families: the dissolution 
of nuptial ties involves the dissolution of domestic society. But domestic society is the 
seminary of social affections, the cradle of sensibility where the first elements are 
acquired of that tenderness and humanity which cement mankind together, and were 
they entirely extinguished, the whole fabric of social institutions would be dissolved. 

Families are so many centers of attraction which preserve mankind from being 
scattered and dissipated by the repulsive powers of selfishness. The order of nature is 
evermore from particulars to generals. As in the operations of intellect we proceed 
from the contemplation of individuals to the formation of general abstractions, so in 
the development of the passions, in like manner, we advance from private to public 
affections; from the love of parents, brothers, and sisters, to those more expanded 
tegards which embrace the immense society of human kind, 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 317 


In order to render men benevolent, they must first be made tender: for benevolent 
affections are not the offspring of reasoning; they result from that culture of the heart, 
from those early impressions of tenderness, gratitude, and sympathy which the endear- 
ments of domestic life are sure to supply, and for the formation of which it is the best 
possible school. 
__ The advocates of infidelity invert this eternal order of nature. Instead of incul- 
cating the private affections, as a discipline by which the mind is prepared for those of 
amore public nature, they set them in direct opposition to each other, they propose to 
build general benevolence on the destruction of individual tenderness, and to make us 
love the whole species more by loving every particular part of it less. In pursuit of 
this chimerical project, gratitude, humility, conjugal, parental, and filial affection, 
together with every other social disposition, are reprobated—virtue is limited to a 
passionate attachment to the general good. Is it not natural to ask, when all the 
tenderness of life is extinguished, and all the bands of society are untwisted, from 
whence this ardent affection for the general good is to spring? 

When this savage philosophy has completed its work, when it has taught its 
disciple to look with perfect indifference on the offspring of his body, and the wife of 
his bosom, to estrange himself from his friends, insult his benefactors, and silence the 
pleadings of gratitude and pity—will he, by thus divesting himself of all that is human, 
be better prepared for the disinterested love of his species? Will he become a philan- 
thropist only because he has ceased to be a man? Rather, in this total exemption from 
all the feelings which humanize and soften, in this chilling frost of universal indiffer- 
ence, may we not be certain that selfishness, unmingled and uncontrolled, will assume 
the empire of his heart; and that, under pretense of advancing the general good, an 
_ object to which the fancy may give innumerable shapes, he will be prepared for the 
_ yiolation of every duty, and the perpetration of every crime? Extended benevolence 
is the last and most perfect fruit of the private affections; so that to expect to reap the 
former from the extinction of the latter, is to oppose the means to the end; is as 
absurd as to attempt to reach the summit of the highest mountain without passing 
‘through the intermediate spaces, or to hope to obtain the heights of science by for- 
getting the first elements of knowledge. These absurdities have sprung, however, in 
_ the advocates of infidelity, from an ignorance of human nature sufficient to disgrace 
even those who did not style themselves philosophers. Presuming, contrary to the 
_ experience of every moment, that the affections are awakened by reasoning, and per- 
_ ceiving that the general good is an incomparably greater object in itself than the 
happiness of any limited number of individuals, they inferred nothing more was neces- 
sary than to exhibit it in its just dimensions, to draw the affections toward it; as 
though the fact of the superior populousness of China. to Great Britain needed but to 
_ be known to render us indifferent to our domestic concerns, and lead us to direct all 
_ our anxiety to the prosperity of that vast but remote empire. 

It is not the province of reason to awaken new passions, or open new sources of 
‘sensibility, but to direct us in the attainment of those objects which nature has already 
rendered pleasing, or to determine among the interfering inclinations and passions 
which sway the mind, which are the fittest to be preferred. 
Is a regard to the general good then, you will reply, to be excluded from the 
motives of action? Nothing is more remote from my intention: but as the nature of 
this motive has, in my opinion, been much misunderstood by some good men, and 
abused by others of a different description, to the worst of purposes, permit me to 
d eclare in a few words what appears to me to be the truth on this subject. 

__ The welfare of the whole system of being must be allowed to be, in itself, the 
gael of all others the most worthy of being pursued; so that, could the mind dis- 
‘inctly embrace it, and discern at every step what action would infallibly promote it, 


+ 


re 


318 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


we should be furnished with a sure criterion of right and wrong, an unerring guide, 
which would supersede the use and necessity of all inferior rules, laws, and principles. 

But this being impossible, since the good of the whole is a motive so loose and 
indeterminate, and embraces such an infinity of relations, that before we could be 
certain what action it prescribed, the season of action would be past; to weak, short- 
sighted mortals Providence has assigned a sphere of agency less grand and extensive 
indeed, but better suited to their limited powers, by implanting certain affections which 
it is their duty to cultivate, and suggesting particular rules to which they are bound 
to conform. By these provisions the boundaries of virtue are easily ascertained, at 
the same time that its ultimate object, the good of the whole, is secured: for, since the 
happiness of the entire system results from the happiness of the several parts, the 
affections, which confine the attention immediately to the latter, conspire in the end to 
the promotion of the former; as the laborer, whose industry is limited to a corner of a 
large building, performs his part toward rearing the structure much more effectually 
than if he extended his care to the whole. 


As the interest, however, of any limited number of persons may not only contri- 
bute, but may possibly be directly opposed to the general good (the interest of a 
family, for example, to that of a province, or of a nation to that of the world), 
Providence has so ordered it, that in a well-regulated mind there springs up, as we 
have already seen, besides particular attachments, an extended regard to the species, 
whose office is twofold: not to destroy and extinguish the more private affections, 
which is mental parricide; but first, as far as is consistent with the claims of those who 
are immediately committed to our care, to do good to all men; secondly, to exercise a 
jurisdiction and control over the private affections, so as to prohibit their indulgence 
whenever it would be attended with manifest detriment to the whole. Thus every part 
of our nature is brought into action; all the practical principles of the human heart 
find an element to move in, each in its different sort and manner conspiring, without 
mutual collisions, to maintain the harmony of the world and the happiness of the 
universe. 

Before I close this discourse, I can not omit to mention three circumstances 
attending the propagation of infidelity by its present abettors, equally new and 
alarming. 


1. It is the first attempt which has been ever witnessed, on an extensive scale, to 
establish the principles of atheism; the first effort which history has recorded to dis- 
annul and extinguish the belief of all superior powers; the consequence of which, 
should it succeed, would be to place mankind in a situation never before experienced, 
not even during the ages of pagan darkness. The system of polytheism was as remote 
from modern infidelity as from true religion. Amid that rubbish of superstition, the 
product of fear, ignorance, and vice, which had been accumulating for ages, some faint 
embers of sacred truth remained unextinguished; the interposition of unseen powers 
in the affairs of men was believed and revered, the sanctity of oaths was maintained— 
the idea of revelation and of tradition as a source of religious knowledge was familiar; 
a useful persuasion of the existence of a future world was kept alive, and the greater 
gods were looked up to as the guardians of the public welfare, the patrons of those 
virtues which promote the prosperity of states, and the avengers of injustice, perfidy, 
and fraud. 

Of whatever benefit superstition might formerly be productive, by the scattered 
particles of truth which it contained, these advantages can now only be reaped from 
the soil of true religion; nor is there any other alternative left than the belief of 
Christianity, or absolute atheism. In the revolutions of the human mind, exploded 
opinions are often revived; but an exploded superstition never recovers its credit. 
The pretension to divine revelation is so august and commanding, that when its false- 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 319 


d is once discerned, it is covered with all the ignominy of detected imposture; it 
falls from such a height (to change the figure) that it is inevitably crumbled into 
atoms. Religions, whether false or true, are not creatures of arbitrary institution. 
After discrediting the principles of piety, should our modern freethinkers find it neces- 
y, in order to restrain the excesses of ferocity, to seek for a substitute in some 
popular superstition, it will prove a vain and impracticable attempt: they may recall 


4 


a y, or to repeal by legislative authority the dictates of reason and the light of science. 


_ 2. The efforts of infidels to diffuse the principles of infidelity among the common 
people is another alarming symptom peculiar to the present time. Hume, Bolingbroke 


enlist disciples from among the populace. Infidelity has lately grown condescending; 
ed in the speculations of a daring philosophy, immured at first in the cloisters of 
the learned, and afterward nursed in the lap of voluptuousness and courts; having at 
ngth reached its full maturity, it boldly ventures to challenge the suffrages of the 
ople, solicits the acquaintance of peasants and mechanics, and seeks to draw whole 
ations to its standard. 

It is not difficult to account for this new state of things. While infidelity was rare, 
was employed as the instrument of literary vanity; its wide diffusion having dis- 
jualified it for answering that purpose, it is now adopted as the organ of political 
convulsion. Literary distinction is conferred by the approbation of a few; but the 
otal subversion and overthrow of society demands the concurrence of millions. 


_ 8. The infidels of the present day are the first sophists who have presumed to 
innovate in the very substance of morals. The disputes on moral questions hitherto 
tated among philosophers have respected the grounds of duty, not the nature of 
duty itself; or they have been merely metaphysical, and related to the history of moral 
sentiments in the mind, the sources and principles from which they were most easily 
deduced; they never turned on the quality of those dispositions and actions which were 
be denominated virtuous. In the firm persuasion that the love and fear of the 
preme Being, the sacred observation of promises and oaths, reverence to magis- 
rates, obedience to parents, gratitude to benefactors, conjugal fidelity, and parental 
enderness were primary virtues, and the chief support of every commonwealth, they 
we re unanimous. The curse denounced upon such as remove ancient landmarks, upon 


‘thus to poison the streams of virtue at their source, falls with accumulated weight on 
he advocates of modern infidelity, and on them alone. 

_ Permit me to close this discourse with a few serious reflections. There is much, it 
ust be confessed, in the apostacy of multitudes, and the rapid progress of infidelity, 
awaken our fears for the virtue of the rising generation; but nothing to shake our 
th—nothing which Scripture itself does not give us room to expect. The features 
Ww ich compose the character of apostates, their profaneness, presumption, lewdness, 
Impatience of subordination, restless appetite for change, vain pretensions to freedom 
md to emancipate the world, while they themselves are the slaves of lust, the weapons 
with which they attack Christianity, and the snares they spread for the unwary are 
depicted in the clearest colors by the pencil of prophecy: ‘Knowing this first (says 
5 t t), that there shall come in the last days scoffers walking after their own lusts.” 
In the same epistle he more fully describes the persons he alludes to; “as chiefly them 
which walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government; pre- 
sumptuous are they, self-willed, they are not afraid to speak eyil of dignities; sporting 


» 


320 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


themselves in their own deceivings, having eyes full of adultery, and that can not cease 
from sin; beguiling unstable souls: for when they speak great swelling words of vanity, 
they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were 
clean escaped from them who live in error; while they promise them liberty, they 
themselves are the servants of corruption.” Of the same characters Jude admonishes 
us “to remember that they were foretold as mockers who should be in the last time, 
who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. These be they (he adds) who separate 
themselves (by apostacy), sensual, not having the Spirit.” Infidelity is an evil of short 
duration. “It has (as a judicious writer observes) no individual subsistence given it 
in the system of prophecy. It is not a beast—but a mere putrid excrescence of the 
papal beast: an excrescence which, though it may diffuse death through every vein of 
the body on which it grew, yet shall die along with it.” Its enormities will hasten its 
overthrow. It is impossible that a system which, by vilifying every virtue, and 
embracing the patronage of almost every vice and crime, wages war with all the order 
and civilization of the world; which, equal to the establishment of nothing, is armed 
only with the energies of destruction, can iong retain an ascendency. It is in no shape 
formed for perpetuity. Sudden in its rise and impetuous in its progress; it resembles 
a mountain-torrent, which is loud, filthy, and desolating; but, being fed by no peren- 
nial spring, is soon drained off and disappears. By permitting to a certain extent the 
prevalence of infidelity, Providence is preparing new triumphs for religion. In 
asserting its authority, the preachers of the Gospel have hitherto found it necessary to 
weigh the prospects of immortality against the interests of time; to strip the world of 
its charms, to insist on the deceitfulness of pleasure, the unsatisfying nature of riches, 
the emptiness of grandeur, and the nothingness of a mere worldly life. Topics of this 
nature will always have their use; but it is not by such representations alone that the 
importance of religion is evinced. The prevalence of impiety has armed us with new 
weapons in its defence. 

Religion being primarily intended to make men wise unto salvation, the support it 
ministers to social order, the stability it confers on government and laws, is a subor- 
dinate species of advantage which we should have continued to enjoy, without reflect- 
ing on its cause, but for the development of deistical principles, and the experiment 
which has been made of their effects in a neighboring country. It had been the 
constant boast of infidels, that their system, more liberal and generous than Chris- 
tianity, needed but to be tried to produce an immense accession to human happiness; 
and Christian nations, careless and supine, retaining little of religion but the profession, 
and disgusted with its restraints, lent a favorable ear to these pretensions. God per- 
mitted the trial to be made. In one country, and that the center of Christendom, 
revelation underwent a total eclipse, while atheism, performing on a darkened theater 
its strange and fearful tragedy, confounded the first elements of society, blended every 
age, rank and sex in indiscriminate proscription and massacre, and convulsed all 
Europe to its center; that the imperishable memorial of these events might teach the 
last generations of mankind to consider religion as the pillar of society, the safeguard 
of nations, the parent of social order, which alone has power to curb the fury of the 
passions, and secure to every one his rights; to the laborious the reward of their 
industry, to the rich the enjoyment of their wealth, to nobles the preservation of their 
honors, and to princes the stability of their thrones. 

We might ask the patrons of infidelity what fury impels them to attempt the sub- 
version of Christianity? Is it that they have discovered a. better system? To what 
virtues are their principles favorable? Or is there one which Christians have not 
carried to a higher perfection than any of which their party.can boast? Have they 
discovered a more excellent rule of life, or a better hope in death than that which the 
Scriptures suggest? Above all, what are the pretensions on which they rest their 
claims to be the guides of mankind; or which embolden them to expect we should 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 321 


ple upon the experience of ages, and abandon a religion which has been attested 
by a train of miracles and prophecies, in which millions of our forefathers have found 
a refuge in every trouble, and consolation in the hour of death; a religion which has 
been adorned with the highest sanctity of character and splendor of talents, which 
enrols among its disciples the names of Bacon, Newton and Locke, the glory of their 
Bocce: and to which these illustrious men were proud to dedicate the last and best 
fruits of their immortal genius? 


| If the question at issue is to be decided by argument, nothing can be added to the 
triumph of Christianity; if by an appeal to authority, what have our adversaries to 
“oppose to these great names? Where are the infidels of such pure, uncontaminated 
morals, unshaken probity, and extended benevolence, that we should be in danger of 
being seduced into impiety by their example? Into what obscure recesses of misery, 
into what dungeons have their philanthropists penetrated, to lighten the fetters and 
relieve the sorrows of the helpless captive? What barbarous tribes have their Apostles 
"visited; what distant climes have they explored, encompassed with cold, nakedness, 
and want, to diffuse principles of virtue, and the blessings of civilization? Or will 
_ they rather choose to waive their pretensions to this extraordinary and, in their eyes, 
eccentric species of benevolence (for infidels, we know, are sworn enemies to enthu- 
_siasm of every sort), and rest their character on their political exploits—on their 
efforts to reanimate the virtue of a sinking state, to restrain licentiousness, to calm 
“the tumult of popular fury, and by inculcating the spirit of justice, moderation, and 

pity for fallen greatness, to mitigate the inevitable horrors of revolution? Our adver- 
- Saries will at least have the discretion, if not the modesty, to recede from the test. 


More than all, their infatuated eagerness, their parricidal zeal to extinguish a 
sense of Deity must excite astonishment and horror. Is the idea of an Almighty and 
perfect Ruler unfriendly to any passion which is consistent with innocence, or an 
obstruction to any design which it is not shameful to avow? Eternal God, on what 
are thine enemies intent! What are those enterprises of guilt and horror, that, for the 
‘safety of their performers, require to be enveloped in a darkness which the eye of 
Heaven must not pierce! Miserable men! Proud of being the offspring of chance: 
in love with unjversal disorder; whose happiness is involved in the belief of there being 
“No witness to their designs, and who are at ease only because they suppose themselves 
“inhabitants of a forsaken and fatherless world! 


Having been led by the nature of the subject to consider chiefly the manner in) 
which skeptical impiety affects the welfare of states, it is the more requisite to warn 
you against that most fatal mistake of regarding religion as an engine of policy; and 

recall your recollection that the concern we have in it is much more as individuals 

t as collective bodies, and far less temporal than eternal. The happiness which it 
confers in the present life comprehends the blessings which it scatters by the way in 
‘its march to immortality. That future condition of being which it ascertains, and for 
which its promises and truths are meant to prepare us, is the ultimate end of human 
"Societies, the final scope and object of present existence; in comparison of which all 
the revolutions of nations and all the vicissitudes of time are light and transitory. 
a0dliness has, it is true, the promise of the life that now is; but chiefly of that which 
is to come. Other acquisitions may be requisite to make men great; but, be assured, 
the réligion of Jesus is alone sufficient to make them good and happy. Powerful 
sources of consolation in sorrow, unshaken fortitude amid the changes and perturba- 
tions of the world, humility remote from meanness, and dignity unstained by pride, 
contentment in every station, passions pure and calm, with habitual serenity, the full 
enjoyment of life, undisturbed by the dread of dissolution or the fear of an hereafter, 
are its invaluable gifts. To these enjoyments, however, you will necessarily continue 
Strangers, unless you resign yourselves wholly to its power; for the consolations of 


322 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 

5 
religion are reserved to reward, to sweeten, and to stimulate obedience. Many, without — 
renouncing the profession of Christianity, without formally rejecting its distinguishing — 
doctrines, live in such an habitual violation of its laws and contradiction to its spirit, : 
that, conscious they have more to fear than to hope from its truth, they are never able ~ 
to contemplate it without terror. It haunts their imagination, instead of tranquilizing — 
their hearts, and hangs with depressing weight on all their enjoyments and pursuits. 
Their religion, instead of comforting them under their trouble, is itself their greatest 
trouble, from which they seek refuge in the dissipation and vanity of the world, until 
the throbs and tumults of conscience force them back upon religion. Thus suspended 
between opposite powers, the sport of contradictory influences, they are disqualified 
for the happiness of both worlds; and neither enjoy the pleasures of sin nor the peace 
of piety. It is surprising to find a mind thus bewildered in uncertainty, and dissatis- 
fied with itself, courting deception, and embracing with eagerness every pretext to 
mutilate the claims and enervate the authority of Christianity; forgetting that it is of 
the very essence of the religious principle to preside and control, and that it is impos- 
sible to serve God and mammon. It is this class of professors who are chiefly in 
danger of being entangled in the snares of infidelity. 


The champions of infidelity have much more reason to be ashamed than to boast 
of such converts. For what can be a stronger presumption of the falsehood of a 
system than that it is the opiate of a restless conscience; that it prevails with minds of 
a certain description, not because they find it true, but because they feel it necessary; 
and that in adopting it they consult less with their reason than with their vices and 
their fears? It requires but little sagacity to foresee that speculations which originate 
in guilt must end in ruin. Infidels are not themselves satisfied with the truth of their 
system; for had they any settled assurance of its principles, in consequence of calm 
dispassionate investigation, they would never disturb the quiet of the world by their 
attempts to proselyte; but would lament their own infelicity, in not being able to 
perceive sufficient evidence for the truth of religion, which furnishes such incentives 
to virtue, and inspires such exalted hopes. Having nothing to substitute in the place 
of religion, it is absurd to suppose that, in opposition to the collective voice of every 
country, age, and time proclaiming its necessity, solicitude for the welfare of mankind 
impels them to destroy it. 


To very different motives must their conduct be imputed. More like conspirators 
than philosophers, in spite of the darkness with which they endeavor to surround 
themselves, some rays of unwelcome conviction will penetrate, some secret apprehen- 
sions that all is not right will make themselves felt, which they find nothing so 
effectual to quell as an attempt to enlist fresh disciples, who, in exchange for new 
principles, impart confidence and diminish fear. For the same reason it is seldom 
they attack Christianity by argument; their favorite weapons are ridicule, obscenity, 
and blasphemy; as the most miserable outcasts of society are, of all men, found most 
to delight in vulgar merriment and senseless riot. 


Jesus Christ seems to have “His fan in His hand, to be thoroughly purging His 
floor;”? and nominal Christians will probably be scattered like chaff. But has real 
Christianity anything to fear? Have not the degenerate manners and corrupt lives 
of multitudes in the visible Church been, on the contrary, the principal occasion of 
scandal and offense? Infidelity, without intending it, is gradually removing this 
reproach: possessing the property of attracting to itself the morbid humors which 
pervade the Church, until the Christian profession, on the one hand, is reduced to a 
sound and healthy state, and skepticism, on the other, exhibits nothing but a mass of 
putridity and disease. | 


In a view of the final issue of the contest, we should find little cause to lament the 


astounding prevalence of infidelity, but for a solicitude for the rising generation, a 


Modern Infidelity Considered—Robert Hall. 323 


whom its principles are recommended by two motives, with young. minds the most ' 
persuasive—the love of independence, and the love of pleasure. With respect to the 
{ st, we would earnestly entreat the young to remember that, by the unanimous 
consent of all ages, modesty, docility, and reverence to superior years, and to parents 
bove all, have been considered as their appropriate virtues, a guard assigned by the 
mmutable laws of God and nature on the inexperience of youth; and with respect 
to the second, that Christianity prohibits no pleasures that are innocent, lays no 
restraints that are capricious; but that the sobriety and purity which it enjoins, by 
strengthening the intellectual powers, and preserving the faculties of mind and body 
in undiminished vigor, lay the surest foundations of present peace and future eminence. 

d At such a season as this, it becomes an urgent duty on parents, guardians, and tutors 
to watch, not only over the morals, but the principles of those committed to their care; 

to make it appear that a concern for their eternal welfare is their chief concern; and 
to imbue them early with that knowledge of the evidences of Christianity, and that 

profound reverence for the Scriptures that, with the blessing of God (which, with 

u bmission, they may then expect), “may keep them from this hour of temptation that 
has come upon all the world, to try them that dwell on the earth.” 


To an attentive observer of the signs of the times, it will appear one of the most 
extraordinary phenomena of this eventful crisis that, amid the ravages of atheism and 
infidelity, real religion is evidently on the increase. The kingdom of God, we know, 
cometh not with observation; but still there are not wanting manifest tokens of its 
approach. The personal appearance of the Son of God was announced by the shaking 
nations; His spiritual kingdom, in all probability, will be established in the midst of 
similar convulsions and disorders. The blasphemous impiety of the enemies of God, 
as well as the zealous efforts of His sincere worshippers, will doubtless be overruled 
to accomplish the purposes of his unerring providence: while, in afflicting the chastise- 
ments of offended Deity on corrupt communities and nations, infidelity marks its 
drogress by devastation and ruin, by the prostration of thrones and. concussion of 
ingdoms; thus appalling the inhabitants of the world, and compelling them to take 
ge in the Church of God, the true sanctuary; the stream of Divine knowledge, 
observed, is flowing in new channels, winding its course among humbler valleys, 
refreshing thirsty deserts, and enriching with far other and higher blessings than 
those of commerce the most distant climes and nations, until, agreeably to the predic- 
tion of prophecy, “the knowledge of the Lord shall fill and cover the whole earth.” 
: bv: Within the limits of this discourse it would be impracticable to exhibit the 
idences of Christianity; nor is it my design: but there is one consideration, resulting 
mediately from my text, which is entitled to great weight with all who believe in the 
e living and true God as the sole object of worship. The Ephesians, in common 
th other Gentiles, are described in the text as being, previous to their conversion, 
ithout God in the world;” that is, without any just and solid acquaintance with His 
aracter, destitute of the knowledge of His will, the institutes of His worship, and 
= hopes of His favor; to the truth of which representation, whoever possesses the 
htest acquaintance with pagan antiquity must assent. Nor is it a fact less 
ontestable that, while human philosophy was never able to abolish idolatry in a 
ngle village, the promulgation of the Gospel overthrew it in a great part (and that 
€ most enlightened) of the world. If our belief in the unity and perfections of God, 
wether with His moral government and exclusive right to the worship of mankind, 
De ounded in truth, they can not reasonably be denied to be truths of the first 
mportance, and infinitely to outweigh the greatest discoveries in science; because they 
arr n the hopes, fears, and interests of man into a totally different channel from that in 
hich they must otherwise flow. Wherever these principles are first admitted, there 
a new dominion is erected, and a new system of laws established. 


324 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


But since all events are under Divine direction, is it reasonable to suppose that the 
great Parent, after suffering His creatures to continue for ages ignorant of His true 
character, should at length, in the course of His Providence, fix upon falsehood, and 
that alone, as the effectual method of making Himself known; and that, what the 
virtuous exercise of reason in the best and wisest men was never permitted to accom- 
plish, He should confer on fraud and delusion the honor of effecting? It ill comports 
with the majesty of truth, or the character of God, to believe that He has built the 
noblest superstructure on the weakest foundation; or reduced mankind to the miser- 
able alternative either of remaining destitute of the knowledge of Himself, or of 
deriving it from the polluted source of impious impostures. We therefore feel our- 
selves justified, on this occasion, in adopting the triumphant boast of the great 
Apostle: “Where is the wise, where is the scribe, where is the disputer of this world? 
Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom 
of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of 
preaching to save them that believe.” 


[Robert Hall was born in 1764 and died in 1831. The large part of his ministry 
at Bristol] and Cambridge. His sermon on Modern Infidelity was published in 1801, 
and was the ablest presentation of the subject of that day if not to the present. Later 
he published other pamphlets on the themes of the day, one on the freedom of the 
press. In 1810 he published Terms of Communion. 

This sermon is considered one of the ablest on the subject, and was recommended 
py Kerr Boyce Tupper, F. W. Gunsaulus, F. B. Meyer and W. G. Moorehead as one 
of the ten best sermons of the century.] 


TWO GREEK BOOKS ON THE 
LIFE BEYOND. 


GILBERT HAVEN. 


“The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.” 
I Cor. 15: 47. 
While hastening on the sad errand of a funeral to my native home and parental 
roof, I beguiled the tedium of travel and the sorrowfulness of heart with readings by 
way. I had two books with me, in which I daily buried the slowly flying hours— 
the “Odyssey” of Homer and the New Testament. I had come, in the reading of the 
former in course, to the visit of Ulysses to the realm of departed spirits, and my mind 
naturally wandered in the other among those passages that talk of the world unseen. 
You can harldy imagine the contrast. Both works written in the same language, 
oth composed by men of the highest capacity, both treating on the same subject, 
nd both solemnly considering this theme; but how different each from the other! 
dow vast the space that separates these two creations! 
_ Iam not going to ask you to look on the one book as different in origin from 
he other. Let them both be considered as sacred—I cannot say as divine, for they are 
90 far apart from each other for both to be divine. Let them both be considered as 
mest efforts of their authors. Then see how immense the contrast. The story of 
mer, it should be said, has been long esteemed divine. At the very time Christ 
ame it had such a reputation. So it may be contrasted as the best specimen of the 

se divine without revelation and without Christ, with the correlative specimen of the 
divine by revelation and in- Christ. 
No one will deny the superior rank of Homer. General consent makes him the 
hief of pagan poets. By pagan I do not mean a word of reproach, but of necessity. 
are the poets who never had direct light from Christian revelation. He ranks 
Hindoo poet in clearness, positiveness, imagination, rhythm, and that highest 
faculties, the perfect bringing forth of things unknown and unseen. He ranks 
Persian and Arabian writer, every Egyptian and Phoenician poet, by immeas- 
ble breadths. He has no successor in lucidity, a shining clearness, force, and 
eetness of vision, among all the writers of Greek and Roman fame. He is sovereign 
n these realms everywhere, and to this day. 

He is, therefore, no weak and ignorant illustration of the condition of man 


pe. By Beversal suffrage he is put at the head of the writers on whom the legacy 
of Christianity and the word of God never directly came. 

_ We may, therefore, turn away from all lower guesses at the secret of the grave, 
ncoherent mumblings which fill volumes of heathen lore, in all tongues and ages, 
md which have been laboriously gathered up in the large volume entitled History of 
i ¢ ‘Doctrine of a Future Life, which volume contains neither the doctrine nor history 
f that truth and life. We need not seek through all these realms of shade for gross 
nd feeble guesses at the truth. Homer is their best representative; elected by 
imanimous suffrage, he stands forth their chief. He is sufficient for this place. 

Nor should we bring to this theme our own information, gathered from centuries 
' Christian education, which has created an atmosphere and made us something 


~ 
& 


326 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


other than nature-people looking at this problem of the grave with nature-eyes. We 
must get out of ourselves, go back from the light of Christianity, and the immeasur- 
able forms and powers in which it has manifested itself, and enter the realm where 
Christianity is not, nor ever was—the realm of pure human nature, or as near that 
realm as it is possible to get; for perfect nature without a-ray from the Gospel sun it 
is impossible to find. Christ is the light, and has always been the light, that lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world, and no age or race is completely without His 
illuminations. Yet these rays are not direct; they give no sight of the sun. They are 
not traceable directly to the word of God. They are not to be accounted as scripturally 
revealed. They are classed under the head of nature. 

If, therefore, you would see how you would be, how all have been, in the dark- 
ness of unrevelation, read this story of the visit of Ulysses to the realm of the dead; 
then turn to the pages of that other Greek book, and see how wonderful the contrast— 
midnight at its uttermost darkness, and midday in its perfection of glory. You will 
also notice how clear are the limitations of that light, what you can see, and what 
you cannot see, and rejoice in Him who has brought life and immortality to light 
through the Gospel. “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the 
Lord from heaven.” 

This is the story of Homer: Ulysses, having been confined a prisoner by the arts 
of Circe for many long months, begged to be allowed to go home. She granted him 
permission, but told him he must first visit the abode of the dead and inquire of a 
dead soothsayer as to his future. If, however, Homer wrote, as some think—and as 
even Gladstone, his last and best commentator, thinks—not far from the time of Saul, 
it shows how general at that age was the idea of learning the future from departed 
Spirits; the errands of Ulysses and Saul to Tiresias and Samuel being almost identical. 

Under her direction he sails from her island straight to the land of shades. 
Cimmeria, whence comes our familiar Cimmerian darkness, crying himself, as with 
his companions he is borne unwillingly to this “land of deepest shade, unpierced by 
human thought.” Thus Bryant translates his description of that country: 


“There lies the land, and there the people dwell 

Of the Cimmerians, in eternal cloud 

And darkness. Never does the glorious sun 

Look on them with his rays, when he goes up 

Into the starry sky, nor when again 

He sinks from heaven to earth. Unwholesome night 
O’erhangs the wretched race.” 


Into this thick darkness he comes, lands, digs a trench, pours into it the blood of 
a black sheep, and the ghosts come thronging round, eager to taste the blood, which 
was requisite before they could acquire the gift of speech. He sees naught here but 
shades. No human being lands on that strand. But how bitter the wails of these 
trooping ghosts: 


“Thronging around me came the 

Souls of the dead from Erebus—young wives 

And maids unwedded, men worn out with years 
And toil, and virgins of a tender age 

In their new grief, and many a warrior slain 

In battle, mangled by the spear and clad 

In bloody armor, who about the trench 

Flitted on every side, now here, now there, 

With gibbering cries, and I grew pale with fear.” 


Bear in mind the universal unhappiness of these spirits. Not one is in heaven. 
It is Cimmeria, a shade, and they its shadows. The first he spoke with was one of his" 


Two Greek Books on the Life Beyond—Haven. 327 


ompz nions, who a day or two before, drunk, had fallen off a roof, where he was 
umbering, missed the stairway and broke his neck. “The phantom sobbed” its 
ply, and weeping and wailing told how he was slain. 


_ Then came his mother. She drank the blood which enabled her to speak, and 
Id in piteous tones her piteous state. She asks: 

“How didst thou come, my child, a living man, 
Into this place of darkness? Difficult 

It is for those who breathe the breath of life 
To visit these abodes, through which are rolled 


Great rivers, fearful floods.” 


ow sad the confession! His own mother, high-born and gentle-hearted, in the 
lace of darkness! Think you had Ulysses had a better faith he would not have 
plied it to his own mother? Would he have had her shivering in the mists of 
arkness at the door of the pit could he have placed her on more shining seats? She 
lis the story of her death as any one on earth might describe a lingering sickness up 


“°Tis the lot. of all our race 
When they are dead. No more the sinews bend 
The bones and flesh, when once from the white bones 
The life departs. Then like a dream the soul 
Flies off, and flits about from place to place.” 


la is the utmost of his knowledge of the dead. The soul flits hither and thither 
ea dream, and always in and with darkness. His talks with other dames of high 
gree reveal no further light on that state. Each discourses on her earthly state. 
ich is still of the earth, earthy. No Lord from heaven breaks in on the scene and 
Ssipates the gloom of the grave. 

The men, he said, were in as lamentable a plight as the women. Agamemnon, 
en he had drank the blood, 


“Wailed aloud, and, bursting into tears, 

Stretched out his hand to touch me; but no power 
Was there of grasp or pressure, such as once 

Dwelt in those active limbs. I could not help 

But weep at sight of him, for from my heart 

I pitied him.” 


ch is the aspect of the chief of the men whom Ulysses had known—King of the 
teks, head of their armies. In conversing together they confined themselves to 
ast. There was no present and no future. ‘Thus in sad talk we stood, and freely 

wed our tears.” 

d hilles, the greatest of the Grecks, the pet hero of Homer, draws near. He 

le, Save Tiresias, was in superior abodes. He ruled among the dead, yet he 

ed of his condition: 


“Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death, 

As if thou couldst console me. I would be 

A laborer on earth, and serve for hire 

Some man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer, 
a, Rather than reign o’er all who have gone down 

i To death.” 


is 


328 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


How powerful his confession! How it tells against those who declare there is no 
light in revelation, no difference between Christian and antichristian states! To be 
alive, the slave of the meanest man, is better than to rule over all the mighty dead. 

This is the gift of the greatest of the Grecians to his people; his best, his only 
glimpse into the world beyond. This is the brightest flower of Greek philosophy, 
art, literature, arms, religion. The rest of the story is no better. He sees famous 
criminals: Sisyphus rolling the ever-rolling stone, Tantalus tantalized with his thirst 
and its impossible relief, Tityus devoured by vultures that never cease to eat his ever- 
growing vitals. He cries out with fear: 


“And now there flocked 
Already round me, with a mighty noise, 
The innumerable nations of the dead.” 


Affrighted, he escapes to his ship of the earth. 

This is one Greek book on the future state. It is the best that nation afforde 
to its people. It is better than any other nation, without the Bible, afforded its people. 
It never improved to the days of Christ. Plato adds no light to Homer. Socrates 
leaves off his discussion with a guess; he has no real knowledge. Virgil has Elysian 
fields, but the most of his spirits fail to enter them, and his crowds of ghosts are almost 
identical with Homer’s, a thousand years apart in time, but not a moment in 
knowledge. 

The Greek people were fed on this food. ‘This story was first told by Ulysses at 
a royal banquet. I think how sadly those hearers must have listened: those ladies of 
the court, hearing these sorrows of the great dames of Greece; those heroic men, 
the mournful state of their historic heroes, and feeling that this fate of their fathers 
and mothers was to be their own. What was there to stimulate faith in these stories— 
truth to them of the most sacred sort? Tell me, ye who fancy light can come from 
other sources than the word of God—ye who believe in Emerson and Tyndall and 
other lesser lights who rule your night, and make it darker—is there any light at all 
in your philosophy superior to that which shone over the Achaians’ halls, where 
Ulysses recited this mournful tale? Has humanity any glimpse of those fields Elysian 
which was not granted to this blind seer and singer? Leave out to-day the light of 
the Gospel, and men gather now drearily in seances, and get chilling grasps of dead 
friends’ hands, and hear sad wailings of their present state. There is not a step ahead 
in the seance of to-day from the Ulyssean visit three thousand years ago. Not long 
since I heard one tell how a spirit visited him through a medium, who bewailed her 
miserable fate, beaten and buffeted and spit upon by her companions, a modern 
blackness of darkness as mournful as that in which these spirits wandered. That was 
their best. Those who are reported better off are still material, earthy, as fond of life 
and crying for it as strongly as did Achilles. “The first man is of the earth, earthy.” 
He can never rise above that condition. He is dragged down by his ignorance and 
his sin. He fears death itself. He fears its revelations. ‘‘The fears of the tomb,” 
Campbell rightly calls it; or, as Job more powerfully says, “The land of darkness and 
the shadow of death; a land of darkness, as darkness,” or darkness that is darkness; 
“and of the shadow of death,” the shade of the death-shade, ghost of ghost, terror of 
terror, hades of hades, “without any order,” the chaos of nature, “and where the 
light is as darkness.” How terrible the picture! The very light itself makes only a 


deeper night. Yet this is not as terrible as the truth. To this day, with a line of a | 


hundred ancestors standing between us and those who listened to Ulysses and Job, 
there is no more beauty in the grave itself, in death or the dead body, than there was 
then. The body is still an object of fear and repulsion. We hasten to bury it out of 
our sight. It becomes fetidness and dust. You adorn it with flowers, make your 


Two Greek Books on the Life Beyond—Haven. 329 


cemeteries beautiful parks, the most beautiful of parks, and still your graveyard is 
not a delightsome thing. It is chaos come again, the worse chaos because superin- 
duced upon the best cosmos. No order like that of comely man and woman; no 
disorder like their destruction. What shall change this view that nature gives—so 
_ dreary, so desolate, so fearful, so horrible? 

What? Listen! There is another Greek book, the work of several penmen, some 
_ mative to the tongue, most foreign, written about two thirds of the time back between 
us and Homer, nearer to his age by a thousand years than to ours. It does not 
_ profess to have his graces of rhythm or his varied and vivid fancy. It has never been 
translated by poets, nor is it a favorite with mere philosophers without faith. Yet 
for clearness of view, simplicity of statement, reach of faith, grandeur of imagination, 
and solidity of confidence, all that all the world has elsewhere said or sung is naught, 
and worse, to its infinitude of strength. 

The Lord from heaven is the second man. He has come; He has brought life 
and immortality to light. He has shed the sunlight of the throne in the barrows of 
the dead. He has walked in Cimmeria, and made it bright as the beams of the 
morning. He has revealed to us the happy fields, and shown us who walk together 
there. He has even taken the dusty earth from its coffin and urn, and made it animate 
with eternal life and glory. How wondrous the change! See how early it begins in 
- this second Greek book. Hardly is His advent announced that this fact is not 
N announced with it. Before the Sun appears in form His radiance shines. “Far off His 
{ coming shone.” In exultant song Zacharias declares, “The dayspring from on high 
hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” 
p This was before He was born—the Divine Ulysses—who was not only to visit the 
_ dead, but to destroy death itself. 

4 The acclaim of the angels announcing, “Peace on earth” to good-willing men, 
was in the same key. Peace and good-will must cover death, or there is no peace. 

\ Then come the words and works of the Master, lifting dead bodies from their 
_ couches into all the fullness of their lost health, calling them back from loathsome 
corruption into serene and solid beauty. Then comes His words, fit accompaniment 


3 for such works: “I am the resurrection, and the life: . . . whosoever liveth and 
believeth in Me shall never dic.” “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise 
it up . . . But he spake of the temple of His body.” “I lay down my life of 


_ myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This com- 
; _ mandment have I received of my Father.” “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour 
_ is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and 
i they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to 
_ the Son to have life in Himself. . . Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in 
t the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they 
that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto 

& the resurrection of damnation.” What august, what awful power is here! Tenderer 
are other words: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in 

_ me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told 
_ ~you. I go to prepare a place for you. . . . I will come again, and receive you 

~ unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”’ How infinitely different this 

from Achilles striding off over the meadows, leaving his mournful inferiors shivering 

_ in the darkness! 

% Christ, our Leader, does not thus stride gloomily and haughtily away. He talks 
to His companions, who are tearful and affrighted, in the most cheering manner. 
Before He goes to Gethsemane, to the agonies and bloody death, which He saw and 
would not flee, for four chapters, which must have been for an hour, He enlarges on 
cheering and helpful themes. He tells them for the first time distinctly about the 


330 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


third Person in the Trinity, and unfolds His twofold character and work—Sanctifier 
and Comforter; especially the latter, as they were to be in especial need of the latter. 
Being divine, and alter these bold and cheerful words, to prove they were no mere 
boast, He condescends to die. Weakest of the weak He mounts the cross. He lays 
down His life as powerless as a babe. Death hath complete dominion over Him. He 
wrestles not. He puts forth no effort to save Himself. He does not even toss and 
writhe in natural resistance to His fate. Never was a babe’s death quicker or easier. 
“Pilate marveled if He were already dead.” He goes, not like Ulysses, and Orpheus, 
and Hercules, alive to hades; but, like every other man, He goes dead. Those myths 
never affect the world’s heart, because they do not suffer the world’s experience. 
Christ suffers unto death, suffers the severest agonies, which everybody dreads, and 
dies the quickest and easiest in these very agonies. Ile touches every experience in 
that hour of agony and utter weakness. How different this from Hercules marching 
in hades! The one strongest of the strong, and in the very towering of his strength; 
the other weakest of the weak, and in the very weakest of his weakness, he sinks into 
the power of death. No shade so thin wanders about the pit of Ulysses. They have 
a show of strength, he none. 

The victory is complete. Never more so; the dead body hangs a perfect corpse. 
It is taken down limp and clammy—dead. It is stretched as such; bathed, washed, 
wrapped, and borne off as such. You know their helplessness by many a sad 
experience. He is shut up in the tomb. Locked is the door, a great stone rolled 
before it, sealed, and watched by a band of soldiers. Can Death ask for a better 
compliance with his conditions? It is done as he has commanded, perfectly done, 
satisfactorily done; governor and king and chief priest are content. The devil 
can conceive of nothing further. His victory is complete. He has killed and 
entombed the Son of God. Hercules, the Mighty, lies slain among His foes. 
Ulysses, the Wise, is outwitted by His enemies. They accept their victory and 
are satisfied. When io! He is not here! He is arisen. He is gone! Death 
is outwitted, overmastered. Out of this all-eater of man cometh forth meat for 
the reanimation of all men. Out of the grave He marches serene and calm and mighty. 
Death hath no more dominion over Him, nor over His. He has done it. Not fable, 
not poetry, not marvelous rhythm, but fact—most marvelous fact! Everybody rushes 
to Him. He is lifted up triumphant over death. He draws all men unto Him. Then 
comes the application of this victory. His words, His works, His own divine deed, 
begin to tell on the world above. He ascends to heaven, a thing easily to be done 
after ascending from the tomb, and the story flies through the world. “Jesus and the 
resurrection” His disciples preach, and everybody hears. Some reject, some despise, 
some hate; all hear. Persecutions arise, but they hear the more, “Jesus and the 
resurrection.” Death comes violently, but they hear the more yet. For before the 
assembled authorities and populace of Jerusalem—on the very spot possibly where 
Jesus sank powerless in the grasp of death—the first of His newly converted preachers 
and disciples, probably a convert of the Pentecostal days, His first witness, declares 
with his dying lips that his dying eyes behold “Jesus sitting at the right hand of God,” 
and he asks him to receive his spirit. How different this from Homeric darkness, from 
Socratean guess! No wailing ghost here, no wandering shade here, seeking to taste 
a drop of blood that it may tell its woes to mortal ears. “Receive my spirit;”’ and 
having so said, he fell asleep. Asleep his body, received his spirit into Jesus’s arms. 
He who a few weeks beiore had said to a dying neighbor, “This day shalt thou be with 
me in paradise,” saw the servant who looked up, : 


“And from a happy place 
God’s glory smote him on the face.” 


Not only God’s glory, but the very countenance of God, the face of Jesus Christ, 


Two Greek Books on the Life Beyond—Haven. 33: 


- smiled upon His disciple, who fell asleep as a tired babe falls asleep in its mother’s 
arms, while she smiles her benediction into its weary eyes. 
Thenceforward fled the mighty word over the realms where Homer sung, over 
the realms where Ulysses sailed, around the great sea, and over the voluptuous East, 
and into the icy North—the word flew, ‘Jesus and the resurrection.” The future of 
man is secure. He shall come forth. He shall renew himself in glory everlasting. 
Then came the letters of argument and consolation; letters describing the inter- 
mediate conditions, so far as description is permitted and allowable; letters limiting 
the wildness of the human fancy and human hope within due bounds; letters suggest- 
ing the time and manner of this advent, yet equally careful to abstain from too great 
detail. How wonderful are some of their passages! Read them by the side of 
~ Homer’s lines, and how his graceful rhythms wither and decay! ‘We know that, if 
_ our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a 
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” ‘We know!” No Greek before 
them ever knew—nay, ever dared to guess—this sublime fact. “For me to die is gain.” 
_ Socrates and Cicero never dared say that, ‘nor Homer, nor Achilles. ‘Gain?” 
“Gain?” “To die, gain?’ Whence know you this? Only because the Lord from 
_ heaven hath come from heaven, and hath transformed the earthly into the heavenly. 
That fifteenth of First Corinthians, written to the most sensual and voluptuous 
city of Greece, how it shoots its light across the ages of the grave and shines bright 
over its farther gate! How it lifts up that graceless city through its saints into the 
heights of grace! How it riddles all mere physical ascension and every attempt to 
abolish the bodily resurrection! How it sets forth with undying strength the steady 
assurance that our dead bodies shall live again! What a shout it sends through the 
hollow depths of hades! “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy 
_ victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be 
y to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” What a change 
* from the tearful, wailing shades of Homer’s heaven to this burst of rapture! 
” That is the new Greek against the old; Christian against heathen; God against 
_ Satan. These passages grow denser and more delightful as we draw toward the close. 
‘ The letters have more in them than the gospels, Corinthians than Romans, John than 
~ Paul; and all consummate themselves in the grandest book in the world, the Revela- 
_ tion. What care we that we cannot understand its trumpets and vials and horsemen 
and horns? We cannot understand the convulsions of symphony, but we can the 
gentle melody that purls through the roaring, surging, upheaving mass of song. 
_ Sothrough this book runs every stream of melody—the beatitude of the spirits of the 
holy dead. It opens with the promises of this bliss: “These shall follow the Lamb 
whithersoever He goeth.” ‘They shall sit on my throne.” They shall be led to 
“living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” The 
_ old grand Greek saw only tears in the eyes of the dead; his mother, his leader, his 
‘servant, his greatest soldier, Hercules himself—all wail and weep. But the new 
grander Greek sees God wiping away all tears. Think how changed that book had 
by Ulysses seen Jupiter wiping away his mother’s tears. And so on and on through this 
book of disclosure appear harpers harping on their harps; crowds on a sea of glass 
i “mingled with fire, yet never breaking nor burning; rivers of water of life; trees laden 
_ with precious fruits, which drop their richness every month, until the glorious golden 
_ city breaks on our view, descending from God out of heaven, with its gigantic aes 
ona of a single pearl, its wall of specified precious stones, its light the Lamb, 
_ temple the Lord God, its people the saints of the Most High. 
Here we must pause. How infinite the distance from Ulysses crying as he is 
drawn into dark Cimmeria and fleeing from its multitude of ghosts, “the innumerable 
mations of the dead.” and John talking with the angel who measures the city, and 


4 
aA 


x. 


332 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


beholding its inhabitants, and listening to their songs! That is the change wrought 
in the race of man by the Gospel. That is the immortality Christ has brought to 
light. That is the Lord from heaven already dwelling among men and giving them a 
joy of peace and assurance such as never could otherwise be known. 

Three things, among many, we pause to notice: 

First, that the consummation of this triumph is at the resurrection. Homer never 
dreamed that those spirits would be reunited to their bodies. The most he hoped for 
was a happy home sometime for some spirits. But the Gospel laughs at impossi- 
bilities and leaps chasms that Nature never dare look into. It puts the crowning 
glories at and alter the raised, revived, and glorified body is reunited to its spirit. That 
is its objective point. Thither it tends. There it gazes. That is its goal and begin- 
ning of glory. Christ put His death and resurrection within forty-eight hours of each 
other. He puts our ages apart. What of it? The science that can connect the two 
ends of a laboratory table with the magnetic spark can gird the world with its flame. 
Christ can raise Himself in one day and portions of two. He can raise us if millions 
of years intervene. Thus and then He will show forth His glory. He reserves the 
highest splendors for that crowning hour. 


But, second, the time between is spent deliciously; whether asleep he does well, 
whether awake he does well; all is well. The intermediate state is not dwelt upon 
as the post-resurrection state, but it is sufficiently delineated to show that it is a state 
of peace. Happy on Jesus’ breast to lie and in His smile to bask! No Christian can 
find a gloomy thought in the reference to the blessed dead. “Blessed are the dead 
which die in the Lord;” not shall be—“are.” “They rest from their labors, and their 
works do follow them.” The gloom cf Job, which his faith defied, but could not 
abolish, is all gone in the New Testament. Stephen goes home rejoicing; Paul 
exults in the day of deliverance; Peter looks for and hastens after the coming of the 
Lord; John sees own sonship changing into his likeness when he shall appear. All 
are serene, happy, jubilant. The intermediate worid to a Christian is a world of life 
and love. It is delightful, it is desirable. Let your heart rest in peace, in the con- 
fidence that “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” 


Third, this hope is limited; Ulysses makes no limit in virtue and vice. 
His characters boast, in hades, of the vilest amours. Achilles, who rules below, is 
there, as above, a polluted chief; while his own mother wails in outer darkness. But 
*tis not so in the Christian’s future world. The discriminations are sharp. Some shall 
arise to shame and everlasting contempt. What a shame of soul is that! How terrible 
may this awakening be! A fallen minister, driven by remorse, withdrew to commit 
suicide, when the thought of that doom rolled over his soul. “Shame and everlasting 
contempt,” he kept repeating to himself; “Shame and everlasting contempt.” He 
shrank back from a further and an eternal plunge into that abyss, and was saved, 
‘hough not from present shame and contempt. Take heed, O great man, lest you 
awake to that terrible doom! You may ride in your lordly carriage through lordly 
ways; you may be the proud and petted head of grand society; but if your life is false 
and corrupt, you shall surely awake that resurrection morning to shame and everlast- 
ing contempt. God help you to avoid that terrible doom! Some shall have a resurrec- 
tion to damnation. Who? They that have done evil. 

“Blessed are they that . . . haveright to the tree of life, and . . . enter 
in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whore- 
mongers, and, murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever maketh and loveth a lie.” 
How sharp the lines! 

The Christian's heaven is no mixed, promiscuous muddle, like a world’s town, and 
sometimes like a world’s church. It is separate, seclusive. Forever so: “He that is 
filthy, shall be filthy still; he that is holy, sha:l be holy still.’ See to it that you accept 


Two Greek Books on the Life Beyond—Haven. 333 


tions. Accept it in honest fear of falling. Accept it in humble hope of standing. 
Accept it in joyful assurance of possessing heaven. Accept it for your consolation, 
for your perfection in righteousness. What things we have seen enter these realms. 
i Yet all who have entered in Christ are in Him today, and shall grow in bliss till the 
ripening hour of the resurrection, when the Lord from heaven shall again appear, 
_ take the earthly with the heavenly, and take both earth and spirit in its new and 
heavenly unit unto the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, the 
glory everlasting. Wherefore comfort one another with these words: 


“Weep for your dead no more; 
Friends, be of joyful cheer; 
_Our star moves on before, 
Our narrow path shines clear. 


“Now is His truth revealed, 
His majesty and might; 
The grave has been unsealed; 
Christ is our life and light! 


“His victory has destroyed 
The shaft that once could slay; 
Sing praise! the tomb is void 
Where the Redeemer lay.” 


q [Gilbert Haven was born at Malden, Mass., Sept. 1821, and died there Jan. 3, 
- 1880. He was a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and one-time editor of 
. Zion’s Herald. 

This sermon is from Christus Consolator, and is reproduced by permission of 
_ Eaton & Mains, publishers, New York, by whom it is copyrighted.] 


334 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE USES OF SUFFERING 
BY NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, Dim 


“For Christ was made perfect through suffering,” and “If we suffer we shall 
also reign.” 


Culture and character are through suffering. Life is God’s university, happiness 
is the graduating point, but trouble and adversity are the appointed teachers. The 
world is built for joy, but man comes to his full estate through the tutelage of sorrow. 
Even Christ, who brings glad tidings of great joy, is exhibited as passing through the 
uttermost of pain, on His way upward toward the uttermost of pleasure and the 
world’s throne. If man washes his eyes in tears and makes his garments white with 
blood, he, too, is promised the throne and scepter of the higher manhood. For 
suffering is an alchemist, refining out coarseness, and transmuting bad into good, and 
selfishness into sympathy. Steel is iron plus fire. Tools are wood plus gashing axes. 
Statues are marble plus the chisel, whose every stroke makes sparks to fly. Manhood 
is nature plus the temptations that chisel out character. That which lets the beau- 
teous crystal out of the geode is not the clear shining of the sun. No Phidias ever 
polished his marble with softness and warmth; periection is through the chisel and 
the sharp blows of the mallet. Whom God loves, He chastens; whom He receives, 
He scourges; then brings He forth for His children the best robe—a robe with warp 
and woof woven of threaded pains—and places their feet in the shining way, a way 
bright with fagot fires, and brings them to the city of crowning joy by a way that 
passes by some Gethsemane and Calvary. 

Bronze doors of old cathedrals are all of beaten handiwork and character is ham- 
mered out on the anvil of adversity. Wine is through crushing of the grapes, and 
joy is a fine spirit oft distilled from the essence of bruised affections. Sin and selfish- 
ness dig deep furrows in the face, so suffering is sent in, to iron the lines out smooth 
again. From Paul to Livingstone, what heroic leader hath worn soft raiment? What 
Luther or Lincoln was reared in kings’ palaces? It is wrestling against opposing 
winds, that works toughness into trees and gianthood into men, If the poet’s vision 
is ever fulfilled and we do “judge the angels doing easy duty at home,” we must first, 
as veterans of the “Old Guard,” achieve our scars and as victors bring our dented 
shields and tattered flags in from fierce battles upon a far off frontier. As optimists, 
therefore, let us not ‘make believe’ and play there are no troubles. One form of 
folly is to always drag the corpse into the banquet. Another form is to try and 
triumph over tragedies by blinding our eyes. Let us confess that man, called “the 
Son of God,” groans and travails from the cradle to the grave; that man, the Lord 
of all creation, is unique through his defeats and sorrows. To deny suffering and 
death is to become the philosophers of mist and shallowness. To define life’s adver- 
sities as “figments of the brain,” imperils intellectual integrity. To ignore trouble is 
to falsify the facts, to rob our lives of refinement, to mutilate the higher nature and 
miss life’s true economy. 

With unyielding courage let us hasten to confess that life is full of sufferings. 
Reverses do overtake men; then the competency of a lifetime melts away in a night, 
and shoulders, so weakened by old age, as that the grasshopper is a burden, must 


The Uses of Suffering—Hillis. 335 


again dig and delve. Ill health comes; then the hand forgets its cunning and the 
brain its skill; the pallid brow, the sunken cheeks, the trembling thought proclaims the 
end. Enemies arise to ruin reputation; then the skies rain slander and bitter lies, until 
all the springs of peace are poisoned. Death enters the fireside circle; “then the van- 
ished feet walk not with us and the silenced voice speaks only in our dreams.” These 
sufferings are real; they must be reckoned with, as we reckon with the laws of gravity. 
With sturdy brain and brave heart let us meet life’s facts, asking no intellectual 
anodyne for paralyzing our faculties and destroying our pains. Calmly let us confess 
that life holds desert as well as garden, holds midday, but also midnight. Nor hath 
any sage discovered the secret of perpetual peace. Man hath sought out many inven- 
tions, fashioned conveniences, discovered remedies, but it is given to none to achieve 
an uninterrupted career of happiness. A full admission of these facts will do much 
to help us search out the higher uses of pain in the economy of nature and God. 

The frontier lines of ignorance begin to recede when we note that as men go up 
toward manhood they go toward the possibility of pain. Suffering is a possible 
infliction of a large, sensitive and godlike nature. Coarseness and rudeness suffer 
little, but refinement much. The iron bars over a jail window answer the wind with 
no vibrating melody, but the silken threads sing for the gentlest zephyr. As we move 
_ downward and away from God’s throne, the capacity of suffering is steadily decreased. 
_ When we stand at the very bottom of the scale of organized life, beside the worm or 
oyster, we stand at the vanishing point of suffering. The jelly fish is so near nothing 
_ that it discerns not the knife that divides its parts. The insect of a day knows no care 
_ or anxiety. Birds have few fears, they dread only the snake and the hawk. The 
lark feels no remorse for yesterday, no fear of food failing tomorrow, has no thought 
of death. When death comes for beasts it comes quickly and painlessly. If the brain 
of the humming bird is small, small are also its sufferings. But man stands at the 
summit of all the animal creation. He unites within himself the bee’s skill in hiving, 
_ the beaver’s art in building, the bird’s deftness in nest-lining. Man includes in his 
little body the special gift and grace of every creature in the world’ below him, com- 
pacting within himself their every source of pleasure. Therefore, the accumulated 
possibilities of pain for all the rest of creation are also focalized upon his single 
person. Thus, as manhood increases, the possibility of suffering augments. This vast 
mental mechanism, with nerve lines running out into land and sea and sky, carries 
with it not only the possibility of an infinite variety and volume of pleasure, but also 
equal possibilities of pain. 

& Therefore it is that troubles seem centralized upon man. Man’s large endowment 
r is a drag net sweeping in pains innumerable. As he journeyed away from birds and 
_ beasts he left behind their painlessness, with their brutishness. As man goes up 
¥ toward Jesus Christ he goes up toward sensitiveness. By so much as Christ agonized 


_ in Gethsemane while rude Peter slept, was tortured on Calvary while that coarse thief 
_ on his cross chattered, by that much was His supremacy proclaimed. Chiefly is God 
the great sufferer, having infinite inflections of pity, compassion, love and mercy 
_ toward His ignorant and sinful children. As men go up toward the throne of uni- 
_ versal sympathy, they go up toward the possibilities of sympathetic suffering. If a 
man will descend and degrade himself to the beast’s level, he can cut most of the nerve 
paths along which pains come in. Susceptibility to suffering argues man’s nearness 
to God. 
i Consider the sources of suffering. Nearest to our thought are pains physical in 
nature. Through no fault of theirs, many are born to ill health. Heredity dooms 
Baca. to wear a garment whose warp and woof are fiery pains. In temperament, tone 
; and physical tint, like produces like. Oaks bear acorns, not figs; canaries are not 
_ from eagles. In the Darwin family there are five generations of students of natural 
Pi 


2p 


336 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


history, and in our Adams family five of statesmen and scholars! Of fifty-one of the 
world’s great poets twenty-two are known to have had illustrious relatives; also, the 
gloomy, tempestuous nature of his mother reappears in Byron and the weak will of 
Coleridge in his son Hartley. 

Physical suffering in others is through accident or ignorance or error in personal 
carriage. Some by overzeal in office, street or study, stretch the nervous cords so 
tightly that they give way. Love and self-sacrifice make others martyrs of ill health. 
What sweetness and patience have come from sick rooms, as the richest perfumes 
come from shrubs whose leaves are crushed. Some have borne an amount of pain 
distributed upon them through years that, if brought together and focalized at one time 
upon one person, would have equaled a thousand deaths upon the inquisitor’s wheel. 
The ruined temples, with broken columns and fallen arches, is the type of these 
wrecked lives. 

The heart and its affections also opens up avenues through which sufferings 
enter. Whoever rears a home altar and surrounds himself with loved ones, opens 
doorways for pain to enter. Doubling joy involves the possible doubling of sorrow. 
Rejoicing when the child comes involves weeping when the child goes. He who goes 
astray as husband or father doth not himself suffer so much as do those who love him. 
Pain for that prodigal son was delayed until he came to the husks and swine. But the 
father began to suffer when the boy first began to drift away from him. Affection 
protracted that agony through long years until the prodigal came to himself again. 
He who buys love pays for it with the possibility of pain. Love must suffer with 
the sins and suffering of its dear friends. 

Interest in the welfare of society also yields suffering. Men are knitted in with 
their kind. The very sight of ignorance and wretchedness works sorrow in a sensitive 
mind. Only those who pull down their blinds and selfishly seclude themselves, becom- 
ing turtles that draw the head under the shell, can be oblivious to the world’s woe 
and want and vice and crime. A wide-browed man cannot go upon the street without 
constant reminder of the chronic misery of the ignorant and wretched poor. Within 
a mile or two from this spot are tenement houses, every brick oozing filth, every floor 
sweating grime, where felons and parasites and drunkards congregate; where children 
open their eyes to filth and squalor; waken to blows and kicks and oaths, are 
debauched while they are still children, and are only chosen for the path that leads to 
the hospital and jail. These facts anguish good men, drive sleep from theif eyes and 
slumber from the couch. A great heart is like that city of Thebes, with its one hun- 
dred gates, through which swept caravans of wealth, indeed, but also the poor, spent 
pilgrims, the weary, the homesick, the heartbroken. 

Moreover, the contrasts of life produce keen pain. All aspire unto power, but few, 
can achieve wealth and position. Ambition to excel burns in the peasant as truly as 
in the prince. Failing himself, the poor man transfers his ambition to his children. 
Thenceforth he vexes the days and nights with ceaseless toil, vainly hoping to buy for 
the child privileges that were denied to the parent. Sleeping he breathes a prayer: 
“O, that my son never be a drudge!”’ Waking, he sighs: ““O, that my daughter may 
never go through what her mother has!” 

But competition is fierce and the pace fast. Soon multitudes fall behind or perish 
on the way. Men go down into obscurity. Millions perish, having shaped no tool, 
built no bridge, written no book, organized no law, furnished no incitement to virtue, 
created no new thought. Gold was in them, but it was undug. Talent was theirs, 
but it was latent. Full many a man is like these famous crystal caves. Some work- 
man discerns an aperture, and, passing through, the torch reveals a vast hidden cave. 
For ages beasts and men had walked by, never dreaming that just within was this vast 
kingdom of diamonds, Multitudes go through life, unknown even by those who walk 


The Uses of Suffering—Hilhs. 337 


‘beside them. Many die as they have lived, mere seeds of men. When April comes 
it finds myriads of roots and germs in the soil waiting for the south wind to bring 
release and power to burst through the seed, to bud and blossom. And many remain 
to the very end of life germinant men, even those nearest to them never know what 
secret force is theirs. How others feel we may not know, but for us it is not enough 
that the poor stand or fall with this life. God’s resources for future happiness and 
_ character are infinite and by us all unsuspected. 


Out of nature’s ruins God works strange resurrections. From rotting log the 
snowdrop springs; over the tree, shattered and blackened by thunderbolt, grow the 
beautiful vines; after Gettysburg the grass heals over the scars that cannon and death 
had digged; soon over the gravestone grows the softening moss, and good men cherish 
the hope that some time, we know not where, somehow, we know not the instrument, 
e the great God will give wrecked men a second summer and lead forth into full fruition 
His millions who were here maimed and dwarfed by heredity, ignorance, poverty 
and sin. The career denied here shall come hereafter. 


I stretch lame hands of faith and grope 
And gather dust and chaff and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 


Primarily suffering hath this ministry, that it is a safeguard of character. Con- 
stant prosperity enervates. Iron is powdered by unceasing electricity, but the steel 
_ fecovers itself when the current intermits. Steady sunshine ruins the tropic races and 
luxury often barbarizes men. The great civilizations lie along the snow belt. Men 
_ grow great only where winter stimulates to the best possible use cf summer. Frost 
puts tang and crispness into the winesap and jonathan and frost also lends spice and 
richness to the people’s thinking. The iron and granite in the New England soil will 
_ soon work their way into some Webster’s soul. Wealthy parents hire tutors and 
travel for their sons and daughters, but they can invent no device that will do for their 
_ children what poverty and adversity did for them. Of old the seer said: “When men 
__ have eaten and are filled straightway they forget God,” and today abundance does for 

_ man what abundance did. Adam and Eve disobeyed when sated by flowers and fruits. 
_ Life’s good things robbed them of God; then came adversity, and lo, the thorns and 
the thistles and the sweat of the brow gave God back to them. For adversity is God’s 
_ antidote for self-sufficiency. Prosperity can buy travel, rest, skill. Soon men feel 
as if they can do without God. Yet how little man has to be proud of. The husband- 
man’s part in a sheaf of wheat or cluster of grapes is 4 per cent; nature’s part is 96 
B ‘per cent. Men call themselves self-made. Why, they only hold a sack while God 
_ fills it. Therefore men must be modest, sincere, trustful and true. Growing proud, 
Suffering is sent to correct his egotism and refine his coarseness. Today men curse 
_ God for that for which tomorrow they will think they have chiefest reason to give 
gratitude. The world is built for giving the race just as much prosperity as it will 
bear without being materialized. When men have learned to use without abusing 
ife’s good things, then they are death-born into eternal abundance and satisfaction. 
_ But under present conditions there can be no civilization without suffering. 


a Sufferings are often revelatory, and toil as teachers. Troubles often are danger 
pesnals. Often men, through excitement and mental stimulants, are in danger of 

destroying the integrity of the physical system. Then hunger rings its alarm bell and 
i proclaims the tissues inflamed by overwork. Rightly interpreted, all aches and 
" pains are cautionary. Penalties are bulwarks between the race and the slough that 


} 
* 


. 


338 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


threatens to engulf it. Pains are not given in revenge, but out of mercy as curative 
medicines. Youth is bold and enterprises into sinful réalms. Youth caresses the 
adder and the scorpion. Excess drains away the precious nerve treasure. Death is 
in the right hand, but the man knows it not. Then pain strikes the clear, sharp note 
of warning balance. Penalties proclaim the everlasting distinction between iniquity 
and integrity, the great gulf fixed between innocence and guilt, between virtue and 
vulgarity. Disobedience is followed by anguish that henceforth this form of sin may 
be avoided and a life passed in pleasure. 


If man needed only one throb of pain in each organ to teach him the law of living 
for that member he would master every principle of sound living within the period 
of childhood. Then all his days would be days of happiness. Unfortunately, man 
forgets, so that the pains must be continued as cautions. On either side of that bridge 
over the Niagara are iron guards and fences. Thus the ten commandments are so 
many guards and hedges along life’s dangerous way. Man plunges through forests, 
past bogs and over chasms. When he leaves the path to plunge into the thicket where 
scorpions will sting, the thorns prick him back into the way. When he would plunge 
into the bog, nettles sting him back from the slough. When he wanders too near 
the precipice, sharp pains of body or mind affright him back from the abyss. God's 
deepest compassion and love are organized into these pains that restrain men from 
wrong and constrain them toward right. Properly interpreted, sufferings and penal- 
ties represent God’s goodness as truly as fruits and flowers, as surely as happiness and 
prosperity. 

Oftentimes also sufferings are educatory. Strangely enough, nearly all racial 
progress and soul culture are through adversity and suffering. If one man’s craft 
strikes the rock and goes to the bottom, his death lifts a signal over the spot, and 
saves whole fleets. If one family mistakes poison for food, and perishes, afterward the 
generations avoid the deadly nightshade. Soon one generation’s pain become the 
pleasure of the next generation. Once liberty of thought was unknown. All lips were 
padlocked. Then Huss went to his stake and Savonarola to his blazing pile. Soon 
man had free thought, free speech, free action. Each free institution cost society a 
hundred battle fields. The social forces of today were not rain fed, but blood nour- 
ished. Free institutions are vines; above their roots our fathers slit their veins and 
emptied out their blood, that reappeared for us in crimson blossoms. Formerly no 
deed nor charter was valid without the king’s seal. Now no institution is genuine 
that is not stamped with the blood of some patriot or martyr. All social advancement 
is a history of suffering and endurance and martyrdom without recognition. Reformers 
have labored and perished. Other generations enter into their labors. Our planet 
has a soil deep and rich because of ages when fire billows melted the adamant; when 
huge glaciers ground the rocks to powder; winds went rioting every whither; electric 
storms blazed, but all in vain; frost wedges split down the cliffs; heat levers pushed 
down the precipes. Then destruction was universal. 


Now we perceive that early desolation meant later fruition. The wheels of earth- 
quake tore the hills apart that the nations might not be separated. Watery currents 
scooped out the rivers as channels for man’s commerce. Frost crumbled the cliffs 
into food for forests and flowers. Rude forces sloped the hillsides, up which the 
shepherd now leads his happy flocks, and enriched the valleys where villages and 
vineyards now nestle beneath the shadow of high hills. This civilization grows rich 
through age on age of suffering. All our treasure of thought and life is a social har- 
vest sown in tears, watered with blood and reaped in grief, thrashed out in pain, 
garnered by death into the granary of the ages. 


‘ 


The law of the conservation of energy is the key that unlocks the problem of the 


The Uses of Suffering—Hillis. 339 


uf ring. Everywhere in nature and life growth is through the conversion of force. 
Fire converts things upward, while seeds work juices and solids into trees. Heat and 
"pressure convert limestone and iron into blood red marble. In the forests it is the 
frost that makes nuts sweetly plump and frees wild grapes from their tartness. Only 
in fierce crucibles can Nature change carbon into fiashing diamend. In the world of 
‘pottery it is fire that burns the artist’s delicate tracery into the texture of porcelain. 
In the animal kingdom science tells us the music of the fields began with the fear and 
in of birds. The robin’s first note was a cry of danger. Afterward changing the 
“Note, it proclaims the flight of the hawk. The notes of warning and alarm developed 
into the liquid music of the lark and the melting rapture of the hermit thrush. In 
Statecraft, too, the law holds good. Socrates says no man is fitted for ruling who has 
‘not known suffering. Concerning the home kingdom, his pupil thought no woman 
was fitted for training her children until she had been mellowed by grief and pain. 
Fulfilling these exalted duties in Nature, suffering is also appointed for the soul. 
With more than a father’s affection, with more than a mother’s love, God sends pain 
‘to men. Carefully He chooses them. Suffering comes under divine commission. 
Sorrows do not riot through life. Men are not atoms buffeted hither and thither. 
Troubles are appointed to refine away our grossness; to transmute selfishness into 
self-sacrifice; to destroy vice to transfigure all our life. Refused, troubles bruise with- 
out softening; they crush without maturing. Accepted and rightly used they change 
their nature and become joys. Tears are seeds; planted they blossom into joy and 
gladness. 
In vision the seer said he saw the door of heaven standing open. For one brief 
moment he looked in upon a group of radiant beings. They seem the favorites of the 
es. They live in the very center of joy. No care is upon them. No burden bears 
em down like ball and chain. No taskmaster drives them to uncongenial tasks. 
% here are no furrows in the cheek nor pain ridges on the forehead. ' They are freer 
_ than the birds. They exhale joy as tropic winds sweet odors. Happiness is native 
te these children of song. Surely these have never wrought in earthly sphere and 
known trouble through three score years and ten. Then answered one: ‘These are 
‘ they who came out of great tribulations. They have washed their robes in the bath 
Of suffering. Passing through the uttermost of pain, they have come to the uttermost 
bf joy. Emancipated at last the invalid from ill health, the persecuted from their 
suers, the poor from their poverty, the ignorant from their night, the heartbroken 
a m their every anguish, these children of exile have come to their throne, their 
own and scepter.” - 
_ In his celebrated painting Delaroche has assembled a court of universal genius. 
trou nd an imaginary art tribunal stand the sages, orators and philosophers, the 
lormers and martyrs, with all who have achieved eminence in any department of life. 
Strange, passing strange! that those who stand in the fore front, pre-eminent for their 
ability ty, are chiefly pre-eminent for their sufferings! Denied his ambition and the 
romised land, Moses leads the immortal band. Blind, Homer ‘eels his way. Hold- 
g his cup of poison, Socrates stands forth condemned to his shameful death. Then 

omes Paul, flogged and stoned out of all semblance of a man. Exiled Dante, too, is 
lere, whose “Inferno” in life best interprets his “Inferno” of death. And there is 
ilton, both blind and heartbroken. Now comes One who leads all that goodly com- 
pany. His name is “above every name.” And whence His supremacy? This is His 
et; “His face is more marred than any man’s.” 


le sermon on The Use of Suffering, or the Soul’s Victory over Suffering, was 
hed in Plymouth church, Brooklyn, under circumstances that made the sermon 


340 ) Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


particularly memorable. The audience was largely made up of men, and e 
and his listeners were anxious about Mrs. Hillis’ severe illness. This — 
between speaker and audience, together with the subject, made the sermon 
impressive. It is reproduced here as reported for the Brooklyn Eagle, co 
_ 1899, and with their permission. 

Newell Dwight Hillis was born at Magnolia, Ta., Sept. 2, 1858, rece 
education at Iowa College, Lake Forest University and McCormick Theo 
Seminary. He served Presbyterian churches at Peoria and Evanston, three o 
years each, and was then called to succeed Prof. David Swing at Central C 
Chicago; since 1899 pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. His | 
literary work consists of The Investment of Influence, Man’s Value to Society, I 
tokens of Immortality, etc.] 


(341) 


. 


? 
y 


“THE FINAL TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY. 


‘ig ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, D. D. 


“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.”—John 12; 32. 


, Our Lord was crucified on Friday, April the seventh, in the year 30. On Wed- 
nesday, the fifth of April, He stood for the last time within the venerable precincts of 
the Jewish Temple, and in the hearing both of Jews and Gentiles, pronounced His last 
‘public discourse; a discourse which John alone of the evangelists has reported, and of 
‘which our text may be looked upon as the grand culminating utterance. 
i The lifting up here spoken of has doubtless a double reference: First, to death 
by crucifixion; and secondly, to the glorious exaltation which was to follow. Greek 
proselytes, representing the Gentile world, had asked to see Jesus, that they might 
learn about the kingdom which He had come to establish. In two days more, the 
Founder of this new kingdom would be hanging dead upon the cross. The faith of 
these inquiring Greeks was liable to be rudely shaken by an issue seemingly so 
disastrous. To enable them to withstand this shock, our Lord not only accepts, but 
emphasizes the impending agony. His path, He assures them, will be no defeat, no 
disturbance even of His plans. Lifted up to the cross, He will thence be lifted to the 
tight hand of the Father, and from that heavenly height, will carry on triumphantly 
His redeeming work. Nor need it be thought strange that death should thus be made 
the gateway to life, to glory, and to dominion. Such is the universal law. The corn 
of wheat must be buried in the ground to rot and perish, or it bears no fruit. Man 
himself must die unto self and sin, in order to live unto God eternally. Much more, 
then, must man’s Redeemer die in order to the assumption of His regal power. It is 
as though our Lord had said: Be not troubled when you see Me lifted up to the 
eross; for in this is the beginning of a kingdom, which shall spread from heart to 
heart, from race to race, and from century to century, till it completes at length the 
‘conquest of the globe. 

_ And so the meaning of our text is plain. It does not teach the doctrine of 
“Universal salvation. It does not say that every single member of the human family 
will certainly be saved. The drawing to Himself, which Christ promises, is not a 
compulsory, but a moral drawing, which may therefore, of course, be resisted, and 

endered of no avail. As a matter of fact, palpable to every honest observer, multi- 
tudes of men, stoutly withstanding this divine attraction, have perished and are now 
Perishing in their sins. But the Gospel shall prove no failure. Suited as it is to the 
necessities of all men, and sincerely offered to all, it shall save all who embrace it. 
Nor shall the number of those embracing it be small. That cross of agony and shame, 
teared on Golgotha, shall never be overturned. Men of every race, and clime, and dye 
of guiltiness, shall be drawn towards it, and subdued by it. Everything else on earth 
shall totter and fall away; laws, customs, institutions, religions. But this shall stand 
unshaken amidst the nations. Jews and Gentiles, wise and foolish, high and low, bond 
and free, shall gather round it. High looming amidst the civilizations and the cen- 
turies, it shall stand and draw; working slowly, it may be, but working ever surely 

l its work is done, and great voices are heard shouting back and forth athwart the 
heavens, that the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and 
of His Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever. 


342 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Christianity thus stands committed to the achievement of universal dominion. 
Its Founder puts it forward into history as the universal religion, . fore-ordained to 
universal prevalence. For those of us who worship ‘Christ as God, this prophetic 
assurance of final victory is enough. Our lines might be much thinner than they are, 
our march much slower, our trophies fewer, and still we should not be disheartened. 
We should still stand fast by the ancient bond, which gives Christ the heathen for His 
inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession. Generation after 
generation might succeed to the arduous struggle, and still the Church would keep 
her camp-fires burning, never doubting that the time will come, however distant, when 
her camp-fires shall be kindled, and her banners shake, on every hill-top from the 
rising to the setting sun. 

But if this be true of the Church in her instinctive loyalty to Christ, it is equally 
true that the asserted divinity of Christ is itself on trial. If the religion which He 
established falls short of universal acceptance, if it encounters civilizations superior to 
it, if it comes into contact with races of men which it cannot conquer, then the preten- 
sions of its Founder are brought to shame. Scattered and partial triumphs will not 
suffice. Either Christianity must subdue all things to itself, or be routed entirely from 
the field. If it does not everywhere ultimately prevail, then it is not what it claims to 
be, and ought not anywhere to prevail. 

Setting aside therefore, for the present, the promise of its Founder, ce is de- 
cisive only on the assumption of His divinity, it becomes necessary for us to entertain, 
on independent ground, the question, whether Christianity is likely thus to prevail. 
We shall have to ask ourselves whether there be anything inherent in the system itself, 
or anything in its past history, prophetic of universal dominion. This we know has 
been again and again denied. In the second century it was denied by Celsus, who 
took the ground that different races and nations are preconfigured to different 
religions, and that consequently the expectation of universal diffusion for any single 
religion is a foolish dream. Christianity is thus confuted at the start by the glaring 
absurdity of its aim. Its insane ambition of universal conquest brands it as an imbe- 
cility and a cheat. A skepticism similar to this of Celsus in regard to the ultimate 
universal prevalence of Christianity exists in our day. There are those amongst us, 
affecting philosophy, who have no faith in our evangelism. They may indeed admit, 
what no candor can deny, that the religion of the cross has become the religion of the 
best and ruling races of mankind; but they do not believe that it can be made to 
traverse the whole scale of humanity. There are races of men, it is alleged, who can 
no more take it than they could take the refined philosophy of Plato. These races 
may be overborne and pushed out of history; but evangelized they can never be. Or 
if ever evangelized, it cannot be till they have first been civilized. Nor is the faith of 
Christian men themselves always as firm and buoyant as it should be. The good work 
goes on slowly. Empires like those of China and Japan, embracing more than a third 
part of the population of the globe, and millions of men everywhere, idolatrous and 
stupid, resist our march. On national and historic grounds, apart from the explicit 
assurance of prophecy, have we any right to expect that these empires and these 
millions will ever accept the faith we offer them? 

This question I now propose to answer: First, by an analysis of Christianity 
itself, which by making clear its marvelous adaptation to human wants, such as no 
human system ever exhibited, may at the Same time demonstrate the divinity of its 
origin, and so give double assurance of its final triumph; and secondly, by a brief 
glance at the past achievements of Christianity in its gallant struggle for the dominion 
of the world. 


I. In the first place, what are the distinctive features of Christianity? Wherein 


The Final Triumph of Christianity—Hitchcock. 343 


Joes it differ from other religions? And how do these points of difference stand 
lated to God on the one side, and to man on the other? 


iL. _In enumerating the distinctive features of our religion, we may mention first 
the Incarnation of God in Christ. 
If anything is clear from history, it is clear that human nature can not endure a 
yald spiritual theism. Man has two thoughts of God, equally normal and necessary. 
‘He thinks of God as One Infinite Spirit, wholly separate from matter, without form, 
voice, or changeable affections, transcending the limitations of time and space, wise, 
just, and awful in His holiness. Hence the pure monotheism now recognized as lying 
ir the background of all the better Pagan mythologies. Hence, in part, the triumphs 
f Mohammed, whose wild voice out of the Arabian peninsula went pealing over three 
continents: “Your God is one God.” That there are more gods than one, or that 
his One God is anything else than pure spirit, human reason, in its best estate, has 
always steadily refused to believe. The divine unity and spirituality were affirmed by 
‘Plato, looking the Greek polythism boldly in the face; and were reaffirmed by the 
eo-Platenists as essential parts of their eclectic creed. But human weakness and 
uman sinfulness necessitates another conception of God. Across the great gulf 
between the finite and the infinite, between sin and holiness, the voice of man is afraid 
‘to speak. The human heart sinks discouraged, and shudders with affright. A being 
‘so feeble, and so defiled, must have God near to him. Hence the Patriarchal and 
Hebrew theophanies, in which the ineffable Jehovah is seen wearing the human form, 
nd is heard speaking in human tones. Hence, likewise, the Pagan deification of 
jature and man, and all the inferior divinities of the Pagan Pantheon, bridging, as best 
y might, the bottomless abyss which yawns betwixt the finite and the infinite, the 
sinful and the sinless. The idea of incarnation is thus seen to be congenial to our 
re. And yet in none of the instances referred to was this idea realized. The 
Patriarchal and Hebrew theophanies were only transient manifestations of God in the 
nen form; a temporary expedient of merely provisional economies. They only 
ted a hunger which they could not feed. Still they served what appears to have 
their providential purpose; they prevented at once the worship of nature and 
ie multiplication of inferior divinities. Accordingly for centuries, down even to the 
ne of the deluge, when wicked men shrank away from the awfulness of God, they 
ook refuge not in polytheism, but in atheism. After the deluge, mankind no longer 
ble to be atheists, betook themselves to the worship of innumerable divinities. 
ature in all her rage was defied from the starry hosts on high down to the mountains, 
he rivers, and the trees. At first these natural objects were revered only as symbols 
of the Divine presence and power. At first the carved or molten image was only a 
nbol. But in process of time the symbols themselves were worshiped. Even the 
lebrews, in spite of their theophanies, were still, after the exile in Babylon, constantly 
sing into these idolatries. Outside of Judaism the declension was monstrous. The 
tor was sunk and lost sight of in His creation. In the great hunger of the human 
cart for an incarnate God, polytheism became the faith of the masses, and pantheism 
ne speculation of the schools. Human reason pronounces for unity in its conception 
the Godhead; but the human heart, yearning for sympathy in its weakness, and 
tricken with terror in its defilement, cries out for an incarnate God. 

_ This importunate demand of our finite and sinful nature is for the first time met 
the incarnation of God in Christ. The theophanies were transient 2nd provisional. 
really adumbrated the coming reality. The incarnations of the pagan world 
were all of a pantheistic type, involving no proper personal union between the Divine 

the human. In the pagan philosophies, God could enter humanity no other wise 
than He entered nature. The tree and the man fared alike. But in Christ the two 
natures, each complete and perfect in itself, were united in a real, perfect personality. 

e 
t. 


i 


344 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


He was a man, born of the Virgin Mary, with a real human body, and a real human 
soul; as human in every proper sense of the word as any one of us. He was also God; 
not God the Father, but God the Word, the Second Person in the Trinity, whom 
angels worship and who made the worlds. In one breath we may say of Him that He 
was born and died. In the next breath we may say of Him, before Abraham began to 
be He eternally and unchangeably is. And for three and thirty years this mysterious 
being lived and walked in Palestine. Now he sailed upon the lake, and now He soothed 
its angry billows by a word. Now he was a genial guest at a marriage feast, and | 
now He turned the water into wine. Now He wept before a sepulcher, and now He 
waked the dead. Now He died Himself, and now having risen from the dead, He as- 
cended up where He was before. Such is the Christ of the New Testament. Such was 
the Christ of Christendom for three hundred years before the Nicene Creed echoed the 
speculations of Athanasius. And such has been the Christ of Christendom, by a vast 
preponderance of numbers, in every succeeding century. Such, too, must continue 
to be the Christ of Christendom, by an equally vast preponderance of numbers, 
through all coming time. Here at last our nature rests. Here at last is the great 
hunger of the heart appeased. We need no less, as we can ask no more. God manifest 
in the flesh is the end of all our desires, the solace of all our sorrows, the conquest of 
all our fears. And what is more, even philosophy is now ranging herself on the side 
of faith. From pantheistic speculations there is no legitimate escape but in the 
doctrine of the Word made flesh. Here, then, the sage and the savage meet, bowing 
together at the feet of an incarnate God. The conception of such a divine humanity 
is equally above them both; but as an accomplished fact, it satisfies and renovates, and 
saves them both. 


9. Another distinctive feature of Christianity is the atonement. If as a Roman 
poet has said, it be human to err, equally human is it to undergo the pangs of 
remorse and the fear of punishment. Dualism may affirm an eternal independent 
principle of evil, and pantheism may seek to resolve all evil into good; but the 
conscience of the race refuses thus to be relieved of its crushing burden of guilt. In 
man’s own unperverted and honest judgment of himself, he is an offender, not merely 
against the moral order of the universe, but an offender against the Moral Ruler 
of the universe, against whom personally he has rebelled, and whose inmost moral 
‘nature has been aroused to the vindication of its righteous claims. Punishment is of 
course the instinctive apprehension of the soul that has sinned. Nature, it is observed, 
always punishes, never pardons an offender. Human governments seldom pardon. 
Human society would lose its coherence, and human life itself become a hideous riot, 
were not punishment the rule for evil-doers, and pardon the rare exception. How, 
then, can impunity for sinners be looked for under the moral government of God? 
But the abyss thus opened is frightful; for every human being misery, and that misery 
eternal. Hence a wild cry everywhere for relief. Is there no escape? Is the law to 
have its course? In this sphere of spirit, as in the sphere of sense, must fire always 
burn, and water always drown? Verily they must, says reason; there is no such 
thing as forgiveness. Altars and sacrifices are of no avail. From the very heights of 
the Platonic philosophy, more than two thousand years ago, the verdict came that 
“the gods are not easily propitiated.” Sorrow, O sinner! is bottomless; by penance 
you must yourself atone for the mischief you have wrought. I will not say that human 
beings in their distress would never dare to dream that God might somehow succor 
such misery. But I must say, what no sound thinker will venture to question, that 
there is no safety in reasoning from mere goodness to mercy. The rude peas- 
ant, with low, confused notions of what is due to justice and law, might have 
imagined that somehow pardon was attainable; but philosophy would have 


The Final Triumph of Christianity—Httchcock. 345 


S rebuked his presumption. And yet in spite of philosophy, men everywhere have 


By 


? 


+4 


’ 


had their altars and victims. Whence these altars and victims? Of blind human 
instinct say some, making thus the strongest possible confession of ill-desert, in 
the hope of averting a retribution seen to be justly impending. Of gross concep- 
tions, say others, as though God might be wrought upon and moved to favor by such 
offerings. But penitent confession, how bitter soever it may be, ts no atonement 
says philosophy. Nor is God so coarse and savage a monster as to delight in the 
scent of burning flesh. Let then altars and victims be swept away; they are an offense 
to reason. And yet the altars stand, dotting every continent, and with their huge 
volumes of smoke, blackening the whole firmament. Whatsoever it may be that builds 
them and lights their fires, these altars are evidently indestructible. Philosophy may 
frown but still they smoke. And their meaning is, that sin, in order to be remitted, 
must first be atoned for. The necessity of expiation is what they preach with their 


tongues of flame. But there is no real expiation in the blood of beasts and birds. 


Such victims take away no sin. The whole system of bloody sacrifices is therefore 
vain; a dismal cheat if it promises atonement; and pitiful at best, if it be only a con- 
fession that atonement is needed. Such is the dilemma of philosophy. Here on the one 
side is the admitted universality of sacrifice proving its connection with something 
indestructible within us; and on the other side the demonstration of its impotency. 


From this dilemma Christianity offers the only possible escape. In the sufferings 
and death of Christ it sets before us a real atonement actually accomplished in history; 
an atonement eternally prepared, of course, since God Himself, its author, is eternal; 
an atonement which began its saving work by the very cradle of our apostate race. It 
was no mere show of condescension and of sympathy, enacted for moral effect, but a 
real thing. Christ actually suffered for us in His divine humanity, enduring mysterious 
and immeasurable agonies, that there might be a real satisfaction to the awful justice 
of God. Not God’s honor only but God’s own nature required it. This sublime work 
of atonement was to Him, as well as of Him, penetrating the very depths of His being, 
and answering a holy demand, which otherwise could have been answered only by the 
punishment of the guilty. It was not merely that He might safely pardon, but-that 
He might pardon at all. Pardon required some other basis than that of penitence in 
the offender; it required a basis of satisfied justice in God’s own nature. And that 
basis was furnished by the sufferings and death of Christ. As for man, there was 
nothing for him to do, indeed there was nothing he could do but simply accept the 
atonement thus accomplished for him. He had only to confess his sin and receive 
forgiveness on the ground of what had been done for him by another. In this way 
was Adam saved, if saved at all. It matters not that thousands of years were to roll 
away before the Son of Man should go as it was purposed for Him. The Lamb that 
taketh away sin was already slain—slain from before the foundation of the world, and 


_ faith had only to await the historic consummation of an eternal act. But the goal was 
_ distant and the way was rough. And so the altar was built, and the victim brought, 


not of human impulse or invention, but by divine appointment; not for taking away 
of sin, but only to typify the real sacrifice. That this was too crude a ritualism, 
beneath the dignity of its alleged Original, let no one say who has ever heard of the 
holy walk of Enoch, who has ever heard of the tithes paid to Melchisedek as the 
representative of an economy older and wider than that of Abraham. We who have 
never used nor had need to use these types must be careful how we sit in judgment 
upon the pious men of the elder ages, whose faith embraced not an ascended but only 
a coming Savior. To them these types were eloquent. The gleaming knife, which 
slew the shrinking victim, pierced their own heart. The flame which leaped from the 
altar, pointed its red finger towards the throne at once of justice and of grace. And 
so these men were saved, as all men might have been. The system had certainly its 


346 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


limitations and its perils. There was always danger that type would usurp the place of 
antitype. There was always danger that atonement would be sought for in the sign, 
rather than in the thing signified. When thus emptied of its great meaning, the whole 
sacrificial system of course miscarried. No wonder the Greek philosophy made such 
havoc of the Greek religion. No wonder the time arrived when the masses thought 
all religions equally true, and philosophers thought them all equally false. Even 
among the Hebrews, faith withered into formalism. Indignant prophets accordingly 
denounced their temple service as an abomination. The lamb of the priest had ceased 
to be suggestive of the Lamb of God. But the world was now a temple, an altar, and 
an offering not liable to such abuse. The sensuous types are all withdrawn. The real 
victim has been slain. The atonement has become an historic fact. And so faith 
marches out from amongst the shadows, to lay hold upon the substance. Philosophy, 
which derided the former, cannot deride the latter. Human nature remains unchanged 
in its corruptions, unchanged in its fears, unchanged in its craving for atonement; and 
there is no solid peace for the troubled conscience but in the blood of Christ. 


3. The third distinctive feature of Christianity is Regeneration. As already 
intimated, confession of sin is not confined to Christendom, and is no new thing in 
history. Universal sacrifice, of which we have just spoken, is itself a universal 
confession of sin. It stands confessed likewise in all literature; even in that of China, 
the coldest and poorest of all. In the better literatures, as of Greece and Rome, this 
confession strikes down deep, pronouncing the very nature of raan depraved. “It is 
clear,” says Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, “that not one of the moral virtues 
springs up in us by nature.” “We all have sinned,” says Seneca; “some more, others 
less.” Accordingly when St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, says of all men, 
that they are “by nature the children of wrath,” he says no more than philosophy has 
said before. 

In regard, however, to the genesis of this confessed depravity, the ancient 
philosophers were greatly at fault. Assuming a better original estate of man, they 
explained his present character by supposing a gradual degeneracy. As Coleridge 
has justly observed, they “had no notion of a fall of man.” Only this they knew, that 
the golden age of the race had been followed by the ages of silver, of brass and of iron. 
Of course they knew of no adequate remedy. And yet near the conclusion of Plato’s 
dialogue ‘‘Respecting Virtue,” there is the remarkable assertion, that virtue is neither 
natural nor acquired by study, but comes, if it comes at all, by a divine fate, without 
any purpose of our own. Here at length is a finger pointing in the right direction; 
from the helplessness of man, to the mighty power of God. 

Christianity begins its curative work by a better diagnosis of the disease. It sets 
in a clear light the original rectitude of man, reveals the Tempter, and reports the Fall. 
As by one man sin is said to have entered into the world, and that one man was the 
first man and father of all men, it is seen that the poison is in our very blood. And 
it follows, of course, that a damage so radical can be repaired only by the hand that 
fashioned us. These two points had doubtless been emphasized in the very morning 
of history, along with the promise of redemption and the appointment of sacrifice. If 
Adam and Eve repented of their sin, we may be sure that their repentance was born of 
faith and that their faith was begotten of God. But in process of time these points 
became obscured. The disease ran on, but its origin was forgotten, and the only 
infallible prescription for it lost. Hence the mistaken and fruitless attempts of heathen 
moralists to retrieve by culture a loss which could be retrieved only by regeneration. 

But although Christianity, in its essence, is thus as old as the promise in the 
garden, the coming of Christ in the flesh, inaugurated a new economy of the spirit. 
From the day of Pentecost there dates a more pungent conviction of sin, with a far 
greater energy of renovating grace. From that time onward, wherever the Gospel 


The Final Triumph of Christianity—Hitchcock. 347 


_ went it darted a new light down into the depths of sin, and offered man the very inter- 
-yention of which Plato had only vaguely dreamed. It sounded a new call to 
Berctiance, rendered more urgent by what was disclosed of the origin and malignity 
of the evil; and accompanied this new call to repentance with the offer of certain 
- deliverance. Christ himself touched the very heart of the matter, when he told Nico- 
~ demus that he must be born again. 
But the new birth is not merely a doctrine of Christianty; it is a work of the 
_ Spirit, pledged to attend the faithful proclamation of the Gospel in every age and in 
every land. Persuasion to virtue was the task and function of the pagan moralist. 
| The offer of God’s renewing grace is the task and function of the Christian evangelist. 
* And there is that in man which can be satisfied with nothing less than what is thus 
_ offered in the Gospel. He knows that he has sinned. He knows that his nature is 
_ depraved. And he knows that he has no power to restore himself to the image and 
favor of God. It only remains for him to be told that the hand which first framed 
now offers to renew him. This, and this only meets his case. Made as we are, 
Masliverance from the consequences merely of sin is not enough for us; we must be 
_ delivered also from the sin itself. It matters not what difference there may be of race, 
Dot language, of rank, of culture, of outward morality; it is enough that we are all 
human. The first Adam is forever repeating himself in his offspring. And the one 
_ imperative necessity of every child of Adam is, to be born again. 
Such is Christianity in its grand distinctive features of Incarnation, Atonement, 
and Regeneration. These three features are all in the line of human reason, as is 
seen by reference to pagan philosophies and false religions; and yet are infinitely 
_ beyond and above human reason, as is proved by the fact so palpable to every candid 
inquirer, that no pagan philosophy or religion was ever able to grasp them. Chris- 
tianity thus stands absolutely and sublimely alone; transcending every other religion 
by all the difference there is between a line which reaches only to the clouds, and a 
line which reaches to the very throne and bosom of the King eternal, immortal and 
_ invisible. And not only so, but it fully meets every want of our finite and fallen 
nature. Precisely those things which are peculiar to it as a system, are precisely the 
things we need. The conclusion is irresistible, that a system at once so unique and 
So essential must be of God. And if it be of God, then, as Gamaliel told the San- 
hedrim, it cannot be overthrown. So long as man is man, and God is God, so long 
‘must this religion stand, working its miracles of grace. 


II. It remains for us to glance briefly at the past achievements of Christianity 
that we may determine whether or not it be actually advancing toward universal 
dominion. This we have need to do, not merely for the quickening of our own faith, 
but because an impression is abroad that Christianity can not very well endure this 

historic test. 
It is not to be denied that there is a class of facts which, at first sight, would seem 
to be hardly in keeping with the prophetic vision of universal conquest. Christianity, 
it is said, has been constantly shifting its theater from race to race, from continent to 
continent; losing in the rear, as it gains in the van of its sounding march. Once its 
banner floated over Asia, even to the shores of the Yellow Sea. Once it waved up 
and down the Nile, streaming across the northern provinces of Africa to the Pillars of 
Hercules. Once it rallied the Graeco-Roman civilization beneath its shining folds. 
Now, these conquests it is alleged have all been lost. Asia has gone back to her old 
teligions; and Africa has gone back to barbarism. Arabia begat a prophet as well as 
Palestine; and at this hour, after twelve centuries of trial, more than a hundred millions 
of our race are Mahommedans. From Asia and Africa Christianity finally withdrew 
to Europe, and in Europe crept slowly to the north and west. The Greek and the 
Roman gave place to the Kelt, the Teuton, and the Slay. And even these have so 


348 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


soiled the banner they were elected to bear aloft, that it had to be brought across the 
Atlantic in quest of fresher breezes and a clearer sky. The older nations of Europe, 
it is asserted, are not sinking to decay, as sank the nations which eighteen hundred 
years ago skirted the Mediterranean. Two young nations are now rising rapidly to 
power; on the eastern horizon, imperial Russia; on this western horizon, republican 
America. In less than half a century their united force will dictate the fortunes of the 
world. But they, too, must rot and perish, and the Christian banner committed to 
their keeping again go trailing in the dust. So do some men amongst us interpret 
the annals of the past; and so do they cast the horoscope of the future. 


But there is a sounder philosophy of history than this, and a brighter vision of the 
future. We admit apparent losses in the past; but we claim a real, and from the begin- 
ning till now, a steady gain. In numerical strength the gain has been immense. The 
Christian Church passed out from beneath the hands of the Apostles with a member- 
ship, perhaps, of half a million. When persecutions ceased in the time of Constantine, 
at least ten millions, or about one-tenth part of the population of the Roman Empire 
had taken the Christian name. And now, of the twelve hundred millions supposed to 
be dwelling upon the globe, nearly one-third part are at least nominally Christians. 
From an expansion of membership, so uniform and constant, we are at liberty to 
anticipate nothing less in the end than universal prevalence. As to losses of territory, 
and shifting theaters of conquest, these are of small moment,in the great account. It 
is only the loss of puissant races of men which can tell against us in the historic argu- 
ment. And no such loss has.ever occurred. The Tartar and other races of central 
and eastern Asia, once gained over, in large numbers, by Nestorian and other mission- 
aries, hold a low place upon the human scale. The Greeks and the Romans were the 
masters of the ancient world. And these have never died; nor discarded the Christian 
name. The Greeks are still a Christian people, ruled by a Christian king. The 
Italians are still a Christian people, rapidly uniting themselves under a Christian head. 
And both are commencing a new career, which bids fair to outshine the old. The 
Greek and the Roman Churches are certainly corrupt; but each bears upon its banner 
the name of an inspired Apostle, and those Apostles, Andrew and Peter, were brothers; 
each glories in the cross of Christ; and both must return eventually to the simpler 
rites and the purer doctrines of their better days. As for the newer, and perhaps still 
nobler races of northern Europe, they proved their inherent loftiness of moral temper 
by seizing with avidity the offered Gospel. Barbarians we have called those rugged 
men who overturned the Roman Empire, and trampled its glories underneath their 
invading feet. But for a hundred years or more, they had had the Scriptures in their 
own Gothic tongue; and when they crossed the boundaries of the Empire, as Niebuhar 
thought, were already Christians by a larger percentage than the race they conquered. 
And these Gothic tribes have never relaxed their hold upon the cross. For centuries, 
it is true, they wore the trappings of the papacy; but in time they sent forth Martin 
Luther, and gave us the Protestant reformation. From western Europe, thus recoy- 
ered to the simplicity of the Gospel, sailed the heroes of faith and freedom, whom we 
call our sires. Here at last is a Church without a bishop, and a State without a king; 
here at last is a Christian republic, time’s latest product, and its best. Just now, 
indeed, we are walking up and down the furnace of a great affliction; but the Son of 
God Himself is with us amidst the flames, and He will see to it that nothing shall perish 
but our dross. We are no prophets, but we all of us discern a future now dawning on 
our horizon, over which the Hebrew prophets would have clapped their hands. 


Over against us, as though to balance the’ globe, belting Northern Europe and 
Asia, nay, clasping round to meet us on our own Pacific shore, stands the great 
colossus of the European and Asiatic future; imperial, it is true, in government, and 
Greek in faith, but lifting his masses with him to intelligence and freedom, and destined 


The Final Triumph of Christianity—Hitchcock. 349 


to learn of us the great lesson of religious liberty for all men. France, I know, is 
Roman Catholic and aggressive; but the better faith of her Huguenots is steadily 
advancing; Protestant England with her heart of oak, stands armed and dauntless 
_ behind her cliffs; we ourselves will soon be ready for our task; and then the eldest son 
of the Latin Church will find no mischief which he will dare to do. 

5 Millions of men I know are still idolaters; millions of men are still Mohamme- 
- dans; and millions more still worship Brahme and Budha. But a single Christian 
nation of western Europe outweighs them all. When these millions will begin in 
_ large numbers to accept the Gospel, we cannot tell; but we know that they need the 
Gospel, for they are men. And we know, too, that sooner or later they must receive 
it at our hands. Where the Gospel once went, winning it victories, it can go again, 
_ In the last strategy of the Christian centuries of conflict Asia and Africa were indeed 
abandoned for a time, but our troops are returning to contest anew the ancient fields 
of victory, and already enough has been accomplished to make us confident in regard 
_ to the final issue. What we need now first and most of all is a better Christendom. 
Three hundred and thirty-five millions of mankind now answer the Christian roll-call; 
and they hold in their hands every art, every science, and nearly every resource of 
strength in existence upon the globe. Their lands are filled with plenty; and their 
commerce whitens every sea. Already they clasp the round earth in their stalwart 
arms; and it only remains for them to lift it up, and lay it upon the bosom of its Lord. 
Such, my brethren, is the religion we have in charge; and such the triumph which 
awaits it. For its distinctive features, separating it immeasurably from all other 
religions, it has Incarnation, Atonement, and Regeneration. These are at once so 
much above our own invention, and so exactly suited to our case, as to prove a Divine 
Original. And what God must have ushered into history, will not be let to fall. Not 
His word only, but His whole nature stands pledged to victory. Nor is this a matter 
of faith alone. Our faith is helped by sight. For eighteen hundred years the Chris- 
tian Church has marched from conquest to conquest. The retreats and losses have been 
only temporary and apparent; the invasions and the gains have been substantial and 
abiding. The end is sure. Every false system is yet to be exploded; and every idol 
is yet to be ground to powder. God grant that none of us may be deaf to such a drum- 
beat, leading the host of the Lord’s anointed to such a conquest. 


[Roswell D. Hitchcock was born at East Machias, Me., August 15, 1817, and died 

at Somerset, Mass., June 16, 1887. He was appointed professor of church history at 

Union Theological Seminary in 1855 and president in 1880. His published works 

_ consist of a Complete Analysis of the Bible, and Socialism. 

i This sermon is from the National Preacher and was.preached November 22, 1863, 
at the Lafayette avenue Presbyterian church, New York, and is considered as important 

__as his other famous sermon, The Eternal Atonement. ] 


350 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


CHOICE AND SERVICE. 


MARK HOPKINS. 


“Choose you this day whom ye will serve.’—Joshua 24: 15. 


Probably Joshua is the most illustrious example on record of a great warrior who 
was also a thoroughly religious man. Chosen by God to bring Israel into the promised 
land, he had under him a people trained as no other had ever been. With the excep- 
tion of Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, not a man of them was over sixty years old. The 
faint-hearted and the murmurers of a former generation had perished, every one of 
them, from among them, and the nation, instinct with one life and one Purpose, were 
ready to follow their leader. The faith of that leader never faltered, and with the 
single exception when there was an Achan in the camp, he led them to uniform 
victory. Having conquered the country, he divided to each tribe its inheritance, and 
for a time the land rested in quiet. 

In this quiet the Israelites did not relapse into idolatry. They remained steadfast 
in their allegiance to God. That generation and the succeeding one received a higher 
testimony than any other that has been on the face of the earth. It is said, “And 
Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that over- 
lived Joshua, and which had known all the works of the Lord that He had done for 
Israel.”’ Still, the heathen were not entirely expelled; the Israelites were the descend- 
ants of those who had made the golden calf at the foot of Sinai, and as the time for his 
death drew near, Joshua desired to do something to guard the people against that 
departure from the living God which was the only thing they had to fear. 

Accordingly he “gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and called for the 
elders of Israel, and for their heads, and for their officers; and they presented them- 
selves before God.” Then was seen one of the most solemn and imposing spectacles 
in the history of the nation. This leader, whose success had been so great, whose 
authority had never, like that of Moses, been questioned, now more than a hundred 
years old, stood before the assembled nation, and surrounded by its chief men, 
recounted to them what God had done for them, and required them to choose deliber- 
ately and solemnly the service of the God of their fathers; or, if they would reject that, 
to choose whom they would Serve. The question was to whom they would render 
supreme allegiance, and that question they were then to decide. This decision Joshua 
was careful should be made only with the fullest light. He not only told them what 
God had done, but also that He was a holy God, and the difficulty of His service on 
that account. They heard, they understood, and decided that they would serve the 
Lord. “And the people said unto Joshua, Nay, but we will serve the Lord.” That 
was decisive of the history of that generation. So far as the choice was from the heart 
it decided the influence and destiny of every individual during the whole course of his 
being. 

In this transaction with the Israelites one thing was required and another implied. 
It was required that they should choose their supreme object of affection and worship; 
it was implied, that, having chosen, they would serve him. The choice was to be made 
once and forever; the service was to be perpetual, involving volitions and acts con- 
stantly repeated. In this choice and these volitions the radical character of the 


Choice and Service—Hopkins. 351 


Israelites found expression; in a similar choice and the consequent volitions our 
character will do the same, and on these our destiny will depend. Let us therefore 
look a little at these acts of choice and of volition, as they are in themselves; as 
related to each other; and to human character and well-being. 

Taking then the act of choice, I observe, in the first place, that we must choose. 

There are certain original and necessary forms of activity through which man 
knows himself. These are commonly said to be three—thinking, feeling, willing. In 
reality there are four, thinking, feeling, choosing, willing. These were never taught 
us. They are not the product of will. We do not think because we will to think, on 
choose because we will to choose, any more than we will because we will to will. We 
think and choose and will by a necessity of our nature immediately and directly when 
the occasion arises. These forms of activity we find originally in us, and a part of us; 
they go back with us to our first remembrance and conception of ourselves. If man 
did not find in himself each of these he would not be a man. Free we may be in 
choosing, but not whether we will choose. This is so a condition of our being, that 
the very refusal to choose is itself choice. 

And not only must man choose, he must also choose an object of supreme affec- 
tion. A supreme object of worship, an object of worship at all, he need not choose, 
but of affection he must. 

This belongs to the constitution of our nature. If a man were compelled to part 
with the objects of his affection one by one, as the master of a vessel is sometimes 
obliged to throw overboard his cargo, it must be that there would be a last thing to 
which he would cling. Without this our nature could have neither consistency nor 
dignity. In this the great masters of thought agree, and through it they account for 
the apparent anomalies of human conduct. 


“Search then the master passion—there alone 
The wild are constant and the cunning known.” 


As a river, if it be a river, despite backwater and eddies, must flow some whither, 
and as those eddies and the backwater are caused by the very current they seem to 
contradict, so must there be in man some current of affection, bearing within its 
sweep all others, and that would, if known, reconcile all seeming contradictions. In 
this, too, the Scriptures agree. It is only a statement in another form of the great 
doctrine announced by our Savior, that in the moral sphere there can be no neutrality 
and no double service. “He that is not with Me is against Me.” “Ye cannot serve 
God and mammon.” , 

How far God so reveals Himself to each man as He did to the Israelites that there 
must be a distinct acceptance or rejection of Him, He only can know, but every being 
‘having a moral constitution must be either in harmony with, or in opposition to, the 
_ great principles of His moral government, and thus virtually either choose or reject 
‘Him. 

To know what the supreme object thus chosen and the master passion is, is the 
capital point in the most difficult and valuable of all knowledge, the knowledge of 
ourselves. Not our capacities alone do we need to know, but the set and force of that 
“current within us which is deepest. But what the object thus chosen is, or even that 
he does thus choose, a man may not distinctly state to himself, and it may come out 
into clear consciousness only as he is brought to a test. The covetous man may go 
for years amassing property; the upas tree of avarice may grow till every generous 
affection is withered beneath it, and yet no test may have been so applied as to compel 
him to say to himself, “I am a miser.” He may not even suspect it. If told the truth 

he may honestly, in one sense honestly, as well as indignantly and reproachfully deny 
‘it, and say with one of old, “Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?” A 


& 


352 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Christian may be in doubt whether he loves God supremely. But let persecution come | 
and demand his property, and that will be one test; let it demand his liberty, that will , 
be another; let it demand his life to be given up through reproach and torture, and ~ 
that will be a third and final test. Then will there be a felt ground of consistency and — 
of dignity. The ship will right itself in the storm, and with its prow toward its haven, 
the fiercer the winds the faster will it be driven thither. 

But while we are thus necessitated to choose, and to choose an object of supreme 
affection, the choice itself is free. There is always in it an alternative. In this it 
differs from all that precedes it either in nature or in ourselves. Here it is indeed that 
we find the birth-place and citadel of that great element and royal prerogative, Free- 
dom, which underlies all moral action and accountability. This it is which brings us 
into a moral and spiritual sphere wholly out of and above that of mere nature. The 
sphere of nature has for its characteristics uniformity and necessity, but here is free- 
dom. This element is typified indeed, and foreshadowed in nature through all her 
forms of unconscious life. Wery beautiful it is to see a multiform life working spon- 
taneously toward its ends. Wonderful is that selective power by which the root and 
leaf of each vegetable, and the sense and digestive apparatus of each animal, appro- 
priate that which will build up the life of each, and reject all else. But here is no 
freedom. And the same may be said of all that precedes choice in our own life. We 
must previously have knowledge, but we know by necessity. No man can help know- 
ing his own existence and acts of consciousness. We must previously have desire. 
Hunger and thirst, the desire for food and drink, are necessary; and there are hunger- 
ings and thirstings, appetencies and cravings so running through our whole nature 
that if we do not hunger and thirst after righteousness even, we cannot be filled. But 
here too the congruities are prearranged, and the desire is necessary. As such it has 
a wider range than choice. We desire many things which we do not and cannot 
choose. We desire wealth, position, power; we may desire the possession of the stars, 
or of universal dominion, but we can choose only that which is offered to our accept- 
ance. There is in choice appropriation, and the thing chosen must be in such a rela- 
tion to us that it may, in some sense, become our own. 


But the peculiarity of an act of choice is that there is in it an alternative. This 
belongs to its definition. There is an overlooking of the whole ground, a comparison, 
and a felt power of turning either way. We must indeed choose, but we are under no 
necessity of choosing any one thing. When but a single object is offered us we may 
choose or reject it; when two are offered, both of which we cannot have, as learning 
and ease, power and quiet, pleasure and virtue, we may choose between them. Thus, 
through the whole range of faculties which God has given us, we may choose which 
shall be brought into predominant activity; and through the whole range of objects 
which He has set before us, including Himself, we may choose which we will appro- 
priate as the source of nutriment to our inmost life. 

In this act of choice, having thus an alternative, every man stands forth to his 
own consciousness as free, that a conviction of his freedom must cling to that con- 
sciousness forevermore. The freedom is so a part of the act, and enters into the very 
conception of it, that men generally would as soon think of denying the act itself as of 
denying its freedom. No man can honestly deny it. Hence, as being known at once, 
and certainly, just as is the act itself, freedom can neither be proved nor disproved, but. 
must be accepted on the immediate testimony of consciousness. A man might as well 
deny the fact that he exists, as to deny those characteristics of his being which enter 
into his conception of himself; and of these, freedom of choice is one. ‘‘We lay it 
down,” says Dr. Archibald Alexander, “as a first principle—from which we can no- 
more depart than from the consciousness of existence—that man is free; and therefore 
stand ready to embrace whatever is fairly included in the definition of freedom.” Let 


' 
‘ 


Choice and Service—Hopkins. 


iar lead the mass of men to disbelieve it. They can never really disbelieve it them- 
selves, they can never practically discard it. 

. And this leads me to observe that as freedom finds in an act of choice its cradle, 
‘0 does it also its citadel. 

Interfere with a man in his outward acts, restrain him from passing the limits of a 
wn, shut him up in a prison, fetter his limbs, and you are said to deprive him of his 


understood, but there is still a freedom which you do not and cannot touch. There is 
in choice an activity of the spirit that abides wholly within itself. It neither requires 
nor admits of means, or instrumentalities. or outward agencies. Hence no power, 
human or divine, that does not change the essential nature of the spirit itself, can 
teach the prerogatives of this power. Here is the inner circle of freedom, its impreg- 
mable fortress. Within this, man is a crowned king. Here, though but a beggar, he 


We thus see what choice is. But the Israelites were not only to choose, they were 
By distinct and separate acts of volition, or of will, they were to cause the 
choice thus made to find expression in all their outward life. Let us then, as was 


_ Almost universally, and by the leading philosophers, as Kant and Hamilton, choice 
and yolition have been confounded under the common name of Will. As more imme- 
liately connected with action, volition has been made the more prominent, and 
obscurity and sad misapprehension have been the result. But not only are choice and 
_ Yolition, or an act of the will, not the same, they are totally different. To this I ask 
pecial attention. LE 
_ And first, choice must precede volition. No man can intelligently will an act 
except with reference to some object previously chosen. 
i Secondly, choice, and not volition, is the primary seat of freedom. In a sense we 
re free in our volitions. They are wholly within ourselves, they require no means or 
strumentalities, and no earthly power can interfere with them; but yet they must be 
im accordance with some choice that predominates at the time, and can be changed = 
Qn ly by a change of the choice. But are not men compelled to will what they do not 
choose? Not strictly. By force unjustly used they are said to be compelled to will 
hat they would not but for that, and this is slavery; still the will will be in accordance 
ith the choice on the whole, else a man could not become a martyr. A patriot, 
laving chosen as his end, and with his whole heart, the good of-his country, and while 
hus choosing, cannot will acts in known opposition to that good. He may die, but 
ie cannot do that. 
_ Again, choice and will respect different objects. In strictness, we never choose 
lat we will, or will what we choose. The objects of choice are persons, things, ends. 
he object of volition is an act; always an act. We choose God, we choose a friend, 
a house, a profession, an ultimate end, but we do not will these. To say that we will a 


ill study; we choose an apple that hangs with its fellows upon the bending bough, we 
the act by which we pluck it. 


And as the objects of choice are different from those of volition, so are its grounds. 


354 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


We choose the apple because it is good; we choose a friend for his intrinsic ani 
we choose an end as good in itself; we choose God as infinitely excellent in Himself, — 
and as meeting through that excellency every capacity of our rational being. ‘ 

Always we choose an object for something in itseli—some beauty, some utility, — 
some grace, some excellence, by which it awakens emotion or desire, and comes into 7 
some relation to our well-being. But an action we never will for anything in itself, but 
only as it is related to an end. An action tending to no end would be a folly, and one 
abstractly right without reference to an end, is inconceivable. We do indeed wiil 
actions as right, but we mean by that, sometimes simply their fitness to gain an end, 
and sometimes, also, that the end is good. If the end be good, and be chosen because 
it is good, the action will be morally right; if not, it will be right simply from its 
relation to the end. An act of choice is itself right when the true end for man is 
chosen, and the choice is made, not merely because it is right, but, as all choice must 
be, in view of some good in the end. Universally, then, it is true that we choose 
objects and ends because they are good, and will actions because they tend to secure 
such objects and ends. 

Once more, in choice man is not executive, in volition he is. 

We think, feel, choose, and though active in these, are not conscious of putting 
forth energy. Every one knows the difference between a mere choice, or even purpose, 
and that putting forth of energy by which we attempt to realize our purpose. This 
gives a new element. Before, the man was contemplative, choosing an end, maturing 
plans; now he is executive, working for an end. Choice and purpose are known in 
themselves, volition by its effects, and what these may be experience only can reveal. 

Thus at all points do we find a difference between choosing and serving, that is, 
of willing. Choice is primary—volition secondary; choice is directly free—volition 
indirectly; choice respects persons, objects, ends—volition acts; choice is not execu- 
tive—volition is; choice too has the common relation of source to both willing and 
loving; volition is not a source at all; choice fixes on ultimate ends and absolute value, 
which is a good and not a utility. The very idea of utility is excluded from this sphere. 
A System of Morals based on the choice of a supreme end as good in itself, cannot be 
one of utility. In choosing the supreme end appointed by God for the good there is in 
it, there can be no undue reference to self. If this had been seen, much misapprehen- 
sion would have been saved. Ultimate ends we choose for the sake of an absolute 
value; a utility is a relative value. It belongs to means and instrumentalities, to 
volitions and acts as related to ends. 

We have now considered choice and volition as they are in themselves, and as 
related to each other. If any one should say that these points are too elementary, or, 
if you please, metaphysical, for an occasion like this, I should agree with him if their 
connection were less vital with human character and well-being. That connection it 
remains for us to consider. 

And first, I observe that choice, free as we have seen it to be, is the radical element 
in rational love. In this is the difference between rational and instinctive love. I know 
that mere emotion has stolen the name of love, and that the impulsive affections have 
been made identical with the heart. I know that there are affinities, and attractions, 
and a magnetism between persons as well as things, that there are subtle and inex- 
plicable influences by which individuals are strangely drawn together, and that under 
the domination of these they think they love. And so they may; but not from these 
alone. So long as attractions are balanced by defects of character, or incongruities of 
temper, so long as there is a parleying between the better judgment and the feelings, 
and while as yet there is no ratifying choice, there is no rational love. Let this choice 
be withheld, and however emotion may eddy and surge, it is not love, and in time it 
will die away. But when the deliberate and full choice is made, the heart is given. 


; 


Choice and Service—Hopkins. 355 


Then objections become impertinent, imperfections disappear, and the full tide of 
emotion flows on, tranquil, it may be, but deepening and widening. Choice is not 
emotion, nor a part of it, but it opens and shuts the gate for its flow. It is the 
“personality determining where it shall bestow those affections that are its life. It is 
_ the nucleus of a train that sets the spiritual heavens aglow. Emotion fluctuates; it 
comes and goes with times and moods and health, but love is constant, and this is the 
ot part of love. It is principle as opposed to emotion. In these two—choice 
and emotion—it is that we find what is called in Scripture “the heart.” “His heart is 
fixed,” says the Psalmist. There is the choice and the principle. “Trusting in the 
‘Lord;” there is the emotion. The heart is not the affections regarded simply as 
‘emotion; it is not the will except as will and choice are confounded. It is the affec- 
tions, including choice; born of choice and nurtured by it. Hence, under moral 
‘government the heart may be rightly subjected, not only as emotion, to indirect regu- 
ation, but as choice, to direct and positive command. For God to say, ‘““My son, give 
“Me thy heart,” is wholly within His prerogative as a righteous moral Governor. This 
is a point of the utmost moment, and often but imperfectly apprehended. 


P Again, if choice be thus an element of love, I need hardly say that it must deter- 
mine character. 

___ This follows because the character is as the paramount love. If this be of money, 
the man is a miser, if of power, he is ambitious, if of God, he is a religious man. It is 
‘said by some that character depends on the governing purpose. It does proximately, 
but purpose depends upon choice. We first choose, then purpose. On this, too, 
depends disposition, so far as it is moral. A supreme choice is the permanent dis- 
posing by a man of himself, in a given direction. This is the trunk of that tree spoken 
of by our Savior, when He said, “Make the tree good, and his fruit will be good.” 
From this will flow a sap that will reach the remotest twig and leaf of outward expres- 
sion, and give its flavor to every particle of the fruit. Such a choice will determine not 
only the disposition, but the subjects of thought, the habits of association, the whole 
furniture of the mind. Hence those expressions of the Bible “the thoughts of the 
h ell “the imaginations of the heart,” are perfectly philosophical. Thoughts, imagi- 
nations, fancies, castle-buildings, take their whole body and form from those choices 
nd affections which are the heart. These come and go, but they swarm out as bees 
from the home of the affections, and there they settle again. So it is that ‘‘out of the 
he proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, 
blasphemies;” and so it is that “out of it are the issues of life.” But it is in these, as 
thus springing from the heart, that character is expressed, and hence it is that the 
cart, having its nucleus and salient point in choice, is the character. 


But if character thus depends upon choice, then the connection of choice with 
human well-being opens at once upon us. Under a moral government—and if we are 
under that we can have no hope of anything—if we are not under that there is 
no God—under a moral government character and destiny must correspond. What- 
apparent and temporary discrepancies there may be, ultimately they must 
spond. That they should do this enters into the very conception of moral 
rnment. Settle it therefore, I pray you, once and forever, that as your character 
, SO will your destiny be. Whatever capacities there may be for enjoyment or for 
uffering in this strange being of ours, and God only knows what they are, they will 
¢ drawn out wholly in accordance with character. There shall be no inheritance of 
sessions, or felicity of outward condition, no river of life, or gate of pearl, or street 
1d, there shall be no serenity of peace, or fulness of joy, or height of rapture, or 
y of love; there shall be no hostile and vengeful element, no lake of fire, no 
wing worm, no remorse or despair, that will not depend upon character. It is by 
t bearing upon this that we are to test every claim made upon us in the name of 


356 Pulpit Powcr and Eloquence. 


religion for outward observance and self-denial; and we are to sweep away as super- 
stitions all forms and observances that do not tend to the purification and elevation of 
character, because it is this alone that bears upon destiny. This is destiny. 

We thus see the amazing import and responsibility attached to this prerogative of 
choice. As we are active and practical it is the one distinguishing prerogative of our 
being. Entering into it, not as that which we may do, but as that which we must do, 
it is so a part of our being that it cannot be separated from us, and that its responsi- 
bility cannot be shared by another. It is that by which we make ourselves known for 
what we are. It is by choice only that our proper personality, ourself, acts back upon 4 
the forces that-act upon us. As an original primitive act, admitting no use of means, : 
it requires no one to teach us how to choose; no one can teach us. If I am required i 
to kindle a fire I can be taught how, because means must be used, and there must be 7 
a process; but I must think and choose before I can be taught how. 


As a moral act the results of choice are immediate and inevitable because it is in 
that that morality is. Outward results and general consequences will depend on ~ 
powers and agencies out of ourselves, but this is wholly between man and his God, and 
reacts upon the soul, leaving its own impress forever. To that impress all things 
outward will come to correspond, and thus it is that man decides his own destiny. — 
His destiny is as his choice, and his choice is his own. In this, not alone in immor- ~ 
tality—immortality without this would be but the duration of a thing—in this, crowned 
by immortality, is the grandeur of our being. All below us is driven to an end which 
it did not choose, by forces which it cannot control. But for us there are moments, 
oh, how solemn, when destiny trembles in the balance, and the preponderance of either : 
scale is by our own choice. Do you deny this, ye who speak of the littleness and 
weakness of man, and of the power of circumstances? Ye who scoff at freedom, and . 
sneer at human dignity, and mock at the strivings of a poor insect limited on all sides, — 
and swept on by infinite forces, do ye deny this? Then do you deny that man is made | 
in the image of God. You deny that he can serve Him. You destroy the paternal — 
relation of the Godhead, you blot out a brighter sun than that which rules these visible ~ 
heavens. If God is to be served it must be by a free choice; by a free choice it must 
be if His service is to be rejected. Other service would do Him no honor, other 
rejection would involve no ‘guilt. Feeble as man is, and we admit his feebleness; 
limited as he is, and we admit the limitation, it has yet pleased God to endow him with 
the prerogative of choosing or rejecting Him and His service. Therefore do I call 
upon you, every one of you, to choose this day whom you will serve. I call upon you 
to choose God, the God in whom you live and move and have your being, the God 
who has made you, and redeemed you, and would sanctify you. Him I call upon you F 
to choose and to serve as that service is revealed in the Gospel of His Son. “If the 
Lord be God, follow Him, and if Baal, then follow him.” 

Choice and service—these were demanded of the Israelites, these are demanded 
of you; these only. Choice and service—in these are the whole of life, and heeding 
practically the characteristics belonging to each, your life must be a success. 

To choice belongs wisdom. Here, indeed, and in the choice of ends rather than of 
means, is the chief sphere of wisdom. The whole of wisdom is the choice and pursuit } 
of the best ends by the best methods and means. But in the choice of methods and 
means to secure their ends ‘the children of this world are often wiser in their genera- 
tion than the children of light.” The difference is in their choice of ends. The ends” 
of the children of this world are madness, and this, in the eye and language of the | 
Bible, stamps them as fools. ; 

But while wisdom belongs to choice, to service belong energy and firmness 
tempered by skill. You will be careful here not to mistake for energy a prevalent 
reckless and boastful tendency to “go ahead,’ or for firmness, a dogged obstiae aa 


Choice and Service—Hopkins. 357 


out candor. Indiscriminate antagonism is easy. Denunciation, indignant or 
castic, coarse denunciation mistaking elegance for sin, is easy. By these a reputa- 
t as a reformer may be cheaply gained. But to be energetic and firm where 
principle demands it, and tolerant in all else, is not easy. It is not easy to abhor 
wickedness and oppose it with every energy, and at the same time to have the meek- 
ness and gentleness of Christ, becoming all things to all men for the truth’s sake. The 


another to give to four millions of slaves all their rights. Here, I repeat it, is your 
de ger. Here it was that the Israelites failed. Their choice was right; their resolution 
was good; they promised well, but they failed to take full possession of the promised 


well-doing; there is a country to be made united, peaceful, prosperous, free, wholly 
free; there is that better time coming for which the whole world waits; there is, above 
all, a promised land beyond the dark river. All these are a promised land to you, and 
wait with more or less of dependence on your wisdom and energy. They are no 
illusions, Bright as any or all of them, except the first, may seem to you to-day, if 
you do your part, the reality will be brighter. Always the realities of God transcend 


Wisdom and energy—this is the watch-word that I would give you as you go down 
nto the battle. Do any of you say, we have not wisdom? I say to you, “If any man 
‘ack wisdom let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, 
and it shall be given him.”” Do you say, we have not strength? I say to you, ‘Lo, 
e is strong,’”’ and “underneath are the everlasting arms.’’ Guided by His wisdom, 
strong in His strength, there may yet be for you struggle and suffering, the darkness 


{Mark Hopkins was born in 1802 and died in 1887, was principal of Williams 
\ ollege from 1836 to 1872, and professor of moral philosophy. He wrote a number of 
books, The Law of Love and Love as a Law, The Study of Man, etc. President 


Garfield was one of his pupils, and he said once that the best definition of a college 
was a boy on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other-] 


358 : Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE GOSPEL A COMBATIVE FORCE. 


BISHOP JOHN F. HURST. 


“Think not that I am come to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, 
but a sword.”—Matt. 10: 34. - 


Our humanity is an uneven thing. Like the seas over which we sail, and the 
dome of sunlight and cloud above us, it is changeful, and is a matter of endless 
surprises. It despises uniformity and monotony, and takes delight in sudden and 
violent contrasts. Of precisely the same nature is the Gospel, which aims at the 
saving of our humanity. It is the most manifold system known to the world’s annals. 
Of all the gems in the precious treasure box of truth, it has the most faces, and the 
flash from them is quickest and reaches farthest. The ancient seer now depicts the 
coming Messiah as a victor over many foes, coming “from Edom, with dyed garments 
from Bozrah, glorious in His apparel, and traveling in the greatness of His strength;” 
and now the same prophet describes Him as “The Everlasting Father, the Prince of 
Peace.” Ages later, when the prophecy became a fulfillment, the angels sang of the 
incarnation as “peace on earth” and ‘“‘good-will toward men.” Still later, when the 
infant became the preacher of the Beatitudes, he declared: “Blessed are the peace- 
makers: for they shall be called the children of God.” In the final period of His 
incarnate life, when the clouds of the great passion began to gather thick and fast, and 
the cross was in full vision, and the Savior needed every friend from far and near, to 
the impulsive disciple who had drawn his sword in His defense, He said: “Put up 
again thy sword into his place; for all that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” 
Yet it is this same One, the dumb sheep before the shearers, whose speech was hardly 
greater than His silence, whose lips also said, that He came not to “send peace, but 
a sword.” 

To such a contrast between an aggressive and combative spirit on the one hand; 
and a sublime and silent patience on the.other, there is no analogy among men. In 
the presence of these divine opposites all human diversities grow insignificant. Paul 
comes nearest in his approaches. Patient, tender, and sympathetic as he was, to no 
Troy or Cannae or Gettysburg need we go to find a more daring hero than was he 
who said of the Gospel, that it was “sharper than any two-edged sword.” 

The solution of these contrasts in character and speech lies in the perfection of the 
blending of such strong colors. Christ was not all patience. He combined the hero 
with the silent sufferer. Paul harmonized the tireless apostle, daring, heroic, ever 
fearless, with the preacher of the charity which is the greatest, and with the willing 
martyr who could say at last, as he looked back upon no lost battle-field, “I am now 
ready to be offered.” The Gospel, therefore, is both an olive-branch of peace and a 
sword of keenest edge and irresistible thrust. In a Florentine gallery one comes to a 
room where he sees a perfect statue from an unerring ancient chisel. It is poised upon 
a pivot, which a child’s hand may turn; and, as the immortal marble revolves, the light 
from the broad. window reveals now a beauty of grace and outline, now a perfection of 
strength and endurance, and now a flexibility of form—the whole a happy blending of 
those rare and varied qualities that floated first in the creative mind of the Greek 
sculptor. So, as the rays fall on this matchless figure of the truth we call the Gospel, 


The Gospel a Combative Force—Hurst. 450 


we discover a perfect combination of the qualities which save—silence and speech, 


This combative quality of the Gospel has a wonderful fascination. It appeals to 
sense of heroism and aggressiveness in either the individual or the communion 
which possesses it. Where there is no vertebral column of vigorous theology, you 


flabby cheek and the lack-lustre eye. One can endure a deformity better than a 
negation. Cromwell, with wart upon his face, and Milton, with blind eyes, are fairer 
figures in the horizon of history than the most polished Tudor or Stuart who 
oppressed the weak millions. Christianity, when it stood first before the world, had 
its face, which was the open index of the vital fires which burned within. Think of the 


mt over all the seven—the type of the majesty and potency of man over the resisting 
forces of the world in which he lives. Behold the historical David, with the flush of 
the sweet Judaean hills in his face, and a consciousness of his royal destiny 
his heart, bringing the Philistine giant to the dust, and giving to his people a peace 
which the bronzed army could not hope to win. You see a Joan of Arc leading the 
French hosts to deeds of valor never surpassed in the annals of the world’s warfare— 
the type of the power of womanhood on the throne, on the battle-field, and in the 
home. But you fail to find any analogy to the young and valiant Christianity, as it 
stood before the world, in the presence of Judaism and paganism, the sworn foes of 
every step of its advance. With unblanched cheek and steady eye and drawn sword 
it went from one field to another, making no compromise with any faith that sued for 

s valorous friendship, conquering the old lands for its new Gospel, stripping the 
venerable temples of their dying faiths, releasing the prisoner and the slave, filling the 
ery archway of the firmament with its songs of triumph, occupying the Roman throne 
by a natural gravitation, threading the deserts, climbing the mountains, penetrating 
the savage northern forests, building its churches, rearing happy homes, establishing 
schools, and constructing a civilization new to the world. Such was this new com- 
batant in the warfare of ideas. It was the hero who never trembled in the presence of 
any foe. It never came back from the battle upon its shield, but always with it. 


nines of a decaying planet, and whose every figure upon its broad and shining disc 
might, indeed, be carved with such skill and care as only blind Homer could sing of 
th shield of Achilles. The Christian’s shield was far more, and is more still, for it is 
the shield of faith, forged in the fires of God, and fore-ordered for successful resistance 
wherever the strong arms of His servants raise it in defense of the right. 


The utility of the Gospel, in its combative and aggressive quality, may be seen in— 
I. The doctrinal triumphs of the church. The great foundation on which the 
_ church of Christ rests is a compact and firm system of theological truths. There they 
hie, the basis of all Christian experience, the authority of all religious activity. It is 

this which marks the difference between Christianity and paganism, between the 
believer and the idolater. Each one of these doctrines has its authority in the Bible, 
ts distinct individuality, its separate history, its record of immortal worth through all 
© years since its formulation. Besides this separate type of purity and worth, each 
2 loctrine has its relationship to the whole. Each is a link in the chain of the unbroken 
which have been brought from the quarry and shaped for their place in wall, or arch, 
t bridge, and yet all firmly joined by that subtle cement with which the Romans, 


360 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


greatest of all the worlds builders, knew how to defy the storm and heat of all the 
ages. So, in the doctrinal structure of Christianity, do we observe an individuality of 
the doctrines, but at the same time a firmly articulated and cemented system, which 
constitutes the vantage ground of the church for all its triumphs. 

Let me ask, What is the history of these Christian doctrines? Have they come to 
us as the finished gifts from the skillful hand of the Divine Architect, or has He given 
only the inspired direction and left the workmanship to man? I answer, There is not 
a doctrine in the entire organism of the church’s faith, which has not come to us in 
the abstract, while the concrete development has been left to the human co-worker 
with God. Had each doctrine its tongue, and would tell its history, it would reveal a 
romance of courage that would put to blush the story of Xenophon’s retreat, and the 
inspired daring of Leonidas or Charles Martel. Every one of our sublime Christian 
doctrines is the price of blood. When Froude was one day walking through the 
market of Scotch Leith, he inquired of a woman the price of her fish, and chaffed her 
for asking too much. She sadly replied, “But they are the price of men’s lives.” 
Right was on her side, for they had been caught at great risk from the wild waves and 
angry tides of the treacherous North Sea. So each doctrine of the Christian structure 
of holy faith has been shaped, and placed in position, at the great cost of the sublimest 
heroism of faith. 

Let me individualize. Look at that majestice.truth, the doctrine of justification 
by faith. An Augustinian monk is reading the revelation of it in a black-letter Bible 
in the Erfurt monastery, making a pilgrimage to Rome, rising on his feet, against all 
codes of propriety, with the words, “The just shall live by faith” in his mind and on his 
conscience, beginning a new life, nailing the old superstitions to the door of the 
Wittenberg church, and with the click of his hammer waking the dead to life from the 
rising to the setting of the sun. 

The sanctity of the Sabbath, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the Christian’s firm 
belief in miracle, and indeed, in the doctrines of the truth, the shield of our higher 
Christianity, are precious trophies borne off by faith and heroism. 


II. In moral reform we observe another exhibition of the worth of the antagoniz- 
ing Gospel. The broad face of society abounds in great moral wrongs, images of 
impurity, and it is the part of the Gospel to attack these, and to rear in their place the 
grand creations of a pure Christianity. The church that sleeps in the presence of any 
crime deserves to die, and be buried in the nearest ecclesiastical potter’s field. The one 
who calls himself a Christian, and is unmoved by the biting serpent and stinging adder 
of alcohol, and refuses his speech and example to aid in putting it to death, richly 
merits the loss of all citizenship in this free republic. No great morality comes to us 
unbidden. We must struggle for it with mighty will, or we never acquire it. Every 
victory which we have gained in the realm of a higher social life has been hotly 
contested, and has been won at last only by nerve of steel and quick sabre-stroke. 

Stand with me on the height which overlooks the calm and beautiful plain that lies, 
as if it might be a piece of rare tapestry from the Gobelin loom, around the still walled 


and moated medieval Nuremberg. Look at that grim historical castle which crowns — 


the height. Its thick walls and grinning windows have witnessed many a close 
conflict. Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus are only two of the thousand who have 
fought for its possession. It has been the coveted prize of great warriors and their 
strong armies for many centuries. There is not a granite block in all the structure 
that does not sing its legend of plenteous bloodshed. So, in all the mighty fortresses 
-. of our great reforms, there is not a stone which has not been gained by mortal conflict. 
- ,Walk about the great citadel of the reforms of all these later days, and count its 
bastions and measure its walls, and go beneath the jagged teeth of its portcullis, and 

st&nd in calm beneath the sunlight of its esplanade, and you know that there is not a 


yi 


Ss 


The Gospel a Combative Force—Hurst. 361 


stone on which you stand, or native granite far beneath your feet, or a quiet home far 
off in the distance, or an acre that springs into beauty at the husbandman’s wand, 
vhich has not become a prize at the end of bitter and relentless war. 


Ill. We see a further illustration of spiritual combative force in the believer's 
personal development. When the heart is changed there is only the beginning of the 
Christian life. Not a muscle has been trained to vigorous work; not a nerve has been 
taught its fine vocation of quick sympathy; every faculty of the mind enters upon an 
untrodden path. God's ideal for His child is not a perpetual infancy, but an immortal 
_ maturity. He means no raw recruit, masquerading on the drill-ground before the 
barracks, but the broad battle-field, beyond river and mountain and desert, a thousand 
miles away, with the innumerable hosts of the enemy in full and threatening front. 
His purpose for the new nature is growth—accretive, steady gain. The law is 
‘inerease—‘‘first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.” “Giving all 
diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, 
‘temperance; and to temperance, patience; and to patience, godliness; and to godliness, 
brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, charity.” It is one grace after another, 
‘until manhood, an ever stronger manhood, is reached. God means “the perfecting 
of the saints till we all come, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son 
of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” 
This completeness of Christian character, then, is what God’s ideal means for every 
believer. To attain it requires great discipline, the ordeal of severe struggle. Haw- 
thorne, the keenest analyst of human nature produced by our country, says that a 
woman’s face is never so beautiful as when she has passed through a great trial. Is 
not all beauty of soul the result of conflict? Look at your stronger and better 
: characters in the sacred gallery of heroes! Did not Moses acquire that calmness of 
_ manner and equipoise of character by a rigid discipline of forty years of monotony and 
‘toil as a shepherd in Midian? He was first developed before God committed to him 
the spiritual leadership of the race. Was not Elijah trained for his faith in the plain 
a below before he was ready to see the cloud from the top of grand old Carmel? 

_ No moral strength comes save by struggling for it. It is trial and sorrow that 
ing out the beauty of the soul. We look at the beautiful flower and enjoy its 
agrance, but we must not forget that it was once a wild thing, clinging to some bald 
orwegian boulder, brought away from its barrenness by some Linnzus, and taken 
9 a warmer sun and friendly soil, and developed into a plant fit for a royal hall or a 
mple service. Look at the sparkle of the diamond. We must not forget that it 
nce lay in the earth in the rough, and that only the sharpest and hardest instruments 
ould cut it into smooth faces and perfect angles, and let the sun find its way to its very 
heart. Behold the coin fresh from the stamp! Never could you see the fine design 
_ and trace the beautiful legend until the gold had been rescued from the mine and 

passed through the ordeal of fire and force. The same inward process of purification 
ongs to the souls. Whenever you see a pure and noble character, know that 
Somewhere, in the obscurity of the work-shop or the ministry of home, there has been 
mete for purity, a long strife for development, and that symmetry and steadiness 
ave come after supreme and unrelaxing effort. I see a Christian apostle brought into 
F he presence of a representative of royalty and commanded to make his defense. His 
mies have presented charges. He is told he may now speak. With masterly 
nner he passes from one firm proposition to another, in his irresistible logic. By 
nd by you see a tremulousness, a stir, an unsteadiness. But in whom? Let us read: 
As Paul reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trem- 
d.” It was the man on the throne, the representative of Roman authority, every 
ad and fold of whose purple robe shook with fear. Paul was as undisturbed as 
calm sun in that Syrian sky. He, the accused and the prisoner, conquered the 


362 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


occupant of a throne. Yet his real conquest was not there, but long before, in the 
darkness of the prison. The perfect victory is won before the battle begins, in the 
long and steady battle with one’s own self. Like the flower, we see triumph only aiter 
the forces have been at work in secrecy and in silence. 

The time is coming when they who have come up through great tribulation shall 
receive the welcome home and enter upon their life of happiness. All tribulation is 
the price they pay for the crown and the robe and the palm. In the old Roman days, 
the husbandman had his tribulum, a heavy block of wood to which was attached a 
rope and that was connected with the staff or handle which was wielded by his strong 
arm. The grain was put upon the threshing-floor. The man who was to thresh it 
brought down his great tribulum upon it, first in one place and then in another, until 
the chaff and the grain were separated and the winds of heaven bore off the chaff 
while the golden grain lay upon the threshing-floor. The tribulum has done its work, 
The grain is bright and beautiful and ready for grinding into finest flour. Had we 
our own way in all our plans, were our purposes never interfered with by the holy 
mind and the stronger hand, we should never be fit for the Master's use. Do we not 
recall the question as the multitudes of triumphant souls surround the throne, “What 
are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?” The answer 
comes back, “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed 
their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” 


[This sermon his not been printed but was copied especially for its use in Pulpit 


Power and Eloquence. It contains a vigor that seems to be slipping away from a_ 


great deal of present-day preaching, and will have served its purpose if it spurs up 
those who read it. 

John Fletcher Hurst was born in Dorchester county, Maryland, Aug. 17, 1834. 
He studied theology at University of Halle and Heidelberg, entering the Methodist 
ministry in 1858. Became instructor at the Methodist missionary institute, Bremen, 
then professor historical theology, then president of Drew Theological Seminary, 
1873-1880. His literary work embraces books on theology, history and travel; bishop 
of the Methodist Episcopal church since 1880.] 


, 
; 
| 


THE REFORMATION OF THE FAMILY. 


PERE HYACINTHE. 


Ladies and Gentlemen: The importance of questions affecting the family becomes 
enhanced in the presence of institutions of popular government. Over against that 
rowing and agitating individualism to which it ought to act as a counterpoise, unless 
he family represents the force of a wise and liberal conservatism, it becomes the instru- 
ment of the most dangerous and obstinate reactions. And if, unhappily, its influence 
hould cease, or rather should decline, for the family is incapable of being wholly 
lestroyed—the order of society would find that its natural foundations had given way, 
ind the impotence of political forces to stand alone would be laid bare to the eyes of 
ll. The question of the family, then, a question of all ages, is peculiarly the question 
the ages and lands of popular government. 

Now, it is a fact, which unfortunately needs no proof, that the family is impaired 
verywhere, and, I think, particularly so in our own country. I do well, therefore, to 
ike up the question of its restoration. I did this ten years ago in the pulpit of Notre 
Jame. My point of view has not changed since then; my convictions have only 
eveloped and strengthened, and I shall speak to you from the same principles, and 
iometimes with like expressions. Less than ever can I take part with those chimerical, 
mot perverse minds which propose to better the family by a course of headlong 
mnoyation. I hold, on the contrary, that the maxim of Macchiavelli is here peculiarly 
plicable, that ‘‘institutions are to be reformed only by carrying them back to their 
riginal.”” 

_ What, then, is the original of the family? Is it a sort of legalization by the State 
ad by religion of the baser instincts of human nature? I blush to put the question, 
it I am forced to do so, because the moral sense of some men is so gross as to make 
necessary. If the family were nothing but this, generous souls would turn from it 
iscorn, and adopt that ancient motto out of Homer, “Live wifeless and die childless.” 
hristianity has planted itself at quite another point of view, and if it has proposed to 
ptional persons in exceptional circumstances the type of absolute asceticism, it 
, at the same time, glorified the family, and opened it to all, not as a refuge 


Shall we find it in fatherhoood? Of all the heights of human existence, 
herhood is one of the sublimest. In contemplation of it St. Paul exclaims, “I bow 
y knees before the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom all fatherhood in 
aven and earth is named!” Fatherhood is a lofty height; but it is not lofty enough. 
is not there that the human family has fixed its throne. That, if you will, is its 
rious footstool, but not its royal seat. 

What, then, is the original of the human family? Doubtles, fatherhood is a fact 
capital importance, but it is an intrinsic fact, and consequently does not constitute 
‘inward essence of wedlock. Ask of reason, and you will learn that there is one 
v of love for persons and another for things. We love a thing for our sake, but a 
son for his own sake, If fatherhood was the prime and absolute end of marriage, 


364 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the wife would be lost in the mother, the companion of man would be only a means to 
an end—a noble and sacred means to the perpetuation of our race, but still a means. 
Asia would be in advance of Europe, and Mussulman barbarism of Christian 
monogamy. That be far from us! The family must rest essentially on the disinter- 
ested love of two human beings, loving for love’s sake, taking each the other for their 
mutual end, and finding in the unselfishness of this choice the fulfillment of their moral 
nature. For just as when man loves his God, loves truth, righteousness, absolute and 
living—for this is God—it is for the very excellence of this sublime object, and yet he 
receives of Him, out of measure, overflowing, never-failing, the joys of reason, con- 
science, heart and all His being; just so in wedded life, there is the devotion of each 
to each, but at the same time they become each the complement and so the felicity of 
the other. For the man is not humanity; the woman is not humanity; but man and 
woman are the two fragments, the thesis and the antithesis, if you like the phrase, that 
unite in the sublime synthesis of marriage, at once human and divine. 


The-intellect, with the law that governs the relations of person to person—the law 
of finality and not utility; the heart, with the law that governs all great affections, 
friendship as well as love, the law of self-devotion; the intellect and the heart, both 
answer us by showing us the essence of the family in that bond, pre-eminently a moral 
bond, which unites forever in one being a man and a woman. 


And now suffer me to interrogate the Bible. I did this in last Sunday’s discourse, 
and we saw what profound philosophy is hidden in its neglected pages. We observed 
the harmonious and progressive development of the material creation up to the unfold- 
ing of man, spirit in flesh, flesh in spirit—the crown in this world of the completed 
work of the creative thought. Now, Genesis tells us also of the creation of woman 
and the duplication of human nature in its two parts—the masculine and rational, and 
the feminine and effectional. Genesis carries us back to a scene which it calls Eden. 


What wonder that mankind begins in Eden! Understand me at the outset, I do 
not attempt to define exactly the historical value of the narrative. My reason presents 
no objection to it, for there must needs, at the origin of the species, have been some 
strange transactions in the world, and miracle for miracle. I like the Bible story 
better than the hypotheses of some men of science. But I am not unaware that in 
dealing with the mysteries of the beginning and the end—mysteries beyond the reach 


of our reason and our imagination, and of all our present faculties—both Genesis and — 


Revelation make use of symbols that are not to be taken literally, lest we belittle the 
things, not less real but more vast, which the letter unveils to us by veiling them. 


I say, then, that for my part I find it no wonder that the Bible story makes man 
begin in Eden. Is it not thus that all of us begin? Is not man born into the midst of 
the scenes of nature as into an enchanted garden, whose forms, whose colors, whose 
perfumes have for his infancy and childhood charms, delights and revelations 
which by and by he will cease to find in them? Every life has its dawn, its spring- 
time—dawn and spring-time that seem destined to be eternal. Even until now, life 
begins with a never-to-be-forgotten dream of innocence and bliss! 


Here, then, we find ourselves, with Adam, in Eden. The whole scene shows us 
that we are in the ideal regions of human stature, and that we have nothing to do with 
the instincts of a weak and fallen creature. We are in Eden. Human nature stands 
before us, not finished, but magnificently roughed out, in that being who has retained 
more especially the name of man; and in him the thing that shines most obviously and 
conspicuously in his face is the power of thought and will. The Apostle Paul, uncon- 
sciously commenting on Moses, tells us that “the husband is the head of the wife.” 
Behold that dominating and commanding brow! Beneath his penetrating gaze 
creation is displayed. It appears before him in its noblest works—those that come 


ee 


The Reformation of the Family—H yacinthe. 365 


nearest to man himself—the animals. The lips of Adam move, and he gives them 
; ames. There, O philosophy, you see the difference between man and brute—it is 
ound in speech. Let science compare the species to its heart’s content, and liken 
man to the lower beings. Speech remains, not as a shade of difference, a gradation, 
but as a great gulf between him and them, for it is the sign and instrument of abstract, 
free, reflective thought. And not until you shall have succeeded in evoking smiles 


“near each other the edges of that yawning chasm that separates forever the thinking 
‘being from that which cannot think. 

Man called the creation by its name; he conceived it; he commanded it. And yet 
amid all this happiness, despite this power and this intelligence, he was not happy. 
Adam found no helpmeet for him. His reason was seeking for life; his head was 
inclining toward his heart. At this point begins the second scene of the drama of 
creation. 

He sleeps a deep sleep. Ah! once again suffer me to exclaim, “Oh, the 
philosophic depth of the thoughts of Holy Writ!” Come away, my friends, withdraw, 
‘like the first man, from this common—I had almost said this vulgar scene, into which 
_ we are ushered every morning and in which we abide until evening; this scene which 
we call the real world, but which is only the apparent world, the world of phenomena, 
"passing forms, not of abiding substance, of sensible effects, not of the causes which 
_ produce them and which escape the scrutiny of the senses! Withdraw from this 
waking scene and enter into the slumber of the senses—into that immediate intuition, 
that deep contemplation, that trance of the understanding and the reason in which we 
behold the inmost depths of things. “And Adam slept a deep sleep.” It was there, 
at the fountain-head of being, and not in this common world in which we dwell, that 
‘the primordial reduplication of human nature was effected for all the coming time. 
The woman is not a being alien to man. She is not to be animated by a breath 
_ different from his. She is not to be formed like him, of lower substances, as of the 
dust of the earth. She is to radiate from the man like his consciousness, or, as St. 
Paul says, like his glory. “The woman is the glory of the man.” She is to radiate 
from man, but not from his brow—the brow is the seat of thought. Ah! this splendor, 
this flame, this glory must go forth from the heart. There it is that the story of 
Genesis shows us its origin. And when the mysterious production is finished, man 
so is finished, and the Creator, so far at least as concerns this globe, may enter into 
His triumph and His rest. Man exists now in his completeness—the head, the heart; 
the heart that thinks in the head, the head that loves in the heart; head and heart, man 
and woman, united in supreme harmony and bearing a single name. “In the day that 
God created man, male and female created He them, and called their name Adam— 
man.” Such is the first page of the Bible, to which perhaps you have never given a 
thoughtful reading. I repeat it: I have no concern with the story, more or less literal, 
of two individuals. What I discern in it with certainty, with profit, with admiration, is 
‘the typical but authentic and revealed history of the moral and religious origin of the 
amily, of society, of all humanity. 

____ It is by the harmonious combination of thought which predominates in man, and 
affection which predominates in woman—by the union of the head and the heart, 
which is the condition and the principle of the union of man and woman—that the fair 
and noble structure of the family is to be reared up. But, mark it well! with this is to 
be reared the whole structure of society, for society is but the development of the 
family. For what is the nation but the circle of contiguous homes? What is the 
Nation but the expanded family? How is it that we feel in common that we are 
Frenchmen? Is it that we speak one language and are of one blood; that for centuries 
we have developed one sentiment of brotherhood, on one territory, watered with the 


366 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. } 


sweat and sometimes with the blood of ourselves and our ancestors? This makes the — 
nation our country—this sense of brotherhood and fatherhood. Fatherland! Land — 
of the fathers and the children! Now, in the fatherland, as in the family, the two great — 
influences meet together—the thinking head, the loving heart—head and heart that 
are to think, love, act as one; and woe to society when they are separated one from 
another—when the man’s influence and the woman’s influence become not only 
distinct but hostile! Of these two forces one will not destroy the other, for you cannot 
destroy nature; but they will come into collision in the worst of all civil wars! By 
every fireside, in every parlor, in the sanctuaries of every church, even in the counsels 
of the state, everwhere you will see the affectional force, the moral force, the religious 
force—too often darkened and’ perverted in woman—holding in check and sometimes 
driving back the scientific, liberal, progressive force personified in man. 

And now from the conception which we have contemplated, let us turn our atten- 
tion to the actual fact: which is it, unity or variance? Doubtless, the reality is not 
always the opposite of an ideal state of -ociety. Whatever superficial or unfair 
observers may think, there is no race on earth in which the family sentiment is as 
strong as in the French race. 

I am not here for an effort of flattery. I am not capable of it anywhere, least of 
all before this great audience. I am not here for a work of rhetorical art—I make no 
claims to rhetoric in these discourses. I am here before these free and thoughtful 
consciences, on a mission of morality and patriotism, while waiting to be received on 
a mission of religion. I set before your consciences my own experiences and convic- 
tions. If I had the power to impose them on a single one of my fellow-men, I would 
not do it. Only hear me, and then judge. 

I say that in a part of the society of France—I might say of Europe, but you will 
understand why I am chiefly concerned with my own dear and glorious country—the 
spiritual unity of the home is not adequately attained, and that, as a fatal consequence, 
the unity of society itself is affected. I have said this, and I shall prove it. I shall 
prove it by considering the family at two principal points—before marriage and after. 

Before marriage, here are two children, unacquainted with each other, or, if they 
have been brought together through neighborhood or family acquaintance, they know 
nothing of the future that awaits them; and yet they are foreordained for each other. 
Despite the abuse that certain theologians have made of the term, I believe in fore- 
ordination in the order of eternal destinies—that just and reasonable foreordination in 
which the liberty of man is not overborne by the liberty of God. But leaving aside the 
mysteries of theological speculation, I believe, or rather I clearly see, each day fore- 
ordination in the order of nature. There are plants, animals—fauna and flora—whose 
place is marked out for them in advance in such a region of the globe, or in such a 
geologic period. And in another order that seems more modest, but which is really of 
far higher dignity, there are souls which, whatever they may do, can never be 
developed apart from each other. Woe to them if they never meet each other, or if 
they meet amiss! These children, then, are foreordained for each other. How are 
they prepared for each other? The young man is the head; what needs training in 
him is those gifts which he has received in greatest abundance—the gifts of intellect; 
but it is also the heart, for we are always liable to fall on that side toward which we 
lean, and withal the heart is the point of contact by which, by and by, in the course of 
moral and domestic development, the man is to come into harmony with the woman. 

Now, I ask, does the education which we give to young men nowadays develop, 
as it ought, the heart and the affections? I put the question, and the answer I get is— 
science! Now, there is no more proud and jealous friend of science than I, only let it 
be science complete, not self-mutilated, self-isolated from human life. Science is more 
than observation and experiment in visible nature—more than the nomenclature of 


The Reformation of the Family—Hyacinthe. 367 


facts. Spirit is not of less account than matter, neither is it less fruitful of diversified 
nd positive studies. Doubtless our young men do study history in connection with 
the natural and abstract sciences, and it is not for me, amid this circle of illustrious 


the soul of a people and into its coming fate. This is history worthy of the name! 
And can we, in fact, separate the reason from the conscience, the heart, the imagina- 
tion even? Can we put abstract truth on one side and life on the other? Is it the 
tight and normal course for thought which ought to circulate through the whole 
human being like a generous blood, when, as if seized with vertigo, it rushes to the 
brain in a fit of metaphysical intoxication or in a stroke of mental apoplexy? Such 
‘science I would none of for our sons. And yet it is to such science as this that they 
are often condemned for the most noble, fruitful and critical years of youth. 


But, I am told, there is religion, which is provided for in the course of instruction 


Too often religion is presented to the young man under a form or in a spirit which 
he cannot accept, or can only accept as a family tradition, not to be too closely 
examined, but not entering into practical life. Ah, well I know that God’s truth does 
not change with succeeding ages or with varying climes. We cannot say it is truth 
this side the Pyrenees and falsified the other side. But there are forms of the truth 
predestined for this country or that, for this century or that, and the form of religious 
truth needed today for cultivated, manly young Frenchmen is not the form that was 
fitted for the Middle Ages, and which is no longer wanted either in Italy or in Spain. 


And so it comes to pass that religion, even when it exists, has a little cell to itself, 
all closed and dark, in the young man’s brain, and does not pass, like a free and all- 
powerful breath, over his whole life and soul. 


But then there is morality. Yes, morality. Gentlemen, in my opinion it is a great 
stake to think of religion as the only thing that divides men’s minds, and of morality 


the finger of nature in the recesses of our conscience, that morality indeed is one, not 
vo. But this book of the conscience is like all other sacred books—men sometimes 


nevertheless, by many persons, that there are two standards of right and wrong, one 
or individuals and the other for nations? And among individuals, alas! that there is 
One standard of right and wrong for men, and another for women! 


These are commonplace remarks, I know, but the applause that I hear from you 
proves that there is need to insist on these commonplaces till they pass out of rhetoric 
and into the conscience, and out of the conscience into fact. The day must needs 
come, and if it be not in the calm and glorious evening of the nineteenth century, it 
must not longer wait than till the peaceful dawn of the twentieth—the day when we 

y Say to nations as well as to individuals, “Thou shalt not lie,” without hearing in 
reply that, in politics, lying is the lawful and necessary and legitimate weapon of 
governors and governed. 


. The day must needs come when we shall not be saying to individuals, “Thou shalt 
ot steal,” while nations are glorying in conquest. And it must needs come to pass 
mat collective murder, unless imposed by hard necessity and sanctioned by sacred 


stice, shall be branded, not as equally, but as far more flagitious than individual 
urder! 


BOB). Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


respond to this doctrine by a hiss discredits his allegiance both to the law of God and — 


to the Gospel. 
I repeat, also, one law of right and wrong for man and for woman. I lay my 


finger here on the most delicate and the most critical point of the morals of our time. — 


Why is it, when there is only one standard of truth and one standard of justice for man 
and for woman, that a corrupted public opinion should have two standards of chastity? 
The woman’s fault is held by all to be her ruin—her moral death-sentence. The same 
fault in a man brings him neither harm nor shame. Too often he glories in it as if 
his only consciousness of the holy gift of manhood was in the abuse of it. And that 
mysterious but equal fidelity mutually due between the betrothed, is it not subjected to 
contradictory and unjust judgments? Where is the young man, in whose bosom still 
remains some fibres of humanity, that does not demand of her, who is today his 
betrothed and who tomorrow is to be his wife, the jealous, implacable integrity of all 
her past life? But are there many that hold themselves bound to reciprocal fidelity? 
Do not the demands of such a morality—mystical, ascetic—bring to the lips of many 
a strange, incredulous smile? 

You see how it is; morality does not always supply what is lacking in religion as 
an antidote to an incomplete and perverted science. 

Look, now, at this young man—in many respects a noble young man; see him 
wasted on one side in sensuality, on the other side in abstraction, and yet called to 
appreciate and understand a heart—and what a heart!—called to love it, to honor it, to 
cultivate it, even; for it is in actual life as it is in the Bible story, that the woman, before 
she becomes in the fullest sense the man’s wife, must be his pupil and his offspring. 

And now over against this preparation of the young man, what is the preparation 
of the girl? In the seclusion of home, under the eye of her parents, in the intimacy of 
brother and sister, her heart, perhaps, will bloom alone, like some plant of genial 
clime that needs no human aid, but only the dew and the sun. But her reason—what 
culture will that receive? 

Hear what Fenelon wrote, in the seventeenth century, in his “Treatise on Female 
Education:” “Nothing,” says he, “is more neglected than the education of girls. 
Everything is decided, in many cases, by fashion and the mother’s whim. No one 
supposes that this sex needs much instruction.”” Has French society in this century 
made any very important advance upon that of the seventeenth? Is it quite secure 
from the strictures which he applied to his own century? He adds, some pages later: 
“Superstition is certainly a thing to be feared for a woman, but nothing is better, to 
eradicate or prevent it, than solid instruction. Let girls, too credulous as they are by 
nature, be accustomed not lightly to admit certain unauthorized legends, nor to 
devote themselves to certain religious practices that are introduced by an indiscreet 
zeal, without waiting for the approval of the Church.” Fenelon could not have sus- 
pected that the day would come when such legends and practices would be approved 
by those who claim to be the representatives of the Church. 

My friends, it does not develop the understanding of young women to drag their 
faculties to and fro over surfaces which they cannot penetrate. It does not enrichi 
their memory nor elevate their thought to overload them with a mass of undigested 
facts and notions. What I ask, as a general rule, of the institutions in which they are 
educated, is this: Are you training up women capable, when the time comes, of 
becoming partners of a man’s intellect, confidantes and counsellors of his thought, his 
reading, his work? Above all, are you giving them a religious belief and practice in 
which their brothers now, their husbands by and by, can take part without blushing 
for themselves, and without doing violence to their reason? 

These two existences, so little fitted for each other, chance—I cannot bring myself 
to say Providence—presently brings together A whim, or a calculation of self- 


The Reformation of the Family—H yacinthe. 369 


interest—which of the two is the better, or rather which is the worse?—unites them; 
and on this union is to be built up that sublime trilogy, the individual, the family, 
society! “But they love one another,” you tell me. And you call that love, in the 
true, moral, Christian sense of that great word! You call that love! Because upon 
this rock without soil, this sand without water, there has sprung up an ephemeral 
flower, deceitful to the careless eye, but having no brilliancy, no fragrance, no continu- 
ance, you declare that they love! Look, then, a few years later, and see what becomes 
_ of this union. 
The young man has made an effort with himself to get control of his own heart 
that he may keep his hold upon the heart of his wife. Now, what sort of sequel 
follows at the end of one of these feverish days of our toilsome and democratic com- 
munities, when the man, weary from the conflict with his fellows and with himself, 
i. wounded, whether he be victor or vanquished, comes back to his home? ‘‘Now,”’ he 
‘says to himself, “I shall have two or three hours, at least, of peace—two or three hours 
that will be like balm to my mind and heart.” He sits down at his fireside, and feels 
quickening within him that which lies deepest in man—deeper than science and poli- 
tics, deeper than business and the toil and tumult of modern life—the holy aspirations 
_ of human nature. He takes upon his lap his youngest child, and the little innocent 
_ strokes his face with happy hands—happy because pure. Dear little hands! How 
_ they fondle the wrinkles of his brow and the scars of old wounds! and in the breath of 
his child the father breathes, as it were, a breath wafted from paradise! He listens 
with delight to those simple but sublime prattlings that are uttered partly in the 
_ language of men, and partly in the speech of angels. Then drawing near the lamp, 
_ whose shade seems to gather up the light and the thoughts, he speaks to his wife, and 
seeks to evoke from this pure and charming present the solemn but happy visions of 
_ the future. But she listens not, or listens only with a pre-occupied mind. Her 
_ thoughts are not with his, either on the present or on the future of their children. He 
_ opens a book—one of those grand books of history of which I have been speaking—a 
book of poetry or of philosophy. But poetry, philosophy, history alike divide them. 
_ She cannot have any complicity in his reading. He opens the Gospel, and this, too, 
they do not understand in the same way. He unfolds the newspaper; they cannot so 
_ much as read the newspaper together! 
Alas! it is history that I am telling—a page out of the history of France more 
, eeainful and dreadful than that of our civil discords and our military disasters. 
The husband will come back to his home, at first less gladly, afterward less fre- 
quently. Then, in place of these visions of innocence and peace, his mind will begin 
_ to be haunted by recollections out of his reading or out of his past experience—the 
_ courtesans of Athens, the bayaderes of India. At last he will ask himself that fatal 
question, What is marriage, after all? What does it amount to, this union under a 
legal contract or religious benediction, so long as the hearts are divided by an eternal 
gulf? Ah! my friends, if he be anything less than a hero, he will go on from that point 
in a course in which we will not follow him. 
And now, as to the wife. I might depict her also a prey to the same enticements, 
the same mistakes. I will not do it; I prefer to take only the gravest and saddest 
aspects of the picture. I think of her, then, as making every effort, despite the defects 
of her education, to bring her own mind and conscience into sympathy with those of 
_herhusband. But in her mind and conscience themselves she finds a limit to her good 
_ will, For if she has, I do not say superstition, but faith—if she has distinct and settled 
_ principles rooted in the soul by which to decide questions of duty and of eternity, and 
_ hecessarily, therefore, questions of the present life in practice and in detail—if, I say, 
in the convictions of her reason and the dictates of her conscience she comes to a 
_ barrier that she cannot cross, what is to become of her? Where shall she find counsel 


oe 


ay 


370 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


in the perplexing questions relating to her own duty or that of her children? Whither 
shall she turn for light, comfort, strength, in those inward struggles that come oftener 
to woman than to man, and in which man is her natural and providential helper? She 
has, I know, received from God these three gifts—purity, tenderness, patience. She 
loves the more because she is the purer, and she knows how to suffer because she knows 
how to love. But at last, just because she is under this law of love, she needs support 
from one that is stronger; she needs, in spiritual matters, to find him who, in these 
also, is “her head.’ If she does not find him in her husband, if he cannot share her 
religious and moral anxieties, she will seek elsewhere. She will find what she needs 

in the Catholic priest, or if not, in that other representative of the gospel, the A 
Protestant pastor; and if she does not find him in any of the official ministers of 
Christianity, she will look for it in some man of religious or philosophic conscience, 
some man of strength, gravity and purity, whom she will ordain by her prayers and 
tears to the priesthood of her conscience. 


i 
. 


However legitimate this resolution of the woman, deeply misconceived, long and 
painfully gainsaid, the woman of whom the Scriptures seem to speak under the figure. 
of the captive daughter of Zion, with tearful, backward-turning face, looking toward 
a past which was but a dream, and which never can return—however sacred the despair 
of the wife, of the mother, isolated in her conscience, and at the cradle of her child— 
after this, tell me, what is there left of marriage? The husband possesses nothing but 
a carcass. His wife’s heart, conscience, soul, are gone from him forever. The educa- 
tion of his children is no longer under his control; for this is the end of the pitiful 
drama—the moral divorce of the parents is consummated by this divorce in the 
education of their children. The children are divided. The sons follow the law of 
the father, the daughters of the mother; or, it may be, each of them will be divided in 
‘soul, and the variance which I have shown in the parents will reappear in the children. 
Be they sons or daughters, they will retain from this contradictory education—I will 
not say faith enough, faith is too high and pure a thing for this—but superstitiom 
enough never to think freely as long as they live, never to make a strong and energetic 
decision in view,of the great and solemn moments of existence—marriage, suffering, 
death—superstition enough for this; and at the same time doubt enough never firmly 
and joyously to believe in the religion which they practice, or at least do not repudiate. 
So it keeps coming back under all its forms—this variance that is tormenting and 
dividing us, and, unless we beware, will be the death of us. That is the great enemy of 
France. 


And now, my friends, to point out the remedy. I have had much to say of 
Christianity; let me lead you, ere we close, to the heathen fireside—which is also ours. 
Christianity is a synthesis; far from rejecting it, it calls to itself all the moral and 
religious elements of the inferior forms of religion. We are descended not only from 
Judea, through the apostles and the first disciples; we are descended from the Celts, 
the Romans, the Greeks. We belong to the old and aristocratic family of the Aryans. 
Now, in every Aryan region, on the shores of the Mediterranean as well as on tha 
banks of the Ganges, each house had its altar—its real, material altar, and on that 
altar burned a fire. Woe to the family whose altar flame should go out, were it only 
for an hour! Before this altar, cherishing this flame, there stood a man, the father 
of the family. He is the family priest, who pours the libations, immolates the victims, 
celebrates the rites, sings the ancestral hymns. And the day whea the father—for this 
name, pater, was given to him among the Greeks and Romans even before his 
marriage; it was a name of honor, of royalty and priesthood—the day when the father 
would take to himself a companion, he separated her from the altar and the worship 
of her parents, and introduced her by a solemn ceremony into the house and religion 
which she was thenceforth to share with him, 


The Reformation of the Family—H yacinthe. 371 


_ By whom has this altar, the sure defence of the community, been thrown down? 
ho quenched that flame? Who silenced those hymns? Don’t tell me it was Chris- 
anity. Christianity has spiritualized everything, but destroyed nothing. The ruin 
me from another quarter. It is a part of that perilous crisis through which we are 
ssing, and the issue of which no man can foretell. Family religion is no more. 
e is individual religion; and if you take the members of the family one by one, 
the best of them, you will find in the secret sanctuary of the conscience a flame, or 
ast a spark. But there is no longer a family altar where they pray and sing 
er; or, if an altar, it is a hidden one, where the mother timidly gathers her brood 
‘the father’s absence. Beware! there are two Christianities; one is manly, the other 
jinine, or rather effeminate. The second may kill the first, but cannot take its place. 
The remedy, my friends, I know it, I offer it to you. Rebuild the family altar! 
tesume your priesthood. Have the courage to believe, teach, pray, to gather about 
gu your wife and children. But what religion shall I follow, do you ask? Whatever 
conscience chooses, were it the most incomplete of all. The poorest of all 


an who has lost all, whether by his own fault or not, and who is groping in the night 
nd stumbling on the brink of the abyss. This fetish is but a dry root or lump of 
apeless wood, if you please. But once let a beam of the human conscience gleam 
ion it—let the radiance and the dew of the revelation from on high envelop it, and 
» blasted, mutilated wood shall bud like Carmel, and blossom and bear fruit unto 
ie Lord. 

Yes, the humblest of religions, only a religion! But the ancient forms of worship, 
ywever beneficent they may have been in their time, can never come back again. 
either can we look for new religions to appear. The last evolution of light among 
is Christianity. True, Christianity may go on from glory to glory, but it can 
surpass itself. Men’s conception of it and realization of it may be improved, but 
cannot change its nature nor cease to be itself—Jesus Christ yesterday, to-day, 
rever. 
_ Young men, and you of riper years, husbands and fathers, have, then, a Christianity 
ng, tender, religious enough to attach to itself your wife and hold your children. 
e a Christianity enlightened, manly, progressive enough to abide in it yourselves, 
ving and practicing it with them. 


d entering the order of Carmelites. About 1865 he moved to Paris, where he 
e famous in denouncing abuses in the church. He was chosen curate of a con- 
tion of Liberal Catholics in Geneva in 1873, and founded a Gallican congregation 
Paris in 1879. 

This address, which is reproduced from the Complete Preacher, was delivered in 
Paris, April 22, 1877, at the Winter Circus. It, with other discourses at that time. 
ved the Parisians mightily. President Barrows of Oberlin College, recommended 
at one of Pere Hyacinthe’s addresses be included in the volume.] 


372 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


PREPARATION FOR CONSULTING THE 
ORACLES OF GO ' 
j 


EDWARD IRVING. ) 
“Search the Scriptures.’-—John 5: 39. ; 
§ 


There was a time when each revelation of the word of God had an introduction ~ 
PA 


into this earth, which neither permitted men to doubt whence it came, nor wherefore 
it was sent. If at the giving of each several truth a star was not lighted up in heaven, : 
as at the birth of the Prince of Truth, there was done upon the earth a wonder, to — 
make her children listen to the message of their Maker. The Almighty made bare 
His arm; and, through mighty acts shown by His holy servants, gave demonstration - 
of His truth, and found for it a sure place among the other matters of human knowl- | 
edge and belief. % i 

But now the miracles of God have ceased, and nature, secure and unmolested, is 
no longer called on for testimonies to her Creator’s voice., No burning bush draws the 
footsteps to His presence chamber; no invisible voice holds the ear awake; no hand 

cometh forth from the obscurity to write His purposes in letters of flame. The vision 
is shut up, and the testimony is sealed, and the word of the Lord is ended, and this — 
solitary Volume, with its chapters and verses, is the sum total of all for which the 
chariot of heaven made so many visits to the earth, and the Son of God Himself taber-— 
nacled and dwelt among us. 

The truth which it contains once dwelt undivulged in the bosom of God; and, on ; 
coming forth to take its place among things revealed, the heavens and the earth, and 
nature, through all her chambers, gave it reverent welcome. Beyond what it contains, 
the mysteries of the future are unknown. To gain it acceptation and currency, the 
noble company of martyrs testified unto the death. The general assembly of the first-— 
born in heaven made it the day-star of their hopes, and the pavilion of their peace. Its” 
every sentence is charmed with the power of God, and powerful to the everlasting 
salvation of souls. 

Having our minds filled with these thoughts of the primeval divinity of revealed 
Wisdom when she dwelt in the bosom of God, and was of His eternal Self a part, long 
before He prepared the heavens, or set a compass upon the face of the deep; revolving 
also, how, by the space of four thousand years, every faculty of mute Nature did 
solemn obeisance to this daughter of the divine mind, whenever He pleased to com- 
mission her forth to the help of mortals; and further meditating upon the delights 
which she had of old with the sons of men, the height of heavenly temper to which 
she raised them and the offspring of magnanimous deeds which these two—the wisdom 
of God, and the soul of man—did engender between themselves—meditating, I say, 
upon these mighty topics, our soul is smitten with grief and shame to remark how in 
this latter day she hath fallen from her high estate; and fallen along with her the great 
and noble character of men. Or if there be still a few names, as of the missionary 
martyr, to emulate the saints of old—how to the commonalty of Christians her oracles 
have fallen into a household commonness, and her visits into a cheap familiarity; while 
by the multitude she is mistaken for a minister of terror sent to oppress poor mortals 
with moping melancholy, and inflict a wound upon the happiness of human kind, 


ans 


Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of God—Irving. 373 


For there is now no express stirring up the faculties to meditate her high and 


Jescended from the porch of heaven? Who feels the awful weight there is in the least 
jota that hath dropped from the lips of God? Who feels the thrilling fear of trembling 
lope there is in words whereon the destinies of himself do hang? Who feels the 
welling tide of gratitude within his breast, for redemption and salvation coming, 
instead of flat despair and everlasting retribution?. Finally, who, in perusing the 
Word of God, is captivated through His faculties, and transported through ali His 
motions, and through all His energies of action wound up? Why, to say the best, it 
is done as other duties are wont to be done; and, having reached the rank of a daily, 
o1 al duty, the perusal of the Word hath reached its noblest place. Yea, that which 
is the guide and spur of all duty, the necessary aliment of Christian life, the first and 
he last of Christian knowledge, and Christian feeling hath, to speak the best, degen- 
rated in these days to stand, rank and file, among those duties whereof it is parent, 
preserver, and commander. And, to speak not the best, but the fair and common 
truth, this Book, the offspring of the Divine mind, and the perfection of heavenly 
wisdom, is permitted to lie from day to day, perhaps from week to week, unheeded 
and unperused, never welcome to our happy, healthy, and energetic moods; admitted, 


if admitted at all, in seasons of sickness, feeble-mindedness, and disabling sorrow. 


_ Oh! if books had but tongues to a their wrongs, then might this Book well 
exclaim—Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! I came from the love and embrace 
of God, and mute Nature, to whom I brought no boon, did me rightful homage. To 
men I come and my words were to the children of men. I disclosed to you the 
mysteries of hereafter, and the secrets of the throne of God. I set open to you the 
ga es of salvation, and the way of eternal life, hitherto unknown. Nothing in heaven 
did I withhold from your hope and ambition; and upon your earthly lot I poured the 
full horn of Divine providence aud consolation. But ye requited me with no 
welcome, ye held no festivity on my arrival; ye sequester me from happiness and 
heroism, closeting me with sickness and infirmity; ye make not of me, nor use me for, 
your guide to wisdom and prudence, put me into a place in your last of duties, and 
fithdraw me to a mere corner of your time; and most of ye set me at naught and 
utterly disregard me. I come, the fullness of the knowledge of God; angels delighted 
nm my company, and desired to dive into my secrets. But ye, mortals, place masters 
Over me, subjecting me to the discipline and dogmatism of men, and tutoring me in 
your schools of learning. I came, not to be silent in your dwellings, but to speak 
welfare to you and to your children. I came to rule, and my throne to set up in the 
s of men. Mine ancient residence was the bosom of God; no residence will I 
e but the soul of an immortal; and if you had entertained me, I should have 
sessed you of the peace which I had with God, “when I was with Him and was 
daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him. Because I have called you and ye 
lave refused, I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded; but ye have set at 
daught all my counsel and would none of my reproof; I also will laugh at your 
calamity, and mock when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh 
a whirlwind, when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they cry 
apon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me.” 


374 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


From this cheap estimation and wanton neglect of God's counsel, and from th 
terror of this curse consequent thereon, we have resolved, in the strength of God, te 
do our endeavor to deliver this congregation of His intelligent and worshiping 
people—an endeavor which we make with a full reception of the difficulties to b 
overcome on every side within no less than without the sacred pale; and upon whic’ 
we enter with the utmost diffidence of our powers, yet with the full purpose of strain: 
ing them to the utmost, according to the measure with which it hath pleased God to 
endow our mind. And do thou, O Lord, from whom cometh the perception of truth, 
vouchsafe to Thy servant an unction from Thine own Spirit, who searcheth all things, 
yea, the deep things of God; and vouchsafe to Thy people “the hearing ear and the 
understanding heart, that they may hear and understand, and their souls may live!" 


Before the Almighty made His appearance upon Sinai, there were awful precursors 
sent to prepare His way; while He abode in sight, there were solemn ceremonies 
and a strict ritual of attendance when He departed, the whole camp set itself to conform 
unto His revealed will. Likewise, before the Savior appeared, with His better law, 
there was a noble procession of seers and prophets, who decried and warned the world 
of His coming; when He came there were solemn announcements in the heavens and 
on the earth; He did not depart without due honors; and then followed, on His 
departure, a succession of changes and alterations which are still in progress, and shall 
continue in progress till the world’s end. This may serve to teach us, that a revelation 
of the Almighty’s will make demand for these three things, on the part of those to 
whom it is revealed: A due preparation for receiving it; a diligent attention to it 
while it is disclosing; a strict observance of it when it is delivered. 


In the whole book of the Lord’s revelations you shall search in vain for one 
which is devoid of these necessary parts. Witness the awe-struck Isaiah, while the 
Lord displayed before him the sublime pomp of His presence; and, not content with 
overpowering the frail sense of the prophet, despatched a seraph to do the ceremonial 
of touching his lip with hallowed fire, all before He uttered one word into his 
astonished ear. Witness the majestic apparition to Saint John, in the Apocalypse, of 
all the emblematical glory of the Son of Man, allowed to take silent effect upon the 
apostle’s spirit, and prepare it for the revelation of things to come. These heard with 
all their absorbed faculties, and with all their powers addressed them to the bidding 
of the Lord. But, if this was in aught flinched from, witness, in the persecution of the 
prophet Jonah, the fearful issues which ensued. From the presence of the Lord he 
could not flee. Fain would he have escaped to the uttermost parts of the earth; but 
in the mighty waters the terrors of the Lord fell upon him; and when engulfed in the 
deep, and entombed in the monster of the deep, still the Lord’s word was upon the 
obdurate prophet, who had no rest, not the rest of the grave, till he had fulfilled it to 
the very uttermost. 


Now, judging that every time we open the pages of this holy book, we are to be 
favored with no less than a communication from on high, in substance the same as 
those whereof we have detailed the three distinct and several parts, we conceive it due 
to the majesty of Him who speaks, that we, in like manner, discipline our spirits with 
a due preparation, and have them in proper frame, before we listen to the voice; that, 
while it is disclosing to us the important message, we be wrapt in full attention; and 
that, when it hath disburdened itself into our opened and enlarged spirits, we proceed 
forthwith to the business of its fulfillment, whithersoever and to whatsoever it summon 
us forth. Upon each of these three duties, incumbent upon one who would not forego 
the benefit of a heavenly message, we will discourse apart, addressing ourselves in this 
discourse to the first-mentioned of the three. _ 


The preparation for the announcement.—“‘When God uttereth His voice,” says the 


Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of God—Irving. 375 


Psalmist, “coals of fire are kindled; the hills melt down like wax; the earth quakes; 
and deep proclaims itself unto hollow deep.” These sensible images of the Creator 
_have now vanished, and we are left alone, in the deep recesses of the meditative mind, 
to discern His coming forth. No trump of heaven now speaketh in the world’s 
ear. No angelic conveyancer of Heaven’s will taketh shape from the vacant air; and 
having done his errand, retireth into his airy habitation. No human messenger 
-putteth forth his miraculous hand to heal Nature’s unmedicable wounds, winning for 
his words a silent and astonished audience. Majesty and might no longer precede the 
oracles of Heaven. They lie silent and unobtrusive, wrapped up in their little compass, 
one volume among many, innocently handed to and fro, having no distinction but that 
in which our mustered thoughts are enabled to invest them. The want of solemn 
preparation and circumstantial pomp, the imagination of the mind hath now to supply. 
The presence of the Deity, and the authority of His voice, our thoughtful spirits must 
_ discern. Conscience must supply the terrors that were wont to go before Him; and 
the brightness of His coming, which the sense can no longer behold, the heart, 
ravished with His word, must feel. 


For the solemn vocation of all her powers, to do her Maker honor and give Him 
_ welcome, it is, at the very least, necessary that the soul stand absolved from every 
call. Every foreign influence or authority arising out of the world, or the things 
_ of the world, should be burst when about to stand before the Fountain of all authority; 
every argument, every invention, every opinion of man forgot, when about to approach 
tothe Father and oracle of all intelligence. And as subjects, when their honors, with 
invitations, are held disengaged, thoug preoccupied with a thousand appointments, 
sO, upon an audience, fixed and about to be holden with the King of kings, it will 
become the honored mortal to break loose from all thralldom of men and things, and 
__ be arrayed in liberty of thought and action to drink in the rivers of His pleasure, and 


Now far otherwise it hath appeared to us, that Christians as well as worldly men 
come to this most august occupation of listening to the word of God; preoccupied 
and prepossessed, inclining to it a partial ear, a straightened understanding, and a 
disaffected will. 


The Christian public are prone to preoccupy themselves with the admiration of 


those opinions by which they stand distinguished as a Church or sect from other 
_ Christians, and instead of being quite unfettered to receive the whole counsel of the 


divinity, they are prepared to welcome it no further than it bears upon, and stands 
with opinions which they already favor. To this pre-judgment the early use of cate- 
_ chisms mainly contributes, which, however, serviceable in their place, have the 
a) disadvantage of presenting the truth in a form altogether different from what it 


_ all the faculties of the soul. In early youth, which is so applied to with those compila- 
tions, an association takes place between religion and intellect, and a divorcement of 
religion from the other powers of the inner man. This derangement, judging from 
_ observation and experience, it is exceeding difficult to put to rights in after-life; and 


_ which speak to the various sympathies of our nature, we are, by the injudicious use of 
these narrow epitomes, disqualified to receive. 
In the train of these comes controversy with his rough voice and unmeek aspect, 


376 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


to disqualify the soul for a full and fair audience of its Maker’s word. The points of © 
the faith we have been called on to defend, or which are reputable with our party, 
assume, in our esteem, an importance disproportionate to their importance in the 
Word which we come to relish chiefly when it goes to sustain them, and the Bible is 
hunted for arguments and texts of controversy, which are treasured up for future 
service. The solemn stillness which the soul should hold before his Maker, so 
favorable to meditation and rapt communion with the throne of God, is destroyed at 


every turn by suggestions of what is orthodox and evangelical—where all is orthodox © 


and evangelical; the spirit of such readers becomes lean, being fed with abstract truths 
and formal propositions; their temper uncongenial, being ever disturbed with contro- 
versial suggestions; their prayers undevout recitals of their opinions; their discourse 
technical announcements of their faith. Intellect, cold intellect, hath the sway over 
heavenward devotion and holy fervor. Man, contentious man, hath the attention 
which the unsearchable God should undivided have; and the fine, full harmony of 


heaven’s melodious voice, which, heard apart, were sufficient to lap the soul in ecstacies 
> 


unspeakable, is jarred and interfered with, and the heavenly spell is broken by the 
recurring conceits, sophisms, and passions of men. Now truly an utter degradation it 
is of the Godhead to have His word in league with that of any man, or any council o: 
men. What matter to me whether the Pope, or any work of any mind be exalted to 
the quality of God? If any helps are to be imposed for the understanding, or safe- 
guarding, or sustaining of the Word, why not the help of statues and pictures for my 
devotions? Therefore, while the warm fancies of the Southerns have given their 
idolatry to the ideal forms of noble art, let us Northerns beware we give not our 
idolatry to the cold and coarse abstractions of human intellect. 


For the preoccupations of worldly minds, they are not to be reckoned up, being 
manifold as their favorite passions and pursuits. One thing only can be said, that 
before coming to the oracles of God they are not preoccupied with the expectation and 
fear of Him. No chord in their heart is in unison with things unseen; no moments 
are set apart for religious thought and meditation; no anticipations of the honored 


‘ 

f 
" 

x 
4 

a" 
‘4 


interview; no prayer of preparation like that of Daniel before Gabriel was sent to teach — 


him; no devoutness like that of Cornelius before the celestial visitation; no fastings 
like that of Peter before the revelation of the glory of the Gentiles! Now to minds 
which are not attuned to holiness, the words of God find no entrance, striking heavy 
on the ear, seldom making way to the understanding, almost never to the heart. To 
spirits hot with conversation, perhaps heady with argument, uncomposed by solemn 
thought, but ruffled and in uproar from the concourse of worldly interests, the sacred 
page may be spread out, but its accents are drowned in the noise which hath not yet 
subsided in the breast. All the awe, and pathos, and awakened consciousness of a 
Divine approach, impressed upon the ancients by the procession of solemnities, is to 
worldly men without a substitute. They have not solicited themselves to be in readi- 
ness. In a usual mood, and vulgar frame they come to God’s Word as to other 
compositions, reading it without any active imaginations about Him who speaks; 
feeling no awe of a sovereign Lord, nor care of a tender Father, nor devotion to a 
merciful Savior. Nowise depressed themselves out of their wonted dependence, nor 
humiliated before the King of kings—no prostrations of the soul, nor falling at His 
feet as dead—no exclamation, as of Isaiah, “Woe is me, for I am of unclean lips!”— 
nor request “Send me”—nor fervent ejaculation of welcome, as of Samuel, “Lord, speak, 
for Thy servant heareth!” Truly they feel toward His word much as to the word of 
an equal. No wonder it shall fail of happy influence upon spirits which have, as it 
were, on purpose, disqualified themselves for its benefits by removing from the regions 
of thought and feeling which it accords with, into other regions, which it is of too 


Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of God—Irving. 377 


evere dignity to affect, otherwise than with stern menace and direful foreboding! If 
would have it bless them and do them good, they must change their manner of 


and reverential frame which becomes an interview with the High and holy One who 
abiteth the praises of eternity. 

Having thus spoken without equivocation, and we hope without offense, to the 
contradictoriness and preoccupation with which Christians and worldly men are apt to 


under which we shall address ourselves to the sacred occupation. 
It is a good custom, inherited from the hallowed days of Scottish piety, and in our 


which the mind is full and overflowing. Of those sentiments which befit the mind 
that comes into conference with its Maker, the first and most prominent should be 
gratitude for His ever having condescended to hold commerce with such wretched and 
fallen creatures. Gratitude not only expressing itself in proper terms, but possessing 
the mind with one abiding and over-mastering mood, under which it shall sit impressed 
the whole duration of the interview. Such an emotion as can not utter itself in 
language—though by language it indicate its presence—but keeps us in a devout and 
adoring frame, while the Lord is uttering His voice. 

{ Go visit a desolate widow with consolation, and help, and fatherhood of her orphan 
children—do it again and again, and your presence, the sound of your approaching 
footstep, the soft utterance of your voice, the very mention of your name, shall come 
to dilate her heart with a fullness which defies her tongue to utter, but speaking by the 
kens of a swimming eye, and clasped hands, and fervent ejaculations to heaven upon 
your head! No less copious acknowledgment of God, the Author of our well-being, 
and the Father of our better hopes, ought we to feel when His Word discloseth to us 


the excess of His love. Though a veil now cast over the Majesty which speaks, it 


ra bce, you were into the third heaven translated, company and OE REE with the 
alities of glory which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man 


unimpresive tone with which its accents are pronounced; and that listless and 
in urious ear into which its blessed sounds are received. How can you, thus unim- 
assioned, hold communion with themes in which every thing awful, vital, . and 
endearing meet together! Why is not curiosity, curiosity ever hungry, on edge to 
iow the doings and intentions of Jehovah, King of kings? Why is not interest, 
interest ever awake, on tip-toe to hear the future destiny of itself? Why is not the 
that panteth over the world after love and friendship, overpowered with the full 


378 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


into the yellow leaf. Of the poets which charm the world’s ear, who is he that inditeth 
a song unto his God? Some will tune their harps to sensual pleasure, and by the 
enchantment of their genius well-nigh commend their unholy themes tothe imagination 
of saints. Others to the high and noble sentiments of the heart, will sing of domestic 
joys and happy unions, casting around sorrow the radiancy of virtue, and bodying 
forth, in undying forms, the short-lived visions of joy! Others have enrolled them- 
selves the high-priests of mute nature’s charms, enchanting her echoes with their 
minstrelsy, and peopling her solitudes with the bright creatures of their fancy. But 
when, since the days of the blind master of English song, hath any poured forth a lay 
worthy of the Christian theme? Nor in philosophy, “the palace of the soul,” have 
men been more mindful of their Maker. The flowers of the garden, and the herbs of © 
the field have their unwearied devotees, crossing the ocean, wayfaring in the-desert, 
and making devout pilgrimages to every region of nature for offerings to their patron 
muse, The rocks, from their residences among the clouds, to their deep rests in the 
dark bowels of the earth, have a bold and most venturous priesthood, who see in their 
rough and flinty faces a more delectable image to adore than in the revealed coun- 
tenance of God. And the political warfare of the world is a very Moloch, who can at 
any time command his hecatomb of human victims. But the revealed suspense of God, — 
to which the harp of David, and the prophetic lyre of Isaiah were strung, the prudence © 
of God, which the wisest of men coveted after, prefering it to every gift which heaven 

could confer, and the eternal intelligence Himself in human form, and the unction of 
the Holy One which abideth—these the common heart of man hath forsaken, and — 
refused to be charmed withal. : 


Pe eal od 


I testify, that there ascendeth not from earth a hosannah of her children to bear 
witness in the ear of the upper regions to the wonderful manifestations of her God! 
From a few scattered hamlets in a small portion of her territory, a small voice 
ascendeth, like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. But to the service of our 
general Preserver there is no concourse from Dan unto Bersheeba, of our people, the 
greater part of whom, after two thousand years of apostolic commission, have not the 
testimonies of our God; and the multitude of those who disrespect or despise them! 


But, to return from this lamentation, which, may God hear, who doth not disre- 
gard the cries of His afflicted people! With the full sense of obligation to the giver, 
combine a humble sense of your own incapacity to value and to use the gift of His 
oracles. Having no taste whatever for the mean estimates which are made, and the 
coarse invectives that are vented against human nature, which, though true in the 
main, are often in the manner so unfeeling and triumphant, as to reveal hot zeal rather 
than tender and deep sorrow, we will not give in to this popular strain. And yet it is 
a truth by experience, revealed, that though there be in man most noble faculties, and 
a nature restless after the knowledge and truth of things, there are toward God and ~ 
His revealed will and indisposition and a regardlessness, which the most tender and 
enlightened consciences are the most ready to acknowledge. Of our emancipated 
youth, who, bound after the knowledge of the visible works of God, and the gratifi- 
cation of the various instincts of nature, how few betake themselves at all, how few 
absorb themselves with the study and obedience of the word of God! And when, by 
God’s visitation, we address ourselves to the task, how slow is our progress and how 
imperfect our performance! it is most true that nature is unwilling to the subject of 
the Scriptures. The soul is previously possessed with adverse interests; the world 
hath laid an embargo on her faculties, and monopolized them to herself; old habit hath 
perhaps added to his almost incurable callousness; and the enemy of God and man is 
skillful to defend what he hath already won. So circumstanced, and every man is so 
circumstanced, we come to the audience of the word of God, and listen in worse tune 


t 


: 


Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of God—Irving. 379 


han a wanton to a sermon, or a hardened knave to a judicial address. Our under- 
standing is prepossessed with a thousand idols of the world, religious or irreligious— 
ryhich corrupt the reading of the word into a straining of the text to their service, and 
when it will not strain, cause it to be skimmed, and perhaps despised or hated. Such 
a thing as a free and unlimited reception of all parts of the Scripture into the mind, is 
-athing most rare to be met with, and when met with will be found the result of many 
a sore submission of nature’s opinions as well as of nature’s likings. 


But the word, as hath been said, is not for the intellect alone, but for the heart, 
and for the will. Now if any one be so wedded to his own candor as to think he doth 
accept the divine truth unabated, surely no one will flatter himself into the belief that 
his heart is attuned and enlarged for all divine commandments. The man who thus 
‘misdeems of himself must, if his opinions were just, be like a sheet of fair paper, 
-unblotted and unwritten on; whereas all men are already occupied, to the very fullness, 
with other opinions and attachments, and desires than the word reveals. We do not 
grow Christians by the same culture by which we grow men, otherwise what need ot 
divine revelation, and divine assistance? But being unacquainted from the womb with 
God, and attached to what is seen and felt, through early and close acquaintance, we 
{ are ignorant and detached from what is unseen and unfelt. The word is a novelty to 
our nature, its truths fresh truths, its affections fresh affections, its obedience gathered 
_ from the apprehension of nature and the commerce of the worldly life. Therefore 
_ there needeth, in one that would be served from this storehouse opened by heaven, a 
disrelish of his old acquisitions, and a preference of the new, a simple, child-like teach- 
_ableness, an allowance of ignorance and error, with whatever else beseems an anxious 
learner. Coming to the word of God, we are like children brought into the conver- 
Sations of experienced men; and we should humbly listen and reverently inquire; or 
_ we are like raw rustics introduced into high and polished life, and we should unlearn 
our coarseness, and copy the habits of the station; nay we are like offenders caught, 
_ and for amendment committed to the bosom of honorable society, with the power of 
regaining our lost condition and inheriting honor and trust—therefore we should walk 
; softly and tenderly, covering our former reproach with modesty and humbleness, 
hhasting to redeem our reputation by distinguished performances, against offense 
doubly guarded, doubly watchful for dangerous and extreme positions, to demonstrate 
our recovered goodness. 


These two sentiments—devout veneration of God for His unspeakable gift, and 
deep distrust of our capacity to estimate and use it aright—will generate in the mind a 
constant aspiration after the guidance and instruction of a higher power. The first 
sentiment of goodness remembered, emboldening us to draw near to Him who first 
drew near to us, and who with Christ will not refuse us any gift. The second senti- 
ment, of weakness remembered, teaching us our need, and prompting us by every 
interest of religion and every feeling of helplessness to seek of Him who. hath said, 
“If any one lack wisdom let him ask God, who giveth liberally and upbraideth not.’ 
The soul which under these two master-feelings cometh to read, shall not read without 
‘profit. Every new revelation feeding his gratitude and nourishing his former 
‘ignorance, will confirm the emotions he is under, and carry them onward to an 
unlimited dimension. Such a one will prosper in the way; enlargement of the inner 
man will be his portion and the establishment in the truth his exceeding great reward 
‘In the strength of the Lord shall his right hand get victory—even in the name of the 
Lord of Hosts. His soul shali also flourish with the fruits of righteousness from the 
seed of the Word, which liveth and abideth forever.” 


Thus delivered from prepossessions of all other masters, and arrayed in the raiment 


380 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


should call a muster of all her faculties, and have all her poor grace in attendance, and 
any thing she knows of His excellent works and exalted ways she should summon up 
to her remembrance; her understanding she should quicken, her memory refresh, her 
imagination stimulate, her affections cherish, and her conscience arouse. All that is 
within her should be stirred up, her whole glory should awake and her whole beauty 
display itself for the meeting of her King. As His hand-maiden she should meet 
Him; His own handiwork, though sore defaced, yet seeking restoration; His humble, 
because offending servant—yet nothing slavish, though humble—nothing superstitious, 
though devout—nothing tame, though modest in her demeanor; but quick and ready, 
all addressed and wound up for her Maker’s will. 


How different the ordinary proceeding of Christians, who, with timorous, mis-— 


trustful spirits; with an abeyance of intellect, and a dwarfish reduction of their natural 
powers, enter to the conference of the Word of God! The natural powers of man are 


to be mistrusted doubtless, as the willing instruments of the evil one; but they must 


be honored also as the necessary instruments of the Spirit of God, whose operation is 
a dream, if it be not through knowledge, intellect, conscience, and action. Now 
Christians, heedless of the grand resurrection of the mighty instruments of thought 
and action, at the same time coveting hard after holy attainment, do often resign the 


mastery of themselves, and are taken into the counsel of the religious world—whirling » 


around the eddy of some popular leader—and so drifted, I will not say from godliness, 
but drifted certainly from that noble, manly, and independent course, which, under 
steerage of the Word of God, they might safely have pursued for the precious interests 
of their immortal souls. Meanwhile these popular leaders, finding no necessity for 
strenuous endeavors and high science in the ways of God, but having a gathering host 
to follow them, deviate from the ways of deep and penetrating thought—refuse the 
contest with the literary and accomplished enemies of the faith—bring a contempt upon 
the cause in which mighty men did formerly gird themselves to the combat—and so 
cast the stumbling-block of a mistaken paltriness between enlightened men and the 
cross of Christ! So far from this simple-mindedness (but its proper name is feeble- 
mindedness) Christians should be—as aforetime in this island they were wont to be— 
the princes of human intellect, the lights of the world, the salt of the political and 
social state. Till they come forth from the swaddling-bands, in which foreign schools 
have girt them, and walk boldly upon the high places of human understanding, they 
shall never obtain that influence in the upper regions of knowledge and power, of 
which, unfortunately, they have not the apostolic unction to be in quest. They will 
never be the master and commanding spirit of the time, until they cast off the wrinkled 
and withered skin of an obsolete old age, and clothe themselves with intelligence as 
with a garment, and bring forth the fruits of power and love and of a sound mind. 


Mistake us not, for we steer in a narrow, very narrow-channel, with rocks of 
popular prejudice on every side. While we thus invocate to the reading of the Word, 
the highest strains of the human soul, mistake us not as derogating from the office 
of the Spirit of God. Far be it from any Christian, much further from any Christian 
pastor, to withdraw from God the honor which is every where His due; but there 
most of all His due where the human mind labored alone for thousands of years, and 
labored with no success—viz., the regeneration of itself, and its restoration to the last 
semblance of the Divinity! Oh! let him be reverently inquired after, devoutly on, and 
most thankfully acknowledged in every step of progress from the soul’s fresh awaken- 
ing out of his dark, oblivious sleep—even to her ultimate attainment upon earth and 
full accomplishment for heaven. And that there may be a fuller choir of awakened 
men to advance His honor and glory here on earth, and hereafter in heaven above; 
let the saints bestir themselves like angels, and the ministers of religion like arch- 


¢ 
¢ d 
o 


§ ° ‘ - 
rien Ca ‘ . - 


7 - 


Preparation for Consulting the Oracles of God—Irving. 381 


- 


ngels strong! And now at length let us have a demonstration made of all that is 
e in thought, and generous in action, and devoted in piety, for bestirring this 
sthargy, and breaking the bonds of hell, and redeeming the whole world to the service 
fits God and King! : 


_ [This sermon is from the History and Respository of Pulpit Eloquence by Heury 
C. Fish, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. 

Edward Irving was born at Annan in 1792, and died in 1834. He was educated at 
nburg, entered the Scottish church and became assistant to Dr. Chalmers at 
sgow in 1819. As minister at Hatton Garden, London, 1822, he drew large crowds, 
ng to the Presbyterian church in Regent square in 1826. In 1833 he was suspended 
from the Presbyterian church for so-called heretical expression. He is known as the 
ounder of the Catholic and Apostolic church. It is generally agreed that he was the 
zreatest pulpit orator of the century.] 


382 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 


DAVID STARR JORDAN. 


I wish this afternoon to make a plea for sound and sober life. I wish to base this 
plea on the fact that to be clean is to be strong; that sinfulness makes for feebleness| 
and vice for decay. If I were to take a text it would be this: ‘If sinners entice thee, 
consent thou not!” But I should change this to read: “If sin entice thee, consent 
thou not;” for the enticement which leads to sin comes from our own ill-governed 
impulses more often than from the persuasions of others. 

When I was a boy I once hada primer which gave the names of many things 
which were good and many which were bad. Good things were faith, hope, charity, 
virtue, integrity and the like, while anger, wrath, selfishness and trickery were rightly 
put down as bad. But among the good things, the primer: placed ‘“‘adversity.” This 
I could not understand, and I remember to this day how I was puzzled by it. The 
name ‘‘adversity” had a-pretty sound, but I found that the meaning was the same as 
“bad luck.” How can bad luck be a good thing? E 

Now that I have grown older and have watched men’s lives and actions for many 
years, I can see how bad luck is good. It depends on the way in which we take it. 
li we yield and break down under it, it is not good; but neither are we good. It is 
not in the luck, but in ourselves, that the badness is. But if we take hold of bad luck 
bravely, mantfully, we may change it into good luck, and when we do so we make 
ourselves stronger for the next struggle. It was a fable of the Norsemen, that when 
a man won a victory over another, the strength of the conquered went over into his 
veins. This old fancy has its foundation in fact. Whoever has conquered fortune has 
luck on his side for the rest of his life. 

So adversity is good, if only we know how to take it. Shall we shrink under it, 
or shall we react against it? Shall we yield, or shall we conquer? To react against 
adversity is to make fortune our servant. Its strength goes over to us. To yield is to 
make us fortune’s slave. Our strength is turned against us in the pressure of circum- 
stances. A familiar illustration of what I mean by reaction is this: Why do men 
stand upright? It is because the earth pulls them down. If a man yields to its 
attraction he soon finds himself prone on the ground. In this attitude he is helpless. 
He can do nothing there, so he reacts against the force of gravitation. He stands 
upon his feet, and the more powerful the force may be, the more necessary it is that 
the active man should resist it. When the need for activity ceases, man no longer 
stands erect. He yields to the force he has resisted. When he is asleep the force of 
gravitation has its own way so far as his posture is concerned. But activity and life 
demand reaction, and it is only through resistance that man can conquer adversity. 

In like fashion temptation has its part to play in the development of character. 
The strength of life is increased by the conquest of temptation. We may call no man 
virtuous till he has won such a victory. It is not the absence of temptation, but the 
reaction from it, that ensures the persistence of virtue. If sin entice thee, consent thou 
not, and after a while its allurements will cease to attract. 

In a recent journal, Mr. W. C. Morrow tells the story of a clergyman and a 
vagabond. They met by chance on the street and each was tempted by the other. 
The young clergyman, fresh from the seminary, in black broadcloth and white necktie, 


The Strength of Being Clean—Jordan. 383 


semed to the vagabond so fresh, so innocent, so pure, that he revolted against his past 
ife, his vulgar surroundings, his squalid future. The inspiration of this unspoiled 
ample gave him strength to resist. For the moment, at least, he threw off the 


hains which years of weakness had fastened upon him. 


’ The minister, on the other hand, found an equal fascination in sin. All the yearn- 
ng curiosity of his suppressed impulses cried out for the freedom of the vagabond. 


ife’s realities. He had never known temptation before, and hence he had never 
resisted it. In his first acquaintance with it, its cheap meanness was not revealed. 


As it chanced, so the story goes, when next the pair met, the vagabond and the 
minister, the two had exchanged places. From a curbstone pulpit the vagabond was 
talking to his fellow sinners from the fullness of his heart. As one who could turn 


9% Him who has for so many centuries been the symbol of purity and light. And as 
ie went on with his harangue, two policemen came up leading away the other, flushed 

face, disheveled of garment and unsteady of step, his tongue uttering words of 
foulness and profanity. The pleasures of sin were over and the minister was on his 


Perhaps this is not a true story, and very likely the incident happened only in the 
fancy of the writer. But something of that sort takes place every day. It is only the 
trength of past resistance that saves us from sin. We must know it and fight it if we 
would not have it take us unawares. 

_ Inthe barber shop of a Washington hotel, this inscription is written on the mirror: 
‘There is no pleasure in life equal to that of the conquest of a vicious habit.’ This 


In every walk in life, strength comes from effort. It is the habit of self-denial 
thich gives the advantage to men we call self-made. A self-made man, if he is made 
t all, has already won the battle of life. He is often very poorly put together. His 
sducation is incomplete; his manners may be uncouth. His prejudices are often 
rong. He may worship himself and his own oddities. But if he is successful in life 
‘im any way, he has learned to resist. He has learned the value of money, and he has 
learned how to refuse to spend it. He has learned the value of time, and how to 


‘money or time away. He has learned to say No. To say no at the right time, and 
hen to stand by it, is the first element of success. 


I heard once of a university (it may be in Tartary, or it may be in Dreamland) 


fo teach him self-control. By this means he was made slow to anger. To resist wrath 
elps one to resist other impulses. There is a great value in the habit of self-restraint, 
en when self-gratification is harmless in itself. Some day self-denial will be 
ystematically taught to children. It ought to be part of the training of men, not 


_ The Puritans were strong in their day, and their strength has been the backbone 
our republic. Their power lay not in the narrowness of their creed, but in the 
verity of their practices. Much that they condemned was innocent in itself. Some 
gs which they permitted were injurious. But they were ready to resist whatever 


384 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


they thought was wrong. In this resistance they found strength, and they found 
happiness, too, and somewhat of this strength and this happiness has fallen to our 
inheritance. 

We may wander far from the creeds of our fathers; we may adopt far different 
clothing, and far other customs and practices. But if we would have the Puritan’s 
strength, we must hold the Puritan’s hatred of evil. Our course of life must be as 
narrow as his; for the way that leads to power in life must ever be strait and stony. It 
is still true and will be true forever, that the broad roads and flowery paths lead to 
weakness and misery, not to happiness and strength. There is no real happiness that 
does not involve self-denial. 

In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out in life to be wicked. It is the 
man who cannot resist temptation. It is the man who cannot say, “No.” For sin to 
become wickedness is a matter of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded 
up as vice calls for its sacrifice. In Kipling’s fable of Parenness, the slave of Vice is 
asked to surrender, one after another, his trust in man, his faith in woman, and the 
hopes and conscience of his boyhood. In exchange for all this the demon left him 
just a little crust of dry bread. That is all the demon had to give. If he is to be the 
slave of sin, there will be nothing else left for him at the last. 

It is because decay goes on step by step that bad men are not all bad, as good — 
men are not wholly good. In the stories of Bret Harte, the gamblers‘and sots are 
capable of pure impulses and of noble self-devotion. The pathos of Dickens rests 
largely on the same kind of fact. It is indeed a fact, and those who would save such 
people should keep it constantly in mind. 

I number among my friends, if he be living yet, which I doubt, an old miner, who — 
had led a hard, wild life. He was a victim of drink and the hysterical Keeley cure 
did not save him from delirium tremens. He walked from Los Gatos to Palo Alta 
for such help as might be found there. As he sat waiting in my house, a little child, 
who had never known sin, came into the room and fearlessly offered him his hand. 
This a grown man would not do without shrinking, but the child had not learned to 
be a respecter of persons. The scarred face lightened; the visions of demons vanish 
for a moment, and the poor man repeated to himself these words of Dickens: 

“I know now how Jesus could liken the kingdom of God to a child.” 

It is not usually the great temptations but the small ones that destroy. Most vice 
comes through corrosion. Corrosion is the constant pressure of petty temptation 
each one easily resisted if it stood alone, but the culminative force being beyond th 
strength of those not already trained in habits of self-denial. “Evil communications — 
corrupt good manners.” However unlovely they may be at first, yet if they are con- 
stantly with us, it is the way of human nature to “first endure, then pity, then 
embrace.” ; B 

We may divide sin into two classes: Evil to others and evil to ourselves. Evil 
to others is wickedness or crime. Relatively speaking, there is not so much pure - 
wickedness in the world. All men have hidden tendencies to greed and trickery and 
selfishness and cruelty. But these for the most part remain hidden except as the 
weakness of vice lets them forth. There are great criminals who have no vices, aS 
monsters of every sort, headless and heartless, one time or another are born. But the 
greater part of what we call crime is the work of weaklings, men or women who have 
lost their strength to resist evil, and who yield to the temptations to harm others as 
they do to the temptations to harm themselves. The habit of drink, for example, does 
not cause theft and murder. It makes its slave too weak to resist even small tempta~ 
tions, and small temptations may lead one into great crimes. 

It is of evil towards one’s self that I wish chiefly to speak today, not of hereditary 
yice, nor the sins that grow out of oppression—these may serve for some other time— 


The Strength of Being Clean—Jordan. 385 


put of the crimes to one’s self that grow out of our social relations. Evil to one’s self 
is the yielding to one’s own temptations—to great temptations or to small; this last 
TI have called corrosion. The primal motive of most forms of sin is to make a short 
cut to happiness. The reason why we yield to temptation is that it promises pleasure 
thout the effort of earning it. This promise is one that has never been fulfilled in 
the history of all the ages, and it is time that men were coming to realize that fact. 
Happiness never came to stay unless it was earnea. There are momentary 
pleasures which are not earned by effort. They are not happiness. They are decep- 
tions or delusions, and like other illusions they soon pass away. We know them to 
e false pleasures, because their final legacy is pain. They “‘leave a dark-brown taste 
in the mouth.” Their recollection is ‘‘different in the morning.” Such “pleasures are 
ike poppies spread; you seize the flower, its bloom is shed,” as Robert Burns, who 
had tried many of them, truthfully tells us. But true happiness is permanent. The 

ind is at rest with itself, and it feels the full joy of living. Happiness is a positive 
thing. It comes with action. In doing, striving, fighting, helping, loving, happiness 
is the encouragement to effort. Even loving without helping cannot bring happiness. 
Said Christ to Simon Peter, “If thou lovest Me, feed My lambs.” Whatever feeling is 
worthy and real will express itself in action, and the glow that surrounds worthy 
action we call happiness. Happiness is the joy of living, and the joy is felt in propor- 
tion to the real “abundance of life.” The short cuts to happiness which temptation 
commonly offers to you and to me may be roughly classified as follows: 


1. Idleness—This is the attempt to secure the pleasures of rest without the 
effort which justifies rest and makes it welcome. When a man shuns effort he is in no 
position to resist. So, through all ages, idleness has been known as the parent of all 
vices. “Life drives him hard” who has nothing in the world to do. The dry rot of 
existence, the vague self-disgust known to the wealthy as ennui and to the poor man 
as plain misery, is the result of idleness pure and simple. Through the open door of 
idleness all other temptations enter. 

2. Gambling.—In all its forms gambling is the desire to get something for noth- 
ing. It is said that “money is the root of all evil.” But this is not true. The 
desire to get money without earning it is the root of all evil. It is the search for 
unearned happiness through unearned power. To get something for nothing, in 
whatever way, demoralizes all effort. The man who gets a windfall spends his days 
thereafter watching the wind. The man who wins in a lottery spends all his gains in 
more lottery tickets. The whole motive for gambling, betting and of all other forms 
Of stakes and hazards, is to get something for nothing. To win is to lose, for the 
winner's integrity is in jeopardy. To lose is to lose, for the loser gets nothing for 
ymething. He has thrown good money after bad, and that too is demoralizing. 

I can see that a professional gambler who has averaged all these matters and 
justed his philosophy to them, might be in his way an honest man and a kindly man. 
‘do not personally know any such, and have found him only in the pages of Bret 
Harte. But whatever charity I might feel for Jack Hamlin or John Oakhurst as I 
meet them in literature, I cannot extend much sympathy to their victims. 

é The same motive lies behind stealing as behind gambling. The difference lies in 
Our statutes and in our social prejudices. 


_ 8. Licentiousness.—There is an ever-present temptation to secure the pleasures 
of love without love’s duties and love’s responsibilities. 
In whatever form this temptation arises, it must be met and fought to the death 
the man who values honor or character or happiness. Open vice brings with a 
certainty disease and degradation and ruin. Secret vice comes to the same end, but 
all the more surely, because the sin and folly of lying are added to the other agencies 
of destruction. The man who tries to lead a double life is either a neurotic freak or 


386 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


else the prince of fools. Generally he is something of both. That society is so 
severe in its condemnation of such conduct is an expression of the bitterness of its own 
experience. To you who look forward to useful and honored lives, the temptations of 
lust must be trodden under foot. Love demands singleness of soul. It is a sturdy 
plant of vigorous growth, with wondrous hope of flower and fruitage, but it will not 
rise from the ashes of lust. 


But it is not alone the gross temptations that must be resisted to the end. There 
is much that passes under other names that is only veiled licentiousness. The word 
flirtation covers a multitude of sins. The pure woman, if she knows the truth, will turn 
from the man who touches her hand in wantonness, as she would turn from a rattle- 
snake. The real heart and soul of a man is measured by the truth he shows to woman, 
It may be true as men say, “boys will be boys,” but if “boys will be boys” in the bad 
sense, they will never be men. 


4. Intemperance.—Men try to get the feeling of happiness when happiness does 
not exist. They destroy their nervous system for the tingling pleasure they feel — 
as its organs are torn apart. There are many drugs which cause this pleasure, and in 
proportion to the delight they seem to give is the real mischief that they work. 

Pain is the warning to the brain that something is wrong in the organ in which 
the pain is felt. Sometimes that which should be felt as pain is interpreted as pleasure. 
If a man lay his fingers upon an anvil and strike them one by one with a hammer, the 
brain will feel the shock as pain. It will give orders to have the blows checked. © - 

But if through some abnormal condition, some twist of the nerves or clot in the 
brain, the injury was felt as exquisite delight, there would arise the impulse to repeat 
it. This would be a temptation. The knowledge of the injury which the eyes would 
tell to the brain should lead the will to stop the blows. The impulses of delight would 
plead for their repetition, and in this fashion the hand might be sacrified for a feeling 
of pleasure which is no pleasure at all, but a form of mania. Of this character is the 
effect of all nerve-exciting drugs. As a drop of water is of the nature of the sea, so in 
its degree is the effect of alcohol, opium, tobacco, cocaine, kola, tea or coffee of the 
nature of mania. They give a feeling of pleasure or of rest, when rest or pleasure does 
not exist. This feeling arises from injury to the nerves which the brain does not 
truthfully interpret. 


There have been men in abnormal conditions who felt mutilation as pleasure, in the 
way I have just described. Men have paid others to pinch their bodies, to tear their 
flesh, to bruise their bones for the exquisite delight in self-mutilation. This feeling is 
the basis for the extraordinary mania which shows itself from time to time among — 
those sects who call themselves flagellants and penitents. Such extravagance is not 
religion; it is madness. And drunkenness is madness also. Differing in degree and 
somewhat in kind, it has yet the same original motive, self-destruction, because of the 
temptation of imaginary pleasure. 


To make clear what I have to say, we must consider for a moment the nature of 
the mind. It is the brain’s business to know, to think, to will and to act. All these 
functions taken together we call the mind. The brain is hidden in darkness, 
sheltered within a bony box, and from all the nerves of sense it receives impressions 
of the outside world and of the conditions of the parts of the body. These impressions 
are the basis of knowledge. All that we know comes to us in one way or another 
through the nerves of sense. It is all drawn from our experience of the world through 
the brain. 


These impressions are compared one with another and brought into relations with 
past experiences, that the mind may deduce from them the real truth. This is the 
process of thought, which has many forms and many variations. 


eo ee, 


The Strength of Being Clean—Jordan. : 387 


_ The purpose of knowledge is action. When we see or feel or hear anything, what 
re we going to do about it? The function of sensation is to enable the body to act 
afely and wisely. Hence the brain controls the muscles. Hence thought always tends 
9 go over into action. The sense organs aré the brain’s only teachers. The muscles 
e its only servants. But there are many orders which can be issued to these servants. 


tions may be incongruous one with another. How shall the brain choose? This 
“the function of the will. It is the duty of the will to choose the best action and to 
uppress all the others. The power of attention enables us to fix the mind on the 
sations or impressions of most worth and to push the others into the background. 


ll past impressions linger in the brain, and these arise, bidden or unbidden, to mingle 
ith the others. To know the relation of these, to distinguish present impressions 
rom memories, to distinguish recollections from realities, is the condition of sanity. 
Phis is mental health, when the machinery of the brain and nerves performs each its 


Il with the world. 


But there are many conditions in which the machinery of the brain fails. The 
nind grows confused. It cannot tell memories from realities. Its power of attention 
ags. A fixed idea not related to external things may take possession of the mind. 
the will may fail, and the mind may be controlled by a thousand vagrant impres- 
ions (really forgotten memory pictures) in as many minutes. In any case the move- 
vent of the muscles becomes uncertain. Their action does not respond to external 
Inditions, but to internal whims. The deeds which result from these whims may be 
ngerous’ to the subject himself or to others. This i$ a condition of mania, or of 
iental irresponsibility. 

Some phase of mental unsoundness is the natural effect of any of those drugs 
Iled stimulants or narcotics. Alcohol gives a feeling of warmth or vigor or exhilara- 
on, when real warmth, vigor or exhilaration does not exist. Tobacco gives a feeling 
f rest which is not restfulness. The use of opium seems to intensify the imagination, 
ying its clumsy wings a wondrous power of flight. It destroys the sense of time and 
pace, but it is in time and space alone that man has his being. Cocaine gives a 
rength which is not strength. Strychnine quickens the motor response which follows 
nsation. Coffee and tea, like alcohol, enable one to borrow from his future store of 
tce for present purposes; and none of these makes any provision for paying back the 
mm. One and all these various drugs tend to give the impression of a power or a 
fasure, Or an activity, which we do not possess. One and all, their function is to 
ce the nervous system to lie. One and all, the result of their habitual use is to 
der the nervous system incapable of ever telling the truth. One and all, their 
bposed pleasures are followed by a reaction of subjective pains as spurious and as 
eal as the pleasures which cause them. Each of them if used to excess brings in 
le insanity, incapacity and death. With each of them the first use makes the second 
sier. To yield to temptation weakens the will, and that makes it easier to yield 
ain. The weakening effect on the will is greater than the injury to the body. In 
t, the harm intemperance does to the body is wholly secondary. It seems almost 
irely the visible reflex of the harm already done to the nervous system. 


While all this is true, I do not wish to take an extreme position. I do not care to 
in judgment on the tired woman who finds comfort in a cup of tea, or on the man 
of nds a bottle of claret or a glass of beer an aid to digestion. A glass of light wine 
trick on the glands of the stomach may spur them to better action. These 
uences are the white lies of physiology. A cup of coffee may give an apparent 


388 . Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


strength we greatly need. A good cigar may soothe the nerves. A bottle of cool beer 
on a hot day may be refreshing; a white lie oils the hinges of society. 

I make no attack on the use of claret at dinner or beer as medicine. This is a : 
matter of taste, though it is not to my taste. Each of these drugs leaves a scar on the 
nerves; a small scar, if you please, and we cannot go through the battle of life without ~ 
many scars of one kind or another. Moderate drinking is not so very bad so long as — 
it stays moderate. It is much like moderate lying—or, to use Beecher’s words, like — 
“beefsteak with incidental arsenic.” It will weaken your will somewhat, but maybe — 
you are strong enough for that. It was once supposed that intemperance was like : 
gluttony; the excessive use of that which was good. It was not then known that — 
all nerve exciters contain a specific poison, and that in this poison such apparent — 
pleasure as they seem to give must lie. . 


Use these drugs if you can afford it: There are many worthy gentlemen who use 
them all in moderation, and who have the strength to abstain from what they call their 
abuse. You will find among drinkers and smokers some of the best men you know, ~ 
while some of the greatest scoundrels alive are abstemious to the last degree. They 
dare not be otherwise, they need all the strength and cunning they have to use in their 
business. Wine loosens the tongue and lets fly the secrets of guilt. But whatever > 
others may do or seem to do with impunity, you can not afford to imitate them. You 
know less of the world than they do and less of yourselves. You are nearer to tempta-— 
tion, and if you are tempted and fall, it will be harder for you to recover. But 
whatever you do, let it be of your own free choice. Count all the cost. Take your 
stand whatever it may be, with open eyes, and hold it without regret. There is 
nothing more hopeless than the ineffective remorse of a man who drinks and wishes 
that he didn’t. If you don’t want to do a thing, then don’t do it. The only way to. 
reform is to stop, stop, stop! and go at once to doing something else. ; 


But whatever you may think or do as to table drinking and the like, there is no 
question as to the evil of perpendicular drinking, or drinking for drink’s sake. Men. 
who drink in saloons do so for the most part for the wrench on the nervous system. 
They drink to forget. They drink to be happy. They drink to be drunk. Sometimes 
it is a periodical attack of madness. Sometimes it is a chronic thirst. Whichever it is, 
its indulgence destroys the soundness of life; it destroys accuracy of thought and 
action. It destroys wisdom and virtue. It destroys faith and hope and love. It brings 
a train of subjective horrors, which the terrified brain can not interpret and which we 
call delirium tremens, the tremendous madness. This is mania, indeed, but every act 
which injures the faithfulness of the nervous system is a step in this terrible direction. 


Some clever writer in the San Francisco Examiner reports the words of an old 
sailor called ‘““Longshore Potts,” who gave a striking account of what he calls “the 
shock.” A young man with money and ambition starts out to enjoy life. He is “hail 
fellow well met,” “afraid of no man,” and “nobody’s enemy but his own.” He fre- 
quents the clubs; he plays the races, and he is with the gayest in all gay company. 
He thinks well of himself; he has a good time and he knows no reason why others 
should not think well of him. This goes on for a year or two, when the pace begins 
to prove too rapid. The “difference in the morning” becomes disagreeable. It inter- 
feres with business. It spoils pleasure. The only thing to do is to go still faster. The 
race down the cocktail route helps to forget. Suddenly the man gets sight of himself. 
He catches his face in the glass. He sees himself as others see him. Instead of “the 
jolly good fellow, which nobody can deny,” he gets the glimpse of a useless, helpless 
sot. He sees a man who has spent his substance, has disgraced his name, has ruined 
his home, has broken the heart of his wife, has beggared his children, has lost the 
respect of others, and the respect of himself. This is the Shock! When it is come he 


The Strength of Being Clean—Jordan. 389 


n alcoholic repentance. There is nothing that can save him but to stop, and it takes 
omething of manhood to do this. Such tears of remorse are not “tears from the 
epths of some divine despair.’ They arise rather from the fact that champagne 


rritates the lachrymal glands. 


With most men sin comes not as a result of strong passions, ungovernable 
mpulses and the revolt against conventions. It is rather that weak will, scanty brain 
nd unchecked selfishness meet some petty or nasty temptation or corrosion. It is 
rue that there are cases of another kind. There are some men whose untamable 
ndependence leads them into peril through revolt from tiresome conventionalities. 
Phey sin because they will not be tied to the apron-strings of society. For these 
awless, turbulent, defiant spirits there is always great hope, for when they find them- 


hey are likely to break away again and to lead lives aggressively good in reaction 


rom past follies. To this class belong the subjects of the great conversions, the real 
brands who have snatched themselves from the real burnings. 


“What a world this would be without coffee,” said one old pessimist to another as 
hey sat and growled together at an evening reception. “What a world it is with 
offee,” said the other, for he knew that the only solace coffee could give was that it 
semed for the moment to repair the injury its own excessive use had brought. 


No stimulant nor narcotic can ever do more than this. They help us to forget 
ime and space and ourselves—all we have worth remembering. “With health and a 
lay” man “can put the pomp of emperors to shame.” Without time and space he can 
do nothing. He is nothing. 

_ “There is joy in life,” says John L, Sullivan, the pugilist, “but it is known only 
the man who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt.” To know this kind of joy 
is to put one’s self beyond the reach of all others. 


The joy of the blue sky, the bright sunshine, the dark forest, the log covered with 
green moss, the songs of birds, the prattle of children, the glow of effort, the beauties 
f poetry, the victories of thought, the thousand and thousand real pleasures of life 
re inaccessible to him “who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt,” while the 
orrows he feels, or thinks he feels, are as unreal as his joys, and as unworthy of a 
fe worth living. 

_ There was once, I am told, a merchant who came into his office smacking his lips, 
nd said to his clerk, ‘““The world looks very different to the man who has had a good 
s of brandy and soda in the morning.” ‘Yes,” said the clerk, “and the man looks 


And this is natural and inevitable. For the pleasure which exists only in the 
Nagination leads to action which has likewise nothing to do with the demands of life. 
he mind is confused, and may be delighted through the confusion, but the confused 
uscles tremble and halt. The tongue is loosened and utters unfinished sentences, the 
ind is loosened, and the handwriting is shaky, the muscles of the eyes are unhar- 
essed, and the two eyes move independently and see double, the legs are loosened 


sion is:long continued, the mental deterioration shows itself in external things, the 
abby hat and seedy clothing and the gradual drop of the man from stratum to 
ratum of society till he brings up at the last in the ditch. As the world looks 
re and more different to him, so does he look more and more different to the world. 
A prominent lawyer of Boston once told me that the great impulse to total absti- 
mence came to him when a young man, from hearing his fellow lawyers talking after 


390 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


. 


their cups. The most vital secrets of their clients’ business were made public property 
when their tongues were loosened by wine. And this led my friend to the firm resolu- 
tion that nothing should go into his mouth which would prevent him from keeping it 
closed unless he wanted to open it. The time will come when the only career for the 


ambitious man of intemperate habits will be in politics. It is rapidly becoming so 


now. The private employer dare not trust his business to the man who drinks. The 
great corporations dare not. He is not wanted on the railroads. The steamship lines 


have long since cast him off. The banks dare not use him. He cannot keep accounts. — 


Only the people long suffering and generous remain as his resource. For this reason, 


municipal government is his specialty; and while this patience of the people lasts, our 


cities will breed scandals as naturally as our swamps breed malaria. 


Before you step outside the path of sanity, be it ever so little, consider well the 


cost. How much can you afford? You are young, strong, ambitious. You have your 


work in life before you. You have burdens already of your own, and you will wish to 
carry the burdens of others. These will tax all your strength. Therefore, keep all you 
have. Do not throw away your one great chance for happiness in the search for 


pleasures which you have not earned, and which at the best will take you from the ‘ 


path you have chosen, and which is the path of your duty. 


After these four, the great temptations, comes the train of small ones, which I 


have called corrosion. The lower temptations are those nearest to us, and they act 
persistently, however little any one of them may attract us in itself. 


First of these comes vulgarity. To be vulgar is to do that which is not the best of 


‘its kind, It is to do poor things in poor ways, and to be satisfied with that. Vulgarity 


weakens the mind and thus brings all other weakness in its train. It is vulgar to wear 
dirty linen when one is not engaged in dirty work. It is vulgar to like poor music, to 
read weak books, to feed on sensational newspapers, to trust to patent medicines, to 
be amused by trashy novels, to enjoy vulgar theaters, to tolerate coarseness and loose- 
ness in any of their myriad forms. We find the corrosion of vulgarity everywhere, 
and its poison enters every home. The bill-boards of our cities are covered with its 
evidences; our newspapers are redolent with it; our story books reek with it; our 
schools are tainted by it, and we cannot keep it out of our homes or our churches 
or our colleges. 


It is the hope of civilization that our republic may outgrow the toleration of 
vulgarity, but we have a long struggle before us before this is done. It is said that 
vulgarity is the besetting sin of democracy. This we might believe were it not that 
the most vulgar city in the world, the one from which vulgarity rises like an exhala- 
tion, is one of the least democratic. 


The second power of vulgarity is obscenity, and this vice is like the pestilence. 
Wherever it finds lodgment it kills. It fills the mind with vile pictures, which will 
come up again and again, standing in the way of all healthful effort. Those’ who have 
studied the life history of homeless poor tell me that obscenity and not drink is the 
cause of the ineffectiveness of most of them. In the ranks of the unemployed, besides 


ee ee ae ee 


the infirm and the unfortunate, is the great residue of the unemployable. The most of - 
these are rendered so by the utter decay of force which comes from the habit of 


obscenity. The forces which make for vulgarity tend also towards obscenity, for all 
inane vulgarity tends to grow obscene. We judge the wickedness of Pompeii by evil 
signs and paintings which the baptism of fire and eighteen centuries of burial have 
failed to purify. If San Francisco were to be buried today we would not willingly 
have our civilization judged by its bill-boards on the corner of Market street. The 


gauntlet of obscene suggestions is the most terrible one our children have to face. We 


men can stand it perhaps, but the children and their friends would surely be justified 


The Strength of Being C lean—Jordan. 36t 


in forming a vigilance committee to clean up the town. Perhaps they may do this 
sometime in some fashion. 

A form of vulgarity is profanity. It is the sign of a dull, coarse, unrefined nature. 
There are times perhaps when profanity is picturesque and effective. In Arizona 
sometimes it is so, and I have seen it so in Wyoming. But not indoors nor in the 
streets nor under normal conditions. It is then simply an insult to the atmosphere 
which is vulgarized for the purpose. It is not that profanity is offensive to God. He 
may deal with it in His own way. It is offensive to man and destructive to him. It 
hurts the man who uses it. ‘““‘What cometh out of a man defileth him,”’ and the man 
hus defiled extends his corrosion to others. The open door of the saloon makes it a 
center of corrosion, and the miserable habit of “treating” which we cail American, but 
which exists wherever the tippling house exists, spreads and intensifies it. 


_ There is no great virtue in statutes to keep men sober. I would as soon “see the 

thole world drunk through choice as sober through compulsion.” The resistance to 
mptation must come from within. So far as the drink of drunkards is concerned, 
prohibition does not prohibit. But to clean up a town, to free it from corrosion, saves 
men and boys and girls too from vice, and who shall say that moral Sanitation is not 
is much the duty of the community as physical sanitation? The city of the future will 
not permit the existence of slums and dives and tippling houses. It will prohibit their 
being for the same reason that it now prohibits pig-pens and dung-hills and cesspools. 
For where all of these things are, slums and cesspools, saloons and pig-pens, there the 
people grow weak and die. 


There are many other forms of the evil of corrosion, but I need pass them only 
with a word. The feeling of weakness breeds the habit of envy; the jealousy and 
atred of the fortunate. Many a vagabond looks on the man with a clean collar as an 
memy who has robbed him, and there are not wanting agitators and politicians who 
nake the most of this jealousy. Other evil influences too there are which you know 
nd I know, and which from day to day we must struggle to cast aside. 


But the point of all I have to say is this: “Consent thou not!” Resistance to one 
temptation brings strength to overcome all others. To overcome temptations is to 
make a man of you. To be a man is to be useful, honored, successful, happy. It is not 
fo t1 to seek strength by hazard or chance. Power has its price, and its price is 
traight effort. 


It is not for you, in Kipling’s words, “with all your life’s work to be done, that 
ou must needs go dancing down the devil’s swept and garnished causeway because 
brsooth there is a light woman’s smile at the end of it.” 


t is not for you to seek pleasure and strength in drinks whose only function is to 


It is not for you to believe that idleness brings rest or that unearned rest brings 
leasure. You are young men and strong, and it is for you to resist corrosion and to 
help stamp it out of civilized society. 

Temptation will be in the path of man forever. It is good for him, as adversity 
_ but vulgar corrosion is like poisoned water. Whatever our relation to it, it can 


# 


nly bring us harm. 


id soul and body clean. 
“TI know of no more encouraging fact,” says Thoreau, “than the ability of a man 


> elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture 


Har wees Sau beat ks nes) 7 y 


‘ a 


392 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


or to carve a statue and so make a few objects beautiful. I 
carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through 
morally we can do.” 


[David Starr Jordan was born at Gainesville, N. Y., Jan 
education at Cornell University, Indiana Medical College, 
been president of Indiana University, U. S. Commissioner in ‘ 
tigations, and president of Leland Stanford University from 1891 
number of works on zoology, The Innumerable Company, etc. — 

This address was delivered to a large audience of young ‘men, 
most eloquent. presentation of a subject not often brought befor 


THE CRUCIFIXION. 


FRIEDRICH WILHELM KRUMMACHER. 


“And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place 
fa skull, they gave Him vinegar to drink, mingled with gall; and when He had tasted 
hereof, He would not drink. And they crucified Him.’”—Matt. 27: 33-35. 


“The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.” Let 
hese words of the prophet Habakkuk be the language of our hearts on entering into 
he Most Holy Place of the Gospel history. 

_ The most solemn of all days in Israel was, as we well know, the great day of 
ttonement, the only day in the year on which the high priest entered into the most 
joly place in the temple. Before he approached that mysterious sanctuary, the law 
njoined that he should divest himself of his costly garments, and clothe himself 
rom head to foot in a plain white linen dress. He then took the vessel with the 
acrificial blood in his hand, and, thrilling with sacred awe, drew back the veil, in 
rder, humbly and devoutly, to approach the throne of grace, and sprinkle it with the 
toning blood. He remained no longer in the sacred place than sufficed to perform 
lis priestly office. He then came out again to the people and, in Jehovah’s name, 
nnounced grace and forgiveness to every penitent soul. 

We shall now see this symbolical and highly significant act realized in its full and 
accomplishment. The immaculate Jesus of whom the whole Old Testament 
riesthood, according to the divine intention, was only a typical shadow, conceals 
dimself behind the thick veil of an increasing humiliation and agony; that, bearing 
n His hands His own blood, He may mediate for us with God His Father. Removed 


izes and accomplishes all that Moses included in the figurative service of the 
acle. The precise manner in which this was accomplished we shall never 
ly fathom with our intellectual powers; but it is certain that He then finally 
rocured our eternal redemption. 

_ My readers, how shall we best prepare ourselves for the contemplation of this 
os solemn and sacred event? At least we must endeavor to do so by holy recollec- 
in of thought, devout meditation, a believing and blissful consideration of the work 
‘redemption, and by heartfelt and grateful adoration before the throne of God. 

May we be enabled thus to draw near by the help of His grace and mercy! 

‘Once more we return to the road to the cross, and, in spirit, mingle with the 
vd proceeding to the place of execution. They are just passing the rocky sepul- 
hres of the kings of Israel. The ancient monarchs sleep in their cells, but a dawning 
surrection gleams upon their withered remains when the Prince of Life passes by. 
e | procession then enters the horrible vale of Gehenna, which once reeked with the 
od of the sacrifices to Moloch. But there is another still more dreadful Cehenna; 
d who among us would have escaped it, had not the Lamb of God submitted to the 
ferings which we now see Him enduring? . 


We are arrived at the foot of the awful hill; but before ascending it, let us cast 


304 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


a look on the crowd behind us, and see if, amid all the hatred and rancor that rages 
there like an infernal flame, we can discover any traces of sympathy and heartfelt 
veneration for the divine sufferer. And lo! an estimable little group meets our eye, 
like a benignant constellation in the darkness of the night. O we know them already, 
these deeply-distressed mourners! We first perceive the pious Salome, the blessed 
mother of the two “sons of thunder.” She desires to set her children an example of 
faithfulness unto death, and we know that both James and John, the former of whom : 
was the first martyr for the new kingdom of peace, afterward showed themselves — 
perfectly worthy of such a mother. Near Salome walks Mary, the near relative of the | 
blessed Virgin. She had also the great privilege of seeing her two sons, James the > 
Less and Joses, received into the immediate fellowship of the great Master. But alas! 
when the sword came upon the Shepherd they were also scattered with the rest of 
the flock; while it seemed to their excellent mother a paramount duty to appear, — 
instead of her children, and by her own fidelity to cover their flight. And lo! yonder 
walks Mary Magdalene, sobbing aloud, who had experienced, above others, the 
delivering power of Him who came to destroy the works of the devil. O how she — 
appears dissolved in grief and sorrow! She has only one wish more, and that is, ta 
be.able to die with Him, without whom the earth seems to her only a gloomy grave, a 
den of murderers. ; 
But who is she with tottering step, leaning on the disciple whom Jesus loved, — 
dejected more than all the rest, who covers her grief-worn face? It is the sorely-tried 
mother of our Lord, in whom Simeon’s prophecy is now fulfilled, “A sword shall 
pierce through thine soul also.”’ But she had scarcely the smallest presentiment that 
it would be accomplished in such a manner. Truly, what she feels no heart on earth 
ever experienced. But look up, Mary! Cast thyself, with all thy grief, into the arms | 
of the Eternal Father. Dost thou see thy Son going to be crucified? He also sees 
His. He who is crowned with thorns is His Son as well as thine. O look at the 
dear disciple, who, though inconsolable himself, tries to support the deeply-grieved 
mother of his Lord. What a scene! But how gratifying is it to perceive, that love 
for the Man of Sorrows has not wholly become extinct upon earth! Nor shall it ever 
expire. Be not concerned on that account. In that mourning group you see only the - 
first divinely-quickened germs of the future kingdom of the Divine Sufferer. From — 
a few, a multitude that no man can number will ere long proceed. , 
After this cursory retrospect of the Savior’s attendants, let us again put ourselves — 
in motion with the crowd. Only a few steps upward, and we reach the end of the ~ 
dreadful pilgrimage. Where are we now? Weare standing on the summit of Mount 
Calvary—Golgotha—horrifying name—the appellation of the most momentous and 
awful spot upon the whole earth. Behold a naked and barren eminence, enriched only - 
by the blood of criminals, and covered with the bones of executed rebels, incendiaries, 
poisoners, and other offscourings of the human race. An accursed spot, where love | 
never rules, but where naked justice alone sits enthroned, with scales and sword, and 
from which every passer-by turns with abhorrence, a nocturnal rendezvous of jackals 
and hyenas. Only think, this place so full of horrors, becomes transformed into “the 
hill from whence cometh our help,” and whose mysteries many kings and prophets 
have desired to see, and did not see them. Yes, upon this awful hill our roses shall 
blossom, and our springs of peace and salvation burst forth. The pillar of our refuge 
towers upon this height. The Bethany of our repose and eternal refreshment here 
displays itself to our view. Truly the ancients were in so far correct in their assertion, 
that Mount Calvary formed the center of the whole earth; for it is the meeting-place 
where the redeemed, though separated in body by land and sea, daily assemble in 
spirit, and greet each other with the kiss of love. Not less correct were they in the 
legend that Father Adam was buried beneath Mount Calvary—this hill being really 


ont. 


The Crucifixion—Krummacher. 395 


dam’s grave, when by the latter we understand the fallen sinful man, whom we all 
a ‘ry about in us, and who was crucified with Christ on Golgotha. It is strange that 
) this day the learned dispute the position of this hill, and that there is scarcely a 
rospect of ascertaining the place with certainty. But it was the divine intention that 
material mount should be exalted into the region of that which is spiritual; and 
ich is actually the case. It finds its abiding-place in the believing view of the world. 
On that awful mount ends the earthly career of the Lord of Glory. Behold Him, 
en, the only green, sound, and fruitful tree upon earth, and at the root of this tree the 
ce is laid. What a testimony against the world, and what an annihilating con- 
radiction to everything that bears the name of God and Divine Providence, if the 
tter did not find its solution in the mystery of the representative atonement! Behold 
lim, then, covered with wounds and ignominy, and scarcely distinguishable from the 
nalefactors among whom He is reckoned. But have patience. In a few years Jeru- 
lem, that rejected Him, glorifies Him in the form of a smoking heap of ruins, as the 
sloved Son of the Most High, whom no one can assail with impunity; and surrounded 
y the lights of the sanctuary, living monuments arise, in three quarters of the globe, 
ed ing the inscription, ‘““To Christ, the Redeemer of the World.” Before these things 
ake place, a horrible catastrophe must occur. The life of the world only springs forth 
rom the death of the Just One. The hour of His baptism with blood has arrived. 
ollect your thoughts, my readers, while you witness it. 

_ Alas! alas! what is it that now takes place on that bloody hill? O heart of stone 
n our breasts, why dost thou not break? Why, thou cold and obdurate rock, dost 
hou not dissolve in tears of blood? Four barbarous men, inured to the most dreadful 
f all employments, approach the Holy One of Israel, and offer Him, first of all, a 
fying potion, composed of wine and myrrh, as usual at executions. The Lord 
isdains the draught, because He desires to submit to the will of His Heavenly Father 
vith full consciousness, and to drink the last drop of the accursed cup. The execu- 
joners then take the Lamb of God between them, and begin their horrid occupation 
y tearing, with rude hands, the clothes from off His body. There He stands, whose 
arment once was the light, and the stars of heaven the fringe of His robe, covered 
nly with the crimson of His blood, and divested of all that adorned Him, not only 
efore men, but also in His character as Surety, before God—reminding us of Adam in 
aradise, only that instead of hiding Himself behind the trees at the voice of God, He 
serfully goes toward it; reminding us also of the Old Testament high priest, His 
ious type, who, before he entered into the Most Holy place to make an atone- 
exchanged his rich attire for a simple white robe. 

After having unclothed the Lord, and left Him, by divine direction, only His 
‘own of thorns, they lay Him down on the wood on which He is to bleed; and thus, 
hout being aware of it, bring about the moment predicted in Psalm 22, where we 
ar the Messiah complaining, and saying, “Be not far from Me, for trouble is near; 
r there is none to help. Many bulls have compassed Me about; strong bulls of 
shan have beset Me round.” O what a dying bed for the King of kings! My 
ends, as often as we repose on the downy cushions of divine peace, or blissfully 
semble in social brotherly circles, singing hymns of hope, let us not forget that the 
se of the happiness we enjoy is solely to be found in the fact that the Lord of Glory 
ice extended Himself on the fatal tree for us. 

-O see Him lie! His holy arms forcibly stretched out upon the cross-beam; His 
t laid upon each other and bound with cords. Thus Isaac once lay on the wood on 
Moriah. But the voice that then called out of heaven, saying, “Lay not thine 


396 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


pervades the crowd, like that which is wont to fill the house of mourning when the 
coffin is nailed down. And, probably, not only on earth, but also in heaven at that 
moment, profound and solemn silence reigned. The horrible nails from the forge of 
hell, yet foreseen in the sanctuary of eternity, are placed on the hands and feet of the 
righteous Jesus, and the heavy strokes of the hammer fall. Reader, dost thou hear the 
sound? They thunder on thy heart, testifying in horrible language of thy sin, and at 
the same time of the wrath of Almighty God. O how many sleepers have awoke from 
their sleep of death under the echo of those strokes, and have escaped from Satan’s 
snare! Awake also thou that art asleep in sin, and rouse thyself likewise, thou who art 
lulling thyself in carnal security! How many a proud and haughty heart has been 
broken into salutary repentance by those strokes! O why does not thy heart also 
break? For know that thou didst aid in swinging those hammers; and that the most 
crying and impious act which the world ever committed is charged to thy account, 

See, the nails have penetrated through, and from both hands and feet gushes forth 
the blood of the Holy One. O these nails have rent the rock of salvation for us, that 
it may pour forth the water of life; have reft the heavenly bush of balm, that it may 
send forth its perfume. Yes, they have pierced the handwriting that was against us, 
and have nailed it, as invalid, to the tree; and by wounding the Just One have pene- 
trated through the head of the old serpent, like Jael’s nail through the head of Sisera. 
O, let no one be deceived with respect to Him who was thus nailed to the cross! 
Those pierced hands bless more powerfully than while they moved freely and un- 
fettered. They are the hands of a wonderful architect, who is building the frame of 
an eternal church—yea, they are the hands of a hero, which take from the strong man 
all his spoil. And believe me, there is no help or salvation save in these hands; and 
these bleeding feet tread more powerfully than when no fetters restrained their steps. 
They now walk victoriously over the heads of thousands of foes, who shortly before 
held up their heads with boldness. Hills and mountains flow down beneath their steps, 
which they never would have levelled unwounded; and nothing springs or blooms in 
the world, except beneath the prints of these feet. 


The most dreadful deed is done, and the prophetic words of the Psalm, “They 
pierced My hands and My feet,” have received their fulfilment. The foot of the cross 
is then brought near to the hole dug for it; powerful men seize the rope attached to the 
top of it, and begin to draw, and the cross, with its victim, elevates itself and rises to its 
height. Thus the earth rejects the Prince of Life from its surface, and, as it seems, 
heaven also refuses Him. But we will let the curtain drop over these horrors. Thank 
God! in that scene of suffering the Sun of Grace rises over a sinful world, and the Lion 
of Judah only ascends into the region of the spirits that have the power of the air, in 
order, in a mysterious conflict, eternally to disarm them on our behalf. 


Look what a spectacle now presents itself! The moment the cross is elevated to 
its height, a purple stream falls from the wounds of the crucified Jesus through the 
air, and bedews the place of torture, and the sinful crowd which surrounds it. This is 
His legacy to His Church. We render Him thanks for such a bequest. This rosy dew 
works wonders. It falls upon spiritual deserts, and they blossom as the rose. We 
sprinkle it upon the door-posts of our hearts, and are secure against destroyers and 
avenging angels. This dew falls on the ice of the north pole, and the accumulated 
frozen mass of ages thaws beneath it. It streams down on the torrid zone, and the air 
becomes cool and pleasant. Where this rain falls, the gardens of God spring up, lilies 
bloom, and what was black becomes white in the purifying stream, and what was 
polluted becomes pure as the light of the sun. That which dew and rain is to nature, 
which without them would soon become a barren waste, the crimson shower which 
we see falling from the cross is to human minds, There is no possibility of flourishing 


The Crucifixion—Krummacher. 397 


without it, no growth nor verdure, but everywhere desolation, barrenness, and death. 
et us therefore embrace the cross, and sing with the poet:— 


“Here, at thy cross, my dying God, 
I lay my soul beneath thy love, 
Beneath the droppings of thy blood, 
Jesus, nor shall it e’er remove!” 


There stands the mysterious cross—a rock against which the very waves of the 
‘curse break, a lightning-conductor by which the destroying fluid descends, which 
would otherwise have crushed the world. He who so merciiully engaged to direct this 
‘thunderbolt against Himself hangs yonder in profound darkness. Still He remains 
‘the Morning Star, announcing an eternal Sabbath to the world. Though rejected 
‘by heaven and earth, yet He forms, as such, the connecting link between them both, 
and the Mediator of their eternal and renewed amity. Ah, see! His bleeding arms are 
extended wide; He stretches them out to every sinner. His hands point to the east and 
west; for He shall gather His children from the ends of the earth. The top of the 
cross is directed toward the sky; far above the world will its effects extend. Its foot 
is fixed in the earth; the cross becomes a wondrous tree, from. which we reap the 
fruit of an eternal reconciliation. O, my readers, nothing more is requisite than that 
‘the Lord should grant us penitential tears, and then, by means of the Holy Spirit, show 
us the Savior suffering on the cross. We then escape from all earthly care and sorrow, 
_and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. For our justification in His sight, nothing 
‘more is requisite than that, in the consciousness of our utter helplessness, we lay hold 
on the horns of that altar which is sprinkled with the blood that “speaketh better 
‘things than that of Abel.” And the Man of Sorrows displays to us the fulness of His 
treasures, and bestows upon us, in a superabundant degree, the blessing of the 
- Patriarch Jacob on his son Joseph:—“The blessings of thy father have prevailed above 
the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills.” 


__. There stands erected the standard of the new covenant, which, when it is under- 
stood, spreads terror around it no less than delight, and produces lamentation no less 
than joy and rejoicing. It stands to this day, and will stand forever, and no more 
fears those who would overturn it than the staff of Moses feared when those of the 
_ Magicians hissed around it. And wherever it is displayed, there it is surrounded by 
- powerful manifestations and miraculous effects. We carry it through the nations, and 
without a blow of the sword conquer one country after another, and one fortress 
‘aiter another. Look how the missionary fields become verdant, and a springtime of 
the Spirit extends itself over the heathen deserts! Hark how the harps of peace 
_ resound from the isles of the sea; and behold how, between the icebergs of the north, 
the hearts begin to glow with the fire of divine love! From whence these changes? these 
-resurrection-wonders? From whence this shaking in the valley of dry bones? The 
cross is carried through the land, and beneath its shade the soil becomes verdant and 
the dead revive. When this wondrous cross is exhibited, with a correct exposition 
of its hieroglyphic characters, “lightnings, thunderings, and voices” are wont to pro- 
ceed. Stones melt in its vicinity, rocks rend before it, and waters, long stagnant, again 


tipple, clear and pure, as if some healing angel had descended into them. 


“Tam crucified with Christ,” exclaims the apostle, and by these words points out 
the entire fruit which the cross bears for all believers. His meaning is,“They are not 
His sins, for which the curse is there endured, but mine; for He who thus expires on 
‘ the cross dies for me. Christ pays and suffers in my stead.” But that of which Paul 
_ boasts is the property of us all, if by the living bond of faith and love we are become 
_ One with the crucified Jesus. We are likewise exalted to fellowship with the cross of 
Christ in the sense also that our corrupt nature is condemned to death, and our old 


398 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


man, with his affections and lusts, is subjected to the bitter process of a lingeri T 
partly through the spirit of purity which dwells and rules within us, and partl ry 
trials and humiliations which God sends us, until the lance-wound of the death of 
body makes an end of it. But it is while enduring these mortal agonies that we | 
see the cross of Calvary unfold its full and peace-bestowing radiance. It arches 
like a rainbow, over our darkness, and precedes us on our path of sorrow like a p: 
oi fire. O that its serene light might also shine upon our path through this va 
tears, and, as the tree of liberty and life, strike deep its roots in our souls! App 
hended by faith, may it shed its heavenly fruit into our lap, and warm and ona 
hearts and minds beneath its shade! 


was born at Meurs, Lower Rhine, @enuaier January 28, 1796, and died Decem' 

10, 1868. His father was a distinguished theologian, and author of the famous “ 
bles,” in verse. Friedrich was educated at Halle and Jena. After a three yea 
pastorate over a German Reformed congregation in New York city, he settled 
Berlin in 1847. The closing words of his last Sermon are said to have epitomi 
his religious character: “Our conversation is in heaven.” Among his widely kn 
works are: “Elijah the Tishbite;”’ “David, the King of Israel;” “The Suffer: 
Savior,” meditations on the last days of Christ. From the last named this Ser 
is taken, by permission of Porter and Coates.] 


THE NEW SONG. 


JOHN ELLIS LANCELEY. 


_ “And they sung as it were a new song before the throne.”—Rey. 14:3. “And they 
ing the song of Moses . . . and the song of the Lamb.”—Reyv. 15: 3. 


_ There is a special benediction pronounced upon those who read the words of this 
rophecy. This stirs the aspiring soul to a prayerful study, and a plea for the fulfill- 
ment of the promise: “To him that knocketh it shall be opened.” 

Stand a little while with me this morning upon the threshold of the unseen and 
beyond—that realm which is as true and potent in its influence over us as anything we 
ive seen in this career. 

The veil is lifted in that revelation given to our fellow-servant John, and written! 
by y command to stir our hope. It is full of messages which have been a solace and 
: ngth to us in all the variations of our human hours. 

_ Weare here as Bible students. Whatever of difference there is between us and the 
worldling, or the slave of sin and unbelief, comes from the Bible. Shut up this Book 
and we are imprisoned, and we may abandon ourselves to a pitiless fate. We may 
hout and cry, yet there is no answer save the echo of our cry. But we are here with 
he Bible before us. To us there is no darkness unbroken, and no problem but a 
iossible solution has been rendered, and the forecast of its outcome laid before our 


At the conclusion of the messages to the seven churches, of which John was the 
pastor, we have the record: “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” ‘Following this 
is the rehearsal of what was made manifest through that open door. No doubt this 
loor opening was largely—though not entirely subjective, i.e., in the mind of John 
imself. Education opens a door to the human mind, and makes the interior of the 
temple of knowledge visible. Open the eyes of the blind man, and you may record 
he event by saying: “A door was opened into this world for him.” 

There was one thing very certain about John’s experience at this time. All other 
doors had been closed to him; he had no outlook which gave him any pleasurable 
ght, and yet he says: “I looked.” Yes; where did he look? Not back toward 
mainland, where his friends and home and churches were; that opens no vision, 
epting such as memory gives of scenes gone by. “I looked!’ There was no 
her on which to look, save that which the soul chooses when it is freed from 
ly ties. So he looked upward. If he had not looked, to him no door in heaven 
would have opened. It is the “lookers” who become the seers. And we learn that one 
did not bring all the revelation. He looked again and again. It was because he 
a “looker” that he was invited to “come and see.” It was when he looked that he 
aw the “Lamb standing upon Mount Zion.” It was when he looked again that he 
w “the white cloud and the Son of man seated thereupon, with a golden crown and 
s harp sickle.” It was when he looked again that he saw the opening of the “temple 
of the tabernacle of testimony.” O surely! it is those who look that see. In this 
miverse of infinite wealth we finite souls shall see only that kind for which we look. 

_ John saw the “throne of God;” he saw “the Lamb in the midst of the throne;” 
saw heavenly beings and earthly ones in one great act of worship. And they did 
uredly worship “the Lamb.” I am glad that this is so recorded. We lift our 


400 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


voices down here in strains of worship to Jesus Christ. Sometimes we have been 
called idolaters by those of our brethren who have assumed a Unitarian name, O Ts 
is a worship approved in heaven. The angels—cherubim and seraphim—worship H L. 
If we are wrong, then they are wrong. Surely I need not be wiser in this matter than 
the “angels of God.” If they stand round the throne and sing: ‘Worthy is the Lamb 
that was slain to receive blessing and honor and glory and power,” surely I can jo 
in the strain: 


n 


“Let earth and heaven agree, 
Angels and men be joined, 
To celebrate with me 
The Savior of mankind; 
To adore the all-atoning Lamb, 
And bless the sound of Jesus’ name.” 


And theirs was a worship of song. Song is the language of triumph. Even when 
melancholy triumphs in us for a time, our song becomes a minor, and pours forth a 
funeral dirge—strange mingling of a temporary grief, through which hope sings in 
sackcloth. When hope triumphs, she flings off her sackcloth and sings in bold an d 
major numbers. It is easy for fulfilled desire to sing, i.e., when that desire has been 
within the spirit-air, where music floats. Not all forms of thought can sing. 
houses of legislature or the senatorial halls have no ideas for music’s scale. The boa 
of trade, or joint-stock company, think not of opening or closing their meetings wi 
song; not even the Science Association of Britain or America thinks of associating 
song with its sessions. There is clear admission that their business is too low-set for 
song; that their ideas are not above the shallow exercises of this passing day. They 
need no wings, for they belong to the dust of earth. ay 

Songs are the soul’s language spoken into the unseen. It is not to one another 
we sing. It may be sometimes for one another, and ofttimes with one another, when 
“all partake the joys of one,” and “the common peace we feel.” Songs are the soul’s” 
transfiguration of speech, when the Divine sounds through the human and bespeaks 
the parentage sublime. I am full well aware that, as on one occasion the vessels of 
God’s temple were desecrated to the service of heathen wine-bibbers, so may the harps" 
of God be strung for the Bacchanalian revelries and the mirth which is the mocking» 
mimicry of joy; but it is the prostitution of the Divine in man, and the prostitutes are 
few. Do you not remember the peculiar and significant phraseology of the singer of 
Israel, when he declared: ‘Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my 
pilgrimage.” Just look at chat! ‘Thy statutes have been my songs.” “Thy” and_ 
“my” indicate the conscious fellowship of God and man, “The house of my pilgrim-_ 
age!” Look at that! How clearly is declared the consciousness of this as a pilgrim | 
state, with this house as a temporary abode! It is really the same phraseology as that 
of the later “child of hope’ who sang: “When the house of this tabernacle shall be 
dissolved.” It is in this temporary condition the Psalmist sings: “Thy statutes have 
been my songs.” What are statutes? What is the meaning of the statute? You who 
go to school every day can tell us. Statutes are things fixed, decreed, set, which 
cannot be otherwise—certainties!—eternal realties! O yes! we can read it. Thy cer- 
tainties have been my songs in the changing courses of my pilgrimage! Thy eternal 
truths, fixed in my soul, are my songs in the night seasons and in the storm: 


“While the nearer waters roll, 
While the tempest still is high.” 


Thy statutes anchor my soul within the veil, sure and steadfast! That idea must 
be repudiated which places the soul’s songs as among the mutatory effects of exhilara-~ 
tion or enthusiasm. The song is the soul’s voice of trust singing the statutes amid 


- 


ae 


The New Song—Lanceley. 401 


ae crumbling of earth-built castles. It is the law that sings—mind that! The spheres 
e set to the music of the statutes. Why do we not think more about all these great 
hings? Why do not God’s children study everything that is for the Father’s sake and 
heir own? It is all for them, created and redeemed from destruction for their sake. 
me, just here, why it is that we have a musical scale of eight notes, the eighth 
being a return to the first! Tell me why the seventh cries out for the finality of the 
ighth, and no song could end on the seventh! Tell me why the first or eighth, which 
are alike, is the keynote to which all the rest are related, and to which all must return 
or a peaceful rest! 
_ Then tell me why it is the same with days: the first and the eighth, being the same, 
ye us the keynote by which to regulate the operation of the six which fill the interval! 
ell me why the Son of God, when moving through this sphere of days, died on the 
h day, which corresponds to the note on which all the minor chords, voicing the 
quiems of the sad, are posited! Tell me why the eighth day was made the Lord’s 
‘day, on which He rose from the grave to begin the new octave of salvation’s song 
which He sings in glory: “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: which 
was dead and is alive forever more!” Tell me why all this was prefigured a thousand 
ars before in acts and facts and sacrifices, Divinely commanded to be performed or 
ered on the eighth day; that on this day the Lord revealed Himself in glory to 
ron and his sons after they had waited the full seven days at the door of the taber- 
nacle; that on this eighth day the lepers were cleansed, the Feast of First Fruits kept, 
d, likewise, the Feast of Pentecost on the eighth day, fifty days after the Feast of 
First Fruits; and also the Feast of Tabernacles, which pointed to the time when God 
would tabernacle with men and wipe away all tears from their eyes! The eighth day 
is a return to the first; but we can neither begin nor end the scale without the 
consciousness of both. The first day of the week is the Christian Sabbath, and it is 
he eighth day of the whole Jewish ritual, and between these two all the history of the 
work of salvation comes. 
Jt is the “statutes” that are to be our songs—no maudlin sentiments of a passing 
motion: such die down with the breeze which stirred them. The statutes abide. Law 
is musical, for it is orderly. The “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” gives the 
sou its freedom, and sets all its goings agoing. 
_ But who of God’s witnesses cares to study all these things, and stand as the inter- 
preters to men of God’s great gifts? The great world loves music and knows not yet 
‘its meaning. God's children only can ever know; it is given to them to know the 
Mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. } 

ie But we only can know who seek to know. It is the reward of a patient, faithful 
‘search. Why gyrate around upon a few well-founded platitudes, and think ourselves 
neere followers of Christ. We sing—we know not what; we ask not why. We fear 
en to look upward or forward, lest we be compelled to fold up our tents and seek 
land of the prospect. Hence, we are slothful and indolent disciples. 
Often your teachers go up into the mount of God, and see visions of truth which 
them to lead you out; but they fall flat on the unaspiring crowd. I have sat down 
id wept, on, many a time, through sheer loneliness—through lack of appreciation of 
hat has fairly transfigured my spirit with its heavenly glow. I have often retreated 
into the common-place and stayed there because there was none to arise and go up 
a the land of promise. 
_ “And they sang as it were a new song.” That was because they were redeemed 
from the earth, and no man could learn it but a redeemed one. This teaches us that we 
all not all be merged into one class when we reach that blest abode. The angels 
and the redeemed will be distinct in their experiences. They can tell us much of 
der sphere, and in due time we will come into their conditions and understand 


il 


402 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


their loftiest thoughts; but our experience will be a mystery to the wisest of them. 
best angel chum cannot sing my song of grace. He has never wept, never sorro 
never sinned, never given birth to a child and mourned over the pale, cold face of 
dead one; he has never yearned over a prodigal son or daughter. Ah, indeed, me 
He has never writhed in the agonies of guilt, and cried from his heart depths: 
wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” I 
you and I, should we meet there, could sing together. We have shared each oth 
woes; we have borne our mutual burdens; we have wept the same tears; we have cried 
the same cry for help; we have received the same consolation, and so we sing 
same song of triumph. Maybe the angels can play our accompaniments. I think it 
Bisely for the angels are forever servants, but men forever sons. 

“A new song!” I have been looking over our hymn book—and there are { 
better, as you know—but I find in it many topics which we shall never need « 
yonder: “Warning and inviting,” “penitential hymns,” “for believers praying,” “ 
believers watching,” “for believers suffering,” “for believers fighting,” “for burial 
All these belong to the wilderness journey, the piledaay and the warfare. In 
midst of the throne they sing ‘“‘a new song.’ va 

Our second text says: “They sing the song of Moses . . . and the song e 
the Lamb.” Right! for verily, indeed, they are closely related. ; 

I read over for you this morning the song of Moses. Did you notice its oper 
address, its prelude incomparable? ‘Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak 
hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.” That is music! No speaker of prose 
so large an auditorium in which to give his oration. Look at that again!—“Give 
O ye heavens,” while I sing. Quickly, now, turn over all the pages betwee 
Pentateuch and the Apocalypse! Look in through the open door! Listen! ° 
they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God.” Ah! Did not the heavens 
ear, and did not the earth also hear the words of his mouth? Oh, ’tis wonderful 
not so wonderful either. The subject of the song demands it. Men with little su 
may content themselves with class-rooms and corners, with favored spots ‘and c 
hearers; but Moses is going to sing about God. There is only one God! Does. 
not fill the heavens and the earth? Then, all must hear of His wonderful works 
is the grandeur of the Bible. It is big with every element of worth; and its gra 
like its outreach—infinite. The song of Moses was a song of God. It could, there! 
be sung in heaven. ‘ 3 

Moreover, it was a song of redemption. It was taught to the people at the end 
of the pilgrimage, to sing in the land of their inheritance. It was a song of 
dealing with man, redeeming him from his enemy and from his bondage, and | 
him a liberty to serve God and partake of His eternal bounties. It was a new 
and no man can learn it but they that had been redeemed. Moses wrote it in a da: 
is the way the songs come. You cannot work on a song; it is now or never. It i 
or it is impossible. It is an inspiration, or it may be a respiration. It comes 
above, or it rises up from the hidden depths. It may be both. The inspiration 
and it searches the deepest recesses of the soul, and gives a vital energy to the hic 
things by which they come forth and are born into an active life. 

Then Moses taught this song to the children of Israel. They could learn it. 
man in Moses’ day could Jearn that song but the redeemed. No other could und 
stand its wonderful range of utterance. There must be no singing in an unkn 
tongue. So far back as that day, they must “sing with the spirit and the un 
standing.” The song of Moses contained history and statute and judgment, cou 
and warning and promise. It was the first chapter of Redemption’s story. It 1 O 
of the struggle to free them from the outward enemy which had enslaved them 
then rehearsed the intenser conflict of redeeming and liberating them from the enem 


The New Song—Lanceley. 403 


arned at the end of the pilgrimage by the pilgrims themselves, it was their 
aan song through all the years of their history. David’s psalms are paraphrases 
ne song of Moses, which he taught them on purpose to sing in Canaan’s temple, 


e living God.” 

Ve can easily understand, then, that in the musical programme of that occasion, 
John was present ‘in the spirit,’ there should be a place for “the song of 
es, the servant of God.” But, you say, that is not a new song. Oh, yes; it will 
lew in the light of heaven. In the light of sun and stars it would, perhaps, 


ght’—the unfading day, when “they shall need neither candle nor light of the 
i, for the Lamb shall be the light thereof.” In this new light all will be new. 
- song will be a song of meanings. Problems which we sighed over in per- 
ity a thousand times down here; events that took all the bloom out of our 
ek, and all the bravery out of our heart; days of struggle, of fear, of failure, 
ark imaginings, which we could not escape and could not understand, will all 
seen in the relation they bore to the forecast and providence of God. Our back- 
J look over ‘“‘all the way the Lord our God hath led us,” will be a new scene 
rely. Embarrassed, circuitous, dark as it has so often seemed, as we pursued 
our tiny lamp in hand, it will then appear like a silvery thread of light a-down 


be the tedium, the monotony, the sickening satiety of the other life. The per- 
‘sweetness of heaven palls upon their appetite. They think its routine and safety 


hing victories of principalities and powers in heavenly places. 


“THE SONG OF MOSES AND THE SONG OF THE LAMB.” 


ho first began the story of the Lamb? Was it not Moses, when the redemption 
rael from Egyptian bondage was effected? Is not this song the sublime fulfil- 
t of the earliest letter of atonement, of remission by meritorious blood? Was 
sus the Savior first introduced to John as the “Lamb of God?” Has He not 
borne that tender name? Has not His death been set forth as the one 
t fact of time, giving significance to every other by its relation thereto? In 


iad better not forget it. Listen! “Thou art worthy . . . for Thou wast 
Is that the one thing worth an ecstatic mention? Is this the pean of a song 
umph? Oh, no! not after the manner of men! “Thou art worthy . . . for 
wast slain.” Aye! slain that He might “give repentance to Israel and the remis- 
of sins;” slain that we might find a way to “glory and honor and eternal life;” 
or you, my listening fellow-sinner, still careless of your soul’s salvation, and 
ss of your eternal doom: slain for the hardened veterans of guilt, whose foul 
ce has echoed in His pitying ears for threescore years and ten; slain for all, 


404 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


that the “righteousness of God might be revealed,’ which knoweth no failure, 
that ‘‘all might come to the knowledge of the truth and be saved.” = 
My time is gone.- We must apply this lesson to our own souls. The con 
is clearly expressed: ‘No man could learn that song but the redeemed from 
earth.” They did not learn it after entering heaven. They entered heaven beca 
they had learned it on earth. It is the fitness of things declared. We be 
to the Lamb. “Thou art worthy . . . for Thou wast slain.” Now it is, 
art thou to sing, for thou art redeemed.” There shall in no wise enter into | 
chorus anything that defileth, neither worketh discord or maketh a false n 
Harmony only by the perfect attunement of hearts! We all know that is right. 
this world of the Creator’s skill organisms are fitted to localities, minds are fitte 
to bodies, and laws ordered for both. In the social order character graduates 
possession of place. In the intellectual life scholarship fills the professor’s ch 
We find perfection in fitness. There is a peculiar sensitiveness in the realm of 
To interblend with the “harps of God” the singers must be keyed up to the ; p 
of redeeming love. The pilgrimage here is the rehearsal. Let us understand t 
Life is the training process for the culture of our hearts, and of our utterance, 
of our ears to hear. This is God’s seminary, His College of Music for the rac 
of immortals to learn the song and how to sing it together. First alone, 
families, then in church, then in society, “till we all come in the unity of the 
and the consecration of our powers, to a.perfect chorus in the fulness of Ch 
If we only realized this as we should, we would not fret at our exercises so 
without much tune to them, as we think. We have much to learn; but oh! 1 
learn it. We must practice our individual part, and know it well. We must 
forget the assembling of ourselves together for rehearsal, for this is also n 
We must not forget what we have learned, as the children of Israel did the si 
Moses. Unto this let us take heed. % 
Have you learned the song? Can you and your fellow-heirs sing it sw 
together? Do you hear a discord? Is some one flat? Then we must tune up 2 
Let us take our pitch from the voice of our beloved Lord, the “vox humana, 
its pure, divinely given expression, and thus bring our heartstrings into filial ac 
Then let us lend our voices to each other’s hearing till we are conscious of a sy 
attunement. Thus shall we rehearse within the outer porch of earth that mel 
which, within our morning’s vision, ten thousand thousand sing before the tk 
And when our earth’s rehearsal is complete we shall be called to take our pz 
the chorus of redemption, and in that 


. “Noblest, sweetest song, 
Sing forth His power to save, 
When this poor lisping, stammering tongue 
Lies silent in the grave.” 


[John Ellis Lanceley was born in Birkenhead, England, in 1848, and move 
his parents at an early age to Canada. He left Victoria College before fini 
his studies, on account of the death of his father. He occupied positions as teleg 
operator and then bank accountant, but the call to the ministry was so evident 
he finally accepted, serving churches in a number of smaller places and th 
most important churches in Toronto, and received a call to a Baltimore, Md., ch 
He died March 5, 1900. When Joseph Parker, the great London preacher, heard of ? 
Lanceley’s death, he said: “A brilliant star has gone out of the visible firmament.” — 

This sermon is from a volume, “The Devil of Names,” published by Williz 
Briggs, Toronto, was included at the suggestion of Ward Beecher Pickard v 
regards it as one of the greatest of the century. It also gives representatio1 
the preachers of Canada, many of whom are eloquent and able.] 


(405) 


JARRINGS OF HEAVEN RECONCILED 
_ BY THE BLOOD OF THE CROSS. 


JOHN LELAND. 


And by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him, I say, whether they be 
gs in earth or things in heaven.”—Colossians 1: 20. 


reconciliation of “things in heaven,” is the part of the text which I shall 
nd to. 


take place hereafter, give to the Almighty no new ideas, furnish Him with no 
1 matter for consideration. Things which are past, present, or to come, with men, 


theless, in condescension to our weakness, speaks of Himself as having head, 
ears, face, mouth, etc.; also as being jealous, angry, pacified, reconciled, having 


is that which gave rise to this contention. When this contention began in 
(to speak after the manner of men) the great I AM arraigned the criminal, 
and summoned all the contending parties to appear and make their pleas before 
reat white throne of divine glory. Which leads me, 


econdly. To treat of the contending parties and their pleas, the Holy Law 
i: “My rise is not from revelation, although that does me honor; throughout 
scond volume I hold conspicuous rank and have been magnified and obeyed by 
on of God. But my origin is from the great scale of being itself; so that if there 
een no revelation among men, honor and regard would have been my due. Yet 
all the sacred majesty due to my character, man, the dependent creature, has risen 
ion and disregarded my voice; not only in one instance, but sin, taking 
by me, has wrought in him all manner of concupiscence—so that the 
ination of his heart is only evil continually. Now we know a law is nothing 
it a penalty to enforce it; and a penalty threatened is but a piece of mockery 


406 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


unless it is executed. In this case, therefore, should man escape with impunity 
Divine government would be reduced to contempt, and every fugitive vagrant 
be hardened in his wickedness. My demand, therefore, is, that man sho 

without mercy.” : 


Truth next approached the Throne, and after attending to and confirming 
which the holy law had said, added, “The soul that sins shall die—cursed is eve 
that continueth not in all things which are written in the law—he that offends i 
point is guilty of the whole—the wicked shall be turned into hell—in the day 
rebellest thou shalt surely die. These are the true sayings of God, sentences y 
came from the mouth of that Being who can not lie; the veracity of the Almigh 
therefore pledged that the sinner, man, be speedily executed, without delay—tf 
sentence against an evil work be not speedily executed, the hearts of the vicious 
fully set on mischief, and nothing but anarchy and confusion will be seen 1 
empire.” ; 

Justice then advanced, with piercing eyes like flaming streams, and burni 
tongue like the devouring fire, and made his plea, as follows: “My name may s 
inharmonious to the guilty, but that which is just must be right, and the least devi 
therefrom must be wrong! I plead for nothing but what is just. I come not wi 
an ex-post-facto law, to inflict a penalty which was not known at the time the sin \ 
committed, but I come to demand the life and blood of the rebel man, who sinn 
with eyes opened—for guilt will always stain the throne of glory till vengeance is tak 
on the traitor.” 


Holiness then addressed the sovereign Arbiter of life and death in the w ; 
following: ‘My name and nature forbid the continuance of the sinner, man, i 
empire. He is full of wounds and bruises, and putrifying sores; from the crown 
his head to the sole of his foot there is no soundness in him; among all his hel, 
there is no healing medicine, and if there was, yet he is so stubborn that he would 
apply it. Therefore, as two can neither walk nor live together except they be ag 
either the polluted sinner or consummate holiness must quit the regions.” ; 

By this time darkness and smoke filled the temple, and seven thunders utt 
their voices. The flashes of vindictive fire broke out impatient from: the throne, a 
the angelic messenger waved his dread weapon, which high brandished shone, , 
ing for human blood, while hell grew proud in hopes of prey, and laughed pre 
loud. The sun became black as sack-cloth, and the heavens were all in~ 
convulsion. The earth shook to its center, and the everlasting hills trembled. 
stood astonished at the awful emblems of Divine displeasure, expecting each mom 
to see the rebel hurled to eternal darkness, as they had seen their fallen brethren, ¥ 
left their first estate in a former period. < 


Omnipotence appeared as the executioner of the criminal, clothed in p 
divine—robed in awful majesty. Thunders rolled before him, the shafts of lig 
darted through the ethereal vault; the trumpet sounded, the mountains skipped like 
rams, and the little hills like lambs; even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of the 
Lord. At the brightness that was before Him His thick clouds passed hailstones 
coals of fire. In one hand He had an iron rod with which He could dash His en 
to pieces like a potter’s vessel, and in the other a sharp sword, with two edges. 
set one foot on the sea, and the other on the earth, and lifted His hand to hi 
His face was awfully majestic, and His voice as the roaring of a lion; but mone « 
learn from His appearance whether He choose to strike the vengeful blow, or in 
Himself in behalf of the criminal. At length He spoke: “I am able to destroy 
was mighty to create; nothing is too hard for Me to do. All worlds were spoken 
existence by My word, and all material worlds hang upon nothing, through Mj 


e1 ; yet I have no will, no choice of My own. Let all the contending parties agree, 
I am at their command, all acquiescent. The charges against the criminal, as 
r now stand, call for My vindictive stroke, but if any expedient shall be found to 
rr e the pleas which have been made, when the final result is made, then I shall 
_ Vicious beings feel power and forget right, but Omnipotence is governed by 
ht. The works which I perform are those which all the perfections of Deity in 
cert point out.” 

Wisdom then arose, and spake to the following effect: ‘Why is the decree so 
ty from the King? The matter is of the first importance. One soul is worth 
e than all the world. The pending decision not only affects this one criminal, 
the millions and “aie ti? of human kind. I, Wisdom, dwell with a and 


Love then came forward, in all his winning forms; his bosom swelled with 
lanthropy, and his eye bespoke the benevolence of his heart. In mellifluent accents 
s began, “My name is Love. No one in heaven claims higher rank than myself, for 
id is Love; of course none deserves to be heard and regarded more than I do. My 
fe to man is everlasting, and neither death nor life, angels, principalities, nor powers, 
ngs present, things to come, nor any other creature shall ever extinguish my love. 


“Mine is an unchanging love, 
Higher than the heights above; 
Deeper than the depths beneath, 
Free and faithful, strong as death.’ 


d the rebel, therefore, be doomed to perdition, with all his vast progeny, the 
ss of my love would cause eternal mournings in heaven; to prevent which my 
fervent cry is, Let the rebel live.” 


Grace also appeared on the side of the criminal, and made the following plea: “If 
ature receives from a fellow creature, or from his God, a compensation for any 


he has no claim on the donor, it is grace. If, moreover, a donor confers a favor, 
only on a needy creature, who has no claim on the donor, not anything to buy 
h; but on one, who i in addition to his meet has contracted guilt, and is an enemy 


‘more exalted than he possessed before he sinned. If this should not be the case, 
would be a word without meaning, and the benevolence of Jehovah would be 
scured forever. 

Mercy, in concert with Love and Grace, was all divine oratory in favor of the 
el, and proceeded: “I can not claim the same rank among the attributes of Deity, 
t Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Goodness, Truth and Justice can, since I am myself 
hild of Love. . . . . . But when innocent creatures fall into need and 
ery, the display of Love assumes my name, Mercy. As I therefore have a name in 
heaven, as Mercy is magnified above the heavens; as Jehovah is rich in mercy, and is 


408 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


After a solemn pause, the great I AM, the sovereign judge, thus spake: “The | 
statements and demands of Law, Truth and Justice against the criminal are well sup- 
ported. Love, Grace and Mercy have discovered abundance of goodness and soomm 
will toward the sinner; but they have not shown how the law can be honored, Truth — 
supported, and Justice satisfied, in the forgiveness of the rebel; and unless such an 
expedient can be produced, man must die without mercy. If any of the celesti a 
angels, or any being in the universe can suggest the expedient, the sinner lives—if not, — 
he dies.” - 

He spake—He closed—but all was whist, and silence reigned in heaven. 4 

The elect angels knew how Love, through a Mediator, could confirm innocent 
creatures in their innocency, but had no idea how criminals could be pardoned. F 

At the instance of Justice, Omnipotence arose like a lion from the swellings of 
Jordan; made bare His thurdering arm, high raised His brandished sword, waved His | 


* 


iron rod, and advanced toward the rebel with hasty strides. 


Love cried, Forbear, I can not endure the sight! "4 
The Law replied, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in 
the law to do them. The soul that sins shall die! % 


Grace exclaimed, Where sin hath abounded, grace shall much more abound! 

Truth said, In the day that thou transgressest thou shalt surely die! 

Mercy proclaimed, Mercy rejoiceth against judgment! 

Justice, with piercing eye, and flaming tongue, said, “Strike! strike! strike the 
rebel dead! and remove the reproach from the throne of heaven!” 

At this the angels drooped their wings, and all the harps of heaven played mourn- 
ful odes. The flaming sword, to pierce the criminal, came near his breast, and the iron 
rod, to dash him to pieces like a potter’s vessel, was falling on his head; when lo! on 
a sudden, the voice of Wisdom sounded louder than seven thunders, and made the 
high arches of heaven to ring and reverberate—‘“Deliver him from going down to the 
pit, for I have found a ransom!” 

In that all-eventful crisis, the eternal Son of God, in a mediatorial form, appeared, 
clothed with a garment down to the feet, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. 
Angels paid Him profound reverence and the great I AM placed Him at His right 
hand. 

He saw the ruined, guilty man, and oh! amazing grace! He loved. With pity 
all His inmost bowels moved. He said, “I was set up from everlasting, my goings 
have been of old, and my delights are with the sons of men. The sinner shall live.” 

The Law, in awful majesty, replied: ‘I am holy, just, and good, my injunctions 
on the rebel were perfectly proper for a human being, and my penalty, which the rebel 
has incurred, is every way proportionate to his crime.” 

Mediator—“All you say is true. I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill. 
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but not a jot or tittle of the law shall fail.” 

Truth—“The lips that never spoke amiss have said that the wicked shall be 
turned into hell. My veracity is therefore pledged to see it executed.” 


Mediator—“That part of truth which was proper to reveal unto man, as a moral 
agent, has said as you relate, with abundance more to the same effect; but that part of 
truth which the great Jehovah, my heavenly Father, spake unto Me, in the covenant . 
of peace, which is made between us both, has declared, that, on account of an atone- 
ment which I shall make, sin shall be pardoned, and sinners saved.” 

Holiness—‘“‘I am so pure that I can never admit a sinner into heaven. Nothing 
unclean or that worketh a lie shall ever enter there.” 


‘ 


ae 


a The Jarrings of Heaven Reconciled by the Blood of the Cross—Leland. 409 


_ Mediator—‘‘Provision is made in the new covenant, whereof I am the Mediator 
and Messenger, to remove the pollution as well as the guilt of sin. I have guaranteed 
that sinners shall be washed in My blood and made clean, and come before the throne 
of glory without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing.” 

Justice cried out again, “Strike!” 
Mediator—‘“Not the sinner, but the Surety!” 


Justice—‘‘Can heaven admit of a vicarious suffering?” 


_ Mediator—“It is that of which no government on earth ever will admit, or ever 
sught to do, but is the singular article agreed upon in the scheme of salvation, which 
astonish the universe in its accomplishment. In the fullness of time I shall be 
born of a woman; be made under the law, and perfectly obey and magnify it, which is 
all that the law in reason can require of human nature. I shall suffer that penalty for 
ners which justice will approve, and God shall accept; shall die, and follow death 


“The day of days will commence; the great day of dread, for which all other days 
were made, will arrive; on that day the dead shall be raised, and those who are living 
on earth shall be changed from a mortal to an immortal state, and all of them shall 
come to judgment before My bar. Those who are like goats among sheep, like tares 
among wheat, who are unclean and polluted, who are lovers of transgression and 
haters of obedience, who have broken the law—wantoned with atoning blood, and 
done despite against the work of the Holy Ghost; shall be banished the kingdom— 
¢ast into outer darkness, and gnaw their galling bonds forever. But the righteous 
_ (both those whose souls have been in Paradise, and their bodies sleeping in the dust, 

and those also who never shall have died) shall be admitted into the kingdom prepared 


“Now, if any one in heaven has dae against this plan, let him speak; for I have 
undertaken to reconcile all things and beings in heaven to the salvation of man.” 


He closed! but O what rapturous joy beamed forth on every face in heaven! 
Law, Truth, and Justice cried out, “It is all we want or wish for.” Love, Grace, and 
. Mercy shouted, “It is the joy of our hearts—the delight of our eyes, and the pleasure 
of our souls.”’” The great I AM said, “It is finished—the expedient is found—the 
Sinner shall live—deliver him from going down to the pit, for a ransom is found!” 
The angels, filled with heavenly pity and divine concern, who had been waiting in 
anxious suspense, through the important contest, now swept their golden harps, and 
ang aloud, “Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth and good-will to man! Thou 
rt worthy, O, Thou Son of God, to receive glory, and honor, and riches, and power, 
Orever and ever! Man, though a little lower in nature than ourselves, shall be raised 
even higher, being in likeness of nature more like the Son of God. While we shall 
De ever adoring confirming love through a Mediator, men will be extolling the riches 
of redeeming blood and the freeness of boundless grace.” 


The great I AM then said to the Mediator, “Forasmuch as Thou hast undertaken 


Bice I give Thee a name which is above aoe name—that at the name oi Jesus 
every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess. Thou shalt have dominion 
from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth. I will divide Thee a 


410 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. — : < 


portion with the great, and Thou shalt divide the spoils with the strong. ' 
the heathen for Thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth foi 
possession, and I will glorify Thee with Myself, with the glory which Thc 
before the world began.” : 
[John Leland was born in Grafton, Massachusetts, May 14, 1754; and in 
united with the Baptist Church in Bellingham, from which body he received lice 
preach at the age of twenty years. He was ordained in 1776. His first minist 
labors were in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, where he had a circu 
one hundred and twenty miles in length. For some time revivals almost conste 
followed his labors. In about two years he had baptized four hundred individ 
In the fourteen years of his preaching, in that part of the country, he baptized : 
hundred. In 1790 he removed to New England. After preaching awhile in Co 
cut and in Conway, Massachusetts, he settled at Cheshire, in the latter State, wher 
resided for nearly half a century, though making frequent preaching tours throug 
Vermont, Virginia, New York, and many other States. He died in January, 184 
his eighty-seventh year. : 
This sermon was considered by Kerr Boyce Tupper one of the ten best se 
of the century.] 


oe ENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 


HENRY P. LIDDON, D: D. 
4 “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst 
ot tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.’”—John 3: 8. 


_ Who has not felt the contrast, the almost tragic contrast, between the high station 
f the Jewish doctor, member of the Sanhedrin, master in Israel, and the ignorance of 
slementary religious truth, as we Christians must deem it, which he displayed in this 
mterview with our blessed Lord? At first sight it seems difficult to understand how 
pur Lord could have used the simile in the text when conversing with an educated 
and thoughtful man, well versed in the history and literature of God’s ancient 
people; and, indeed, a negative criticism has availed itself of this and of some 
other features in the narrative, in the interest of the theory that Nicodemus was only a 
itious type of the higher classes in Jewish society, as they were pictured to itself by 
the imagination of the fourth Evangelist. Such a supposition, opposed to external 
facts and to all internal probabilities, would hardly have been entertained, if the critical 
genuity of its author had been seconded by any spiritual experience. Nicodemus is 
very far from being a caricature; and our Lord’s method here, as elsewhere, is to lead 
on from familiar phrases and the well-remembered letter to the spirit and realities of 
igion. The Jewish schools were not unacquainted with the expression a “new 
treature;” but it had long since become a mere shred of official rhetoric. As applied 
a Jewish proselyte, it scarcely meant more than < change in the outward relations of 
religious life. Our Lord told Nicodemus that every man who would see the kingdom 
of God which he was founding must undergo a second birth; and Nicodemus, who had 
Deen accustomed to the phrase all his life, could not understand it if it was supposed to 
mean anything real. ‘“‘How,” he asks, “can a man be born when he is old? can he 
snter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Our Lord does not extri- 
ite him from this blundering literalism; He repeats His own original assertion, but in 
trms which more fully express His meaning: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, 
Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of 
30d. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is 
pirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, “Ye must be born again.” Our Lord's refer- 
to water would not have been unintelligible to Nicodemus; every one in Judea 
new that the Baptist had insisted on immersion in water as a symbol of the purifica- 
ion of the soul of man. Certainly, in connecting “water” with the Spirit and the new 
rth, our Lord’s language, glancing at that of the prophet, went very far beyond this. 
Te could only. be fully understood at a iater time, when the Sacrament of Baptism had 
een instituted, just as the true sense of His early allusions to His death could not have 
een apprehended until after the Crucifixion. But Nicodemus, it is plain, had not yet 
dvanced beyond his original difficulty; he could not conceive how any second birth 

$ possible, without altogether violating the course of nature. And our Lord pene- 
tes his thoughts and answers them. He answers them by pointing to that Invisible 
\g who could achieve, in the sphere of spiritual and mental life, what the Jewish 
dctor deemed so impossible a feat as a second birth. Nature, indeed, contained no 


412 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


force that could compass such a result; but nature in this, as in other matters, was a 
shadow of something beyond itself. 

It was late at night when our Lord had this interview with the Jewish teacher, At 
the pauses in conversation, we may conjecture, they heard the wind without as it 
moaned along the narrow streets of Jerusalem; and our Lord, as was His wont, took 
His creature into His service—the service of spiritual truth. The wind was a figure of 
the Spirit. Our Lord would have used the same word for both. The wind might teach 
Nicodemus something of the action of Him Who is the real Author of the New Birth 
of man. And it would do this in two ways more especially. 

On a first survey of nature, the wind arrests man’s attention, as an unseen agent 
which seems to be moving with entire freedom. “The wind bloweth where it listeth.” 
It is fettered by none of those conditions which confine the swiftest bodies that traverse 
the surface of the earth; it sweeps on as if independent of law, rushing hither and 
thither, as though obeying its own wayward and momentary impulse. Thus it is an 
apt figure of a self-determining invisible force; and of a force which is at times of 
overmastering power. Sometimes, indeed, its breath is so gentle, that only a single 
leaf or blade of grass will at distant intervals seem to give the faintest token of its 
action; yet, even thus, it ‘“bloweth where it listeth.” Sometimes it bursts upon the 
earth with destructive violence; nothing can resist its onslaught; the most solid build- 


ings give way; the stoutest trees bend before it; whatever is frail and delicate can only _ 


escape by the completeness of its submission. Thus, too, it “bloweth where it listeth.” 
Beyond anything else it strikes upon the senses of man; it is suggestive of free super- 


sensuous power; it is an appropriate symbol of an irruption of the Invisible into the 


world of sense, of the action, so tender or so imperious, of the Divine and Eternal 
Spirit upon the human soul. 

But the wind is also an agent about whose proceedings we really know almost 
nothing. ‘‘Thou hearest the sound thereof; such is our Lord’s concession to man’s 
claim to knowledge. ‘‘Thou canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth;” 
such is the reserve which He makes in respect of human ignorance. Certainly we do 
more than hear the sound of the wind; its presence is obvious to three of the senses. 
We feel the chill or the fury of the blast; and, as it sweeps across the ocean, or the 
forest, or the field of corn, we see how the blades rise and fall in graceful curves, and 
the trees bend, and the waters sink and swell into waves, which are the measure of its 
strength. But our Lord says, “Thou hearest the sound thereof.” He would have us 
test it by the most spiritual of the senses. It whispers, or it moans, or it roars as it 
presses us; it has a pathos all its own. Yet what do we really know about it? “Thou 
canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”” Does the wind then obey no 
rule; is it a mere symbol of unfettered caprice? Surely not. If, as the Psalmist sings, 
“God bringeth the winds out of His treasuries,’ He acts, we may be sure, here as 
always, whether in nature or in grace, by some law, which His own perfections impose 
upon His action. He may have given to us of these later times to see a very little 
deeper beneath the surface of the natural world than was the case with our fathers. 
Perchance we explain the immediate antecedents of the phenomenon; but can we 
explain our own explanation? The frontier of our ignorance is removed one stage 
farther back; but “the way of the wind” is as fitting an expression for the mysterious 
now as it was in the days of Solomon. We know that there is no cave of Holus. We 
know that the wind is the creature of that Great Master Who works everywhere and 


incessantly by rule. But, as the wind still sweeps by us who call ourselves the children — 


of an age of knowledge, and we endeavor to give our fullest answer to the question, 
“whence it cometh, and whither it goeth?” we discover that, as the symbol of a 
spirtual force, of whose presence we are conscious, while we are unable to determine, 


ae 
“es 


ee ret 


o 


Influences of the Holy Spirit—Liddon. 413 


with moderate confidence, either the secret principle or the range of its action, the 
wind is as full of meaning still as in the days of Nicodemus. 


When our Lord has thus pointed to the freedom and the mysteriousness of the 
wind, He adds, ‘So is every one that is born of the Spirit.” The simile itself would 
have led us to expect—''So is the spirit of God.” The man born of the Spirit would 
‘answer not to the wind itself, but to the sensible effect of the wind. There is a break of 
_ correspondence between the simile and its application. The simile directs attention to 
‘the Divine Author of the new birth in man. The words which follow direct attention 
to the human subject upon whom the Divine Agent works. Something similar is 
4 observable when our Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to a merchantman seeking 
goodly pearls; the kingdom really corresponds not to the merchantman, but to the 
pearl of great price which the merchantman buys. In such cases, we may be sure, the 
natural correspondence between a simile and its application is not disturbed without a 
‘motive. And the reason for this disturbance is presumably that the simile is not 
adequate to the full purpose of the speaker, who is anxious to teach some larger truth 
_ than its obvious application would suggest. In the case before us, we may be allowed 
_ to suppose, that by His reference to the wind our Lord desired to convey something 
_ more than the real but mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit in the new birth of man. 
% His language seems designed, not merely to correct the materialistic narrowness of 
_ the Jewish doctor, not merely to answer by anticipation the doubts of later days as to 
_ the spiritual efficacy of His own Sacrament of Regeneration, but to picture, in words 
which should be read to the end of time, the general work of that Divine Person 
Whose mission of mercy to our race was at once the consequence and the completion 
_ of His own. 

‘ It may be useful to trace the import of our Lord’s simile in three fields of the 
action of the Holy and Eternal Spirit; His creation of a sacred literature, His guidance 
of a Divine society, and His work upon individual souls. 

As, then, we turn over the pages of the Bible, must we not say, “The wind of 
_ heaven bloweth where it listeth?” If we might reverently imagine ourselves scheming 
beforehand what kind of a book the Book of God ought to be, how different would it 
be from the actual Bible! There would be as many Bibles as there are souls, and they 
would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their differences, they would prob- 
ably agree: they would lack the variety, both in form and substance, of the Holy Book 
_ which the Church of God places in the hands of her children. The self-assertion, the 
scepticism, and the fastidiousness of our day would meet like the men of the second 
Roman triumvirate on that island in the Reno, and would draw up their lists of pro- 
Scription. One would condemn the poetry of Scripture as too inexact; another its 
history as too largely secular; another its metaphysics as too transcendental, or as 
hostile to some fanciful ideal of “simplicity,” or as likely to quench a purely moral 
enthusiasm. The archaic history of the Pentateuch, or the sterner side of the ethics 
of the Psalter, of the supernaturalism of the histories of Elijah or of Daniel, or the 
so-called pessimism of Ecclesiastes, or the alleged secularism of Esther, or the literal 
mport of the Song of Solomon, would be in turn condemned. Nor could the Apostles 
nope to escape: St. John would be too mystical in this estimate; St. James too legal in 
hat; St. Paul too dialectical, or too metaphysical, or too easily capable of an anti- 
“nomian interpretation; St. Peter too undecided, as if balancing between St. Paul and 
‘St. James. Our new Bible would probably be uniform, narrow, symmetrical; it would 
be entirely made up of poetry, or of history, or of formal propositions, or of philosoph- 
ical speculation, or of lists of moral maxims; it would be modelled after the type of 
some current writer on English history, or some popular poet or metaphysician, or 
some sentimentalist who abjures history and philosophy alike on principle, or some 


composer of well-intentioned religious tracts for general circulation. The inspirations 


414 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


of heaven would be taken in hand, and instead of a wind blowing where it listeth, we — 
should have a wind, no doubt, of some kind, rustling earnestly enough along some — 
very narrow crevices or channels, in obedience to the directions of some one form of — 


human prejudice, or passion, or fear, or hope. 


My brethren, the Bible is like nature in its immense, its exhaustless variety; like 
nature, it reflects all the higher moods of the human soul, because it does much more; 


because it brings us face to face with the infinity of the Divine Life. In the Bible the ] 
wind of heaven pays scant heed to our anticipations or our prejudices; it “bloweth ~ 
where it listeth.” It breathes not only in the Divine charities of the Gospel, not only — 
in the lyrical sallies of the Epistles, not only in the great announcements scattered here 
and there in Holy Scripture of the magnificence, or the compassion, or the benevo-_ 


lence of God; but also in the stern language of the prophets, in the warnings and 


lessons of the historical books, in the revelations of Divine justice and of human 
responsibility which abound in either Testament. ‘Where it listeth.” Not only where 
our sense of literary beauty is stimulated, as in St. Paul’s picture of charity, by lines 
which have taken captive the imagination of the world, not only where feeling and 


conscience echo the verdict of authority and the promptings of reverence, but also 


where this is not the case; where neither precept nor example stimulates us, and we are 


left face to face with historical or ethical material, which appears to us to inspire no 
spiritual enthusiasm, or which is highly suggestive of critical difficulty. Let us be 
patient; we shall understand, if we will only wait, how these features of the Bible too 


are integral parts of a living whole; here, as elsewhere, the Spirit breathes; in the _ 


genealogies of the Chronicles as in the Last Discourse in St. John, though with an 
admitted difference of manner and degree. He “bloweth where He listeth.” The 
Apostle’s words respecting the Old Testament are true of the New: “All Scripture is 
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction in righteousness.” And, “Whatsoever things were written aforetime 
were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures 
might have hope.” - 

“But thou hearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell whence it cometh, and 
whither it goeth.” The majesty of Scripture is recognized by man, wherever there is, 
I will not say a spiritual faculty, but a natural sense of beauty. The “sound” of the 
wind is perceived by the trained ear, by the literary taste, by the refinement, by the 
humanity of every generation of educated men. But what beyond? What of its 
spiritual source, its spiritual drift and purpose, its half-concealed but profound unities, 
its subtle but imperious relations to conscience? Of these things, so precious to 
Christians, a purely literary appreciation of Scripture is generally ignorant; the sacred 
Book, like the prophet of the Chebar, is only “as a very lovely song of one that hath 
a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument.’ Or again, the “sound thereof” 
is heard in the admitted empire of the Bible over millions of hearts and consciences; 
an empire the evidences of which strike upon the ear in countless ways, and. which is 
far too wide and too secure to be affected by the criticisms that might occasionally 
seem to threaten it. What is the secret of this influence of Scripture? Not simply that 
it is a Book of Revelation; since it contains a great deal of matter which lay fairly 
within the reach of man’s natural faculties. The Word or Eternal Reason of God is 
the Revealer; but Scripture, whether it is a record of Divine revelations or of naturally 
observed facts, is, in the belief of the Christian Church throughout “inspired” by the 
Spirit. Inspiration is the word which describes the presence and action of the Holy 
Spirit everywhere in Scripture. But what does the Christian Church exactly mean by 
Inspiration? Many have been the attempts to answer that question precisely. It has 
been said of the late Dr. Arnold that during the later years of his life he spent more 
thought in the effort to construct a perfectly satisfactory theory of inspiration than on 


¥ es 


4 


7 


tay aS 


ai 
a 


7 


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Influences of the Holy Spirit—Liddon. 415 


any other subject. In the Church of Rome there are at least three permitted opinions 
as to the nature of Biblical Inspiration. The more rigid, advocated by some Domin- 
can theologians, regards the sacred writers as simply passive instruments of the 
aspiring Spirit, so that every word and comma and point was dictated from heaven. 
Others understand by inspiration a general positive assistance, prescribing*what to 
write, what to omit, and guiding the general choice of language and of periods without 
‘dictating each separate expression. The Jesuit divines of Louvain, Hamel and Lessius, 
‘confined inspiration to the purely negative function of protecting the inspired writer 
from error. In the English Church the differences on the subject are, at least, as con- 
‘siderable as in the Church of Rome. The demand for an exact theory is natural 
enough, especially on the part of sincerely religious men, who have lost sight of the 
providential guidance of the Church, and who desire to enhance as far as possible the 
definite force of the authority of Scripture. Yet surely it is a matter for thankfulness 
that no part of the Catholic Church has formally committed itself to an authoritative 
doctrine of Biblical Inspiration, whatever may have been attempted by private writers 
of more or less consideration. Not merely because any possible definition would 
almost certainly add to difficulties which are suggested by negative criticism; but much 
more because, from the nature of the case, we are not really able to deal ab intra with 
such a subject. That Divine inspiration must postulate certain momentous results, 
positive as well as negative, may indeed be taken for granted; some positive informing 
guidance, as well as immunity from any moral or doctrinal error. But when we go 
beyond this, and endeavor to hold the balance between mechanical and dynamical 
theories, in other words, to determine how the Divine Spirit has acted upon the human, 
_We are in a region where nothing is really possible beyond precarious conjecture. We 
know not how our own spirits, hour by hour, are acted on by the Eternal Spirit, 
though we do not question the fact; we content ourselves with recognizing what we 
cannot explain. If we believe that Scripture is inspired, we know that it is instinct with 
the Presence of Him Whose voice we might hear in its every utterance, but of Whom 
we cannot tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth. 


' The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the Apostles has been a 
history of spiritual movements. Doubtless it has been a history of much else; the 
Church has been the scene of human passions, human speculations, human errors. 
But traversing these, He by Whom the whole body of the Church is governed and 
sanctified, ‘thas made His Presence felt, not only in the perpetual proclamation and 
elucidation of truth, not only in the silent, never-ceasing sanctification of souls, but 
also in great upheavals of spiritual life, by which the conscience of Christians has been 
-quickened, or their hold upon the truths of Redemption and Grace made more intelli- 
gent and serious, or their lives and practice restored to something like the ideal of the 
Gospels. Even in the apostolic age it was necessary to warn Christians that it was 
high time to awake out of sleep; that the night of life was far spent, and the day of 
eternity was at hand. And ever since, from generation to generation, there has been 
a succession of efforts within the Church to realize more worthily the truth of the 
Christian creed, or the ideal of the Christian life. These revivals have been inspired or 
led by devoted men who have represented the highest conscience of Christendom in 
their day. They may be traced along the line of Christian history; the Spirit living in 
the Church has by them attested His Presence and His Will; and has recalled luke- 
warm generations, paralyzed by indifference or degraded by indulgence, to the true 
irit and level of Christian faith and life. 

_. In such movements there is often what seems, at first sight, an element of caprice. 
They appear to contemporaries to be onesided, exaggerated, narrow, fanatical. They 
are often denounced with a passionate fervor which is so out of proportion to the 
ty as to border on the grotesque. They are said to exact too much of us, or to 


416 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


too popular and insensible to philosophical considerations, as being the work of men 
of the people. Or, again, they are so occupied with controversy as to forget the claims 
of devotion, or so engaged in leading souls to a devout life as to forget the unwelcome 
but real necessities of controversy. They are intent on particular moral improvements 
so exclusively as to forget what is due to reverence and order; or they are so bent upo 
rescuing the Church from chronic slovenliness and indecency in public worship as t 
do less than justice to the paramount interests of moral truth. Sometimes thes 
movements are all feeling; sometimes they are all thought; sometimes they are, as i 
seems, all outward energy. In one age they produce a literature like that of the fourth — 
and fifth centuries; in another they found orders of men devoted to preaching or to 

works of mercy, as in the twelfth; in another they enter the lists, as in the thirteenth _ 
century, with a hostile philosophy; in another they attempt a much-needed Reforma- 
tion of the Church; in another they pour upon the heathen world a flood of light and y 
warmth from the heart of Christendom. It is easy, as we survey them, to say that 
something else was needed; or that what was done could have been done better or — 
more completely; or that, had we been there, we should not have been guilty of bis 
onesidedness, or of that exaggeration. We forget, perhaps, Who really was there, ana 

Whose work it is, though often overlaid and thwarted by human weakness and human 
passion, that we are really criticizing. If it was seemingly onesided, excessive or 
defective, impulsive or sluggish, speculative or practical, esthetic or experimental, may 

not this have been so Beene in His judgment, Who breatheth where He listeth, this 

particular characteristic was needed for the Church of that day? All that contempora-— 
ries know of such movements is “the sound thereof;” the names with which they are — 
associated, the controversies which they precipitate, the hostilities which they rouse or 
allay, as the case may be. Such knowledge is superficial enough; of the profound - 

spiritual causes which really engender them, of the direction in which they are really 
moving, of the influence which they are destined permanently to exert upon souls, 
men know little or nothing, The accidental symptom is mistaken for the a 


characteristic; the momentary expression of feeling for the inalienable conviction of 
certain truth. The day may come, perhaps, when more will be known; when practice — 
and motive, accident and substance, the lasting and the transient, will be seen in their 
true relative proportions; but for the time this can hardly be. He is passing bw 
“Whose way is in the sea, and His paths in the deep waters, and His footsteps” 
unknown.” The Eternal Spirit is passing; and men can only say, “He bloweth where | 
He listeth.” a 

Those who take God at His word will not doubt where His Holy Spirit is given 
In sacraments which He has ordained; in a message which He has authorized; in 
prayer, public and private, to which He has pledged His presence, this great gift is 
certainly to be found. The Spirit is the soul of the Church, and whatever be the weak- 
nesses or diseases of parts of the body which He deigns to inhabit, the soul a 
itself as life in its furthest extremities. 


But is His mission wholly confined to the Body of Christ? has He no relations | 
to separated groups of Christians, to seekers after truth in heathen lands, to lower 
forms of truth as well as higher, to philosophy, to science, to art, to all departments of 
human energy? Surely in recognizing this larger sphere of His energy we do not blur 
the lines of His covenanted action; to believe in the mighty gift of Pentecost is not to 
deny that “the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world.” Doubtless in His activity there 
are many methods, many degrees of intensity, many ends in view. His influence is” 
youchsafed to those who hold only portions of truth, that they may be led on to that 


: 


Influences of the Holy Spirit—Liddon. 417 


hich as yet they do not hold; He prevents men with His most gracious favor before 
e furthers their efforts by His continual help. This may be understood most easily 
y those who most firmly believe in the revealed constitution and claims of the Church 
‘Christ; and it suggests happier prospects than are otherwise possible amid the 
xisting confusions of the world and of Christendom. Last year two American 
achers visited this country, to whom God had given, together with earnest belief 
| some portions of the Gospel, a corresponding spirit of fearless enterprise. Certainly 
they had no such credentials of an apostolic ministry as a well-instructed and believing 
hurchman would require. They knew little or nothing of God’s revealed Will 

especting those sacramental channels whereby the life of grace is’ planted and main- 
ained in the soul; and their test of ministerial success appeared sometimes to mistake 
physical excitement or inclination for a purely spiritual or moral change. And yet, 
ust not we, who through no merit of our own, have enjoyed greater spiritual advan- 
tages than theirs, feel and express for these men a sincere respect, when, acting accord- 
g to the light which God had given them, they threw themselves on our great cities 
ith the ardor of Apostles; spoke of a higher world to thousands who pass the 
ater part of life in dreaming only of this; and made many of us feel that we owe 
m at least the debt of an example, which He Who breatheth where He listeth must 
ly have inspired them to give us? 


_ Our Lord’s words apply especially to Christian character. There are some effects 
the living power of the Holy Spirit which are invariable. When He dwells with a 
hristian soul, He continually speaks in the voice of conscience; He speaks in the 
vice of prayer. He produces with the ease of a natural process, without effort, with- 
the taint of self-consciousness, “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, good- 
faith, meekness, temperance.” Some of these graces must be found where He 
es His home. There is no mistaking the atmosphere of His presence: in its main 
atures it is the same now as in the days of the Apostles. Just as in natural morality 
= main elements of “goodness” do not change; so in religious life, spirituality is, 
amid great varicties of detail, yet in its leading constituent features, the same thing 
Tom One generation to another. But in the life of the individual Christian, or in that 
the Church, there is legitimate room for irregular and exceptional forms of activity 
excellence. Natural society is not strengthened by the stern repression of all that 
uliar in individual thought or practice; and this is not less true of spiritual or 
ious society. From the first, high forms of Christian excellence have often been 
ciated with unconscious eccentricity. The eccentricity must be unconscious, 
tauise consciousness of eccentricity at once reduces it to a form of vanity which is 
irely inconsistent with Christian excellence. How many excellent Christians have 
m eccentric, deviating more or less from the conventional type of goodness which 
been recognized by contemporary religious opinion! They pass away, and 
they are gone men do justice to their characters; but while they are still with us 
ow hard do many of us find it to remember that there may be a higher reason for 
f peculiarities than we think. We know not the full purpose of each saintly life 
ne designs of Providence; we know not much of the depths and heights whence it 
$ its inspirations; we cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. Only we 
that He Whose workmanship it is bloweth where He listeth; and this naturally 
ids us to remark the practical interpretation which the Holy Spirit often puts upon 
ord’s words by selecting as his chosen workmen those who seem to be least fitted 
lature for such high service. The Apostle has told us how in the first age He set 
aself to defeat human anticipations. “Not many wise men after the flesh, not many 
hty, not many noble, are called;” learned academies, powerful connections, gentle 
id did little enough for the Gospel in the days when it won its first and greatest 
) es. The Holy Spirit, as Nicodemus knew, passed by the varied learning and 


418 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


his contemporaries as “the dumb Ox,” so little did they divine what was to be his place 
in the theology of Western Christendom. And to those of us who can look back upon 


now exerts, and most Ceuenlar, the widest influence for good, and whose name i 
repeated by thousands with grateful respect. Or we can call to mind another whos 
whole mind was given to what was frivolous, or even degrading, and who now is 
leader in everything that elevates and improves his fellows. The secret of these trans 
figurations is ever the same. In those days these men did not yet see their way; they j 
were like travelers through the woods at night, when the sky is hidden and all things 
seem to be other than they are— ‘ 


“Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna 
Est iter in silvis, ubi ccelum condidit umbra 
Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.” 


Since then the sun has risen and all has changed. The creed of the Church of 
Christ, in its beauty and its power, has been flashed by the Divine Spirit upon thei 
hearts and understandings; and they are other men. They have seen that there is : 
something worth living for in earnest; that God, the soul, the future, are immense | 
realities, compared with which all else is tame and insignificant. They have learned 4 
something of that personal love of our crucified Lord, which is itself a moral and 4 
religious force of the highest order, and which has carried them forwards without their 
knowing it. And what has been will assuredly repeat itself. Some of you who listen, — 
if you are living thirty years hence, will verify their experiences by your own. 4 

In conclusion, our Lord’s words suggest many lessons, but one of especial ana 
incontrovertible importance; reverence for the presence and work of that Holy Visitor — 
Whose festival this is. Reverence for Him, in the Bible which He inspires; in the 
Church which He governs and sanctifies; in the souls, whether our own or others, in e 
which He deigns to dwell. It is easy to become familiar with the outward tokens of 
His presence; to use language which has no meaning apart from Him; to forget a | 
He is the Lord and Giver of Life, without Whom Holy Scripture, the Church, the — 
New Birth, the New Life, would be empty phrases. If nature is full of interest and 
wonder; if the bodily frame which we inhabit, like the sea or the sky, are ever ae 
ing to us new material for thought; much more is this the case with the mysterious — 
depths of the human soul. And few things, perhaps, weigh more heavily on those 0 a 
us who know that life is already on the wane, and that the greater number of the years” 
for which we shall answer hereafter must have already passed, than the recollection 
which at times steals over us, of that almost unnoticed multitude of thoughts, feelings, — 
aspirations, pointing upwards and onwards, which have presented themselves in the 
presence-chamber of the soul, and then have vanished away, and left no trace behind. — 
Whence came they? Those glimpses of nobler truth, those sudden cravings after a 
higher existence, those fretful uneasy yearnings, full of whosesome dissatisfaction with 
self, those whisperings, those voices, which would not for a while allow us to rest, but 
which, as the years have passed—is it not often thus?—have died away into silence. , 


a 


Influences of the Holy Spirit—Liddon. 419 


hence came they; and whither should they have led us on? Ah! we have said to 
rselves, or the world has said to us, that the foolish enthusiasm of youth has passed, 
d that with middle age we have succeeded to common sense and to ripe discretion. 
may be so; but there is, at least in some cases, another way of reading the result. It 
too possible that something more than fervid indiscretion has been lost with youth; 
at the bloom of the soul, the freshness and tenderness of the conscience, has been 
ded by a condition of thought and feeling, the true character of which we con- 
il from ourselves and from others when we label it “discretion” and “common 
nse.” Depend upon it, my younger brethren, the bright, self-sacrificing enthusiasms 
early manhood are among the most precious things in the whole course of human 
They may have their illusions, but they have their safeguards also; and when 
ey emancipate us from all that would force us down, when they clear the spirit’s eye 
id nerve the bodily arm, when they enable us to tread under our feet some clinging 
ischief which has made us wretched for years, and open out horizons of disinterested 
rt from which we already draw the inspiration of a higher life, surely we do well 
cherish them. Amidst much which is depressing in the religious circumstances and 
ospects of this place, Christians have signal reason humbly to thank God the Holy 
host for the impulse which He has given of late to missionary enterprise; for the 
oble men, known to not a few of us as teachers or as friends, whom He has sent out 
9m our midst within the last two years to rule His flock in heathen lands; and for 
€ young, warm, and generous hearts whom human affection, deepened and sanctified 
the supernatural love of God, has gathered around them as a band of devoted sons 
d workers. This assuredly is the “sound” of the wind from heaven, of that Eternal 
irit Who marks in every generation predestined souls for His higher service; of 
hom none can exactly say whence he comes to them or whither He is leading them; 
ho breatheth where He listeth, not by caprice or by accident, but because He knows 
actly whereof each of His creatures is made, and apportions His distinctions with 
€ unerring decision of perfect Love and perfect Justice. 

“Tf you make it a rule to say sincerely the first verse of the Ordination Hymn every 
ning without failing, it will in time do more for you than any other prayer I know, 
cept the Lord’s Prayer.” They were the words of one who had a right to speak from 


perience, and who has now gone to his rest. 


“Veni, Creator Spiritus, 

Mentes Tuorum visita, 

Imple superna gratia, 

Quz Tu creasti pectora.”’ 

tainly this prayer does not take long to say; and perhaps, fifty years hence, in 
th r state of existence, some of us will be glad to have acted on the advice. 


, with Canon Mozley’s sermon, furnish the best examples of the University 


mons at Oxford, a number of which have become very well known. It was 
ched June 4, 1876. 


ord and became a prominent member of the Liberal High Church party. His 
pton lectures on the divinity of Jesus Christ were delivered in 1866, and in 1870 
appointed canon residentiary of St. Paul’s.] 


420 . Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW. 


GEORGE C. LORIMER. 


“Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, 
and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”—Jer. 6: 16. “a 


Tennyson sings sweetly, but wildly, “Ring in the Christ that is to be.” 


entitled, “The Old Faith and the New,” in which he inquires, “Are we still Christians 
furnishing an elaborate reply in the negative. He declares, writing of a comi 
religion, “that a new growth will in the future develop itself from the inevitable disso- 
lution of the old.” Recently, the Duke of Somerset, in a small work, which breath 
something of a nobleman’s languidness and superciliousness, sanctions this drea 
expectation, saying, “It is now obvious that the theology of former ages cannot b 
permanently maintained.” Of course, it is hardly needful to say that Mr. O. 
Frothingham, and the radical party of America, sympathize with these views, regard. 
ing as certain the destruction of the Old Faith, however they may differ among 
themselves concerning the doctrines of the New. They appear to believe that history 
must repeat itself, and that as the power of Greek and Roman mythic superstitions was 
overthrown by the Sophists, so must the essential and distinguishing features of 
Christianity succumb to the speculative neologists and rationalizing critics of moder 
times. ‘ 
As asubstitute for what they consider doomed, they offer a variety of speculations, 
some of which are more radical than others, while all partake of a common inclinatio a 
towards naturalism and the doctrines of materialism and necessity. The mo 
moderate among them, like some of their ancient prototypes, the Sophists, are not | 
anxious to obliterate the name of the reigning religion, but aim to resolve the so-called — 
mythic tales of miracles’ into certain great facts and powers of nature, that, as they 
claim, a more rational ground of support for religious life may be furnished. In this — 
way they think it will be easier to accomplish their ends. They propose to paralyze — 
the heart of the system, and to satisfy humanity with the faint warmth which ma 
survive for a season in the dead body. 4 
Others openly and avowedly are more radical, and agree either with the more — 
extreme among the ancient Sophists, or with the philosophic hopelessness of Epicurus. 
Justin Martyr wrote of the former class, as it was in his times, “They seek to convin 
us that the Divinity extends His care to the great whole, and to the several kinds; but 
not to me and to you, not to men as individuals. Hence it is useless to pray to Him; — 
for everything occurs according to the unchangeable law of an endless cycle.” And- 
Pliny, speaking from the side of the heathen, declared “that all religion is the offspring © 
of necessity, weakness, and fear. What God is, if in truth He be anything distinct 
from the world, it is beyond the compass of man’s understanding to know.” ‘a 
These and similar views are being revived among us, in connection with modern 
discoveries in physical science, and the advance in philosophy. We have now Herbe t 
Spencer’s doctrine of the Unknowable, by which we are taught that the Unseen Pow ; 
of the universe cannot be known at all, and therefore cannot reasonably be served, — 
loved, honored, or obeyed, Haeckel, of Jena, and with him many others, regards th sf 


The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. 421 


se of the world as a ceaseless evolution, implying no plan, choice, or will, on the 
of an Unseen Power, and including no choice, will, or moral good or evil, on 


mechanical laws alone. In this way, according to their statement of the case, “a 
pr imitive nebula, called sometimes a fire mist, has developed into worlds, suns, planets, 
and living things, and will probably return, after countless ages, to nebulous mist, 
confusion and darkness.” 

Mr. Frothingham, in one of his published sermons, thus sharply contrasts the 
fundamental teachings of the New Faith with those of the Old: ‘‘The doctrine that 
man was created perfect, and fell, is contrasted with the doctrine that man was created 
imperfect, and rose. The doctrine that man was introduced upon the planet a new 
sreature, radically unlike any that had preceded him, is contrasted with the doctrine 
that man was the natural result of processes that had gone before. The doctrine of 
the inspiration of the Bible is contrasted with the doctrine of the inspiration of the 
mind. The doctrine that truth is imparted by supernatural revelation is contrasted 
with the doctrine that truth is acquired by patient investigation and slow advance. 
The doctrine that the soul must be submitted to an external spiritual authority is 


It does not seem to me credible that the world will abandon the religion of Christ 
for a series of propositions as barren as these. Humanity, though depraved, is surely 
not inane enough to thrust from it the sources of its intellectual and moral inspiration, 


y 


and receive instead teachings as unsatisfactory as they are unelevating. I have no 
fear for the ultimate result of these attacks. Like those which have preceded them 
various periods of the past, they will inevitably end in placing Christianity, as 
eved by the fathers, on a loftier height of influence, and on an impregnable basis 
evidence. 

But in the meanwhile damage is being done. There are not a few, especially 
among the youth of our city, whose spiritual future is imperiled. While the conflict 
tages between the true and the false, while they are measuring strength, the souls of 
many may be deceived. Christianity is safe enough, but individuals are not. It is 
Ss impression that constrains me to look a little more closely than I otherwise should 
at the teachings of those who desire to be the religious guides of the coming ages. 
The Prophet, in my text, commanded the Jews “to stand and see’—see the foolish 
ays they were treading—and return to the old paths.” And that the young men, who 
ink for themselves, and who desire to devote their powers to the loftiest of services, 
may be warned of pitfalls which skeptics and infidels have opened before them, and 
have their confidence in the truth and grandeur of Christianity renewed and 


_ THE PERMANENT DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW. 


I. The Old Faith is Historical, the New is Speculative. This is a very important 
stinction, and one very easily understood. If we recur to the ages before Christ's 
dvent, we shall find them setting towards Him—on any other hypothesis they are 
imless. Not only do prophets foretell His coming, but there are yearnings, as 
xpressed by Plato, and by the Stoics in their dreams of human perfection, which point 
© Him. The voices of oracles, and the inarticulate groanings of the heathen, carry 
he thoughts of men towards a deliverer. Christ was the goal towards which ancient 
istory set, its meaning and its climax; for since His appearing the great heart of 
umanity has beat less feverishly and throbbed less painfully. 

_ We all know that since His resurrection He has been the spring and source of 
ne world’s mightiest and most wide-sweeping movements. Modern history has been 


422 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


shaped and molded by the mission of Jesus. In China and India, where religior 
speculative, stagnation has been the rule for centuries, and they can hardly claim 
have had any history during this period. If they are now beginning to stir with n 
activities it is because the Cross at last has been planted in the heart of their territory. 
The West has only escaped this numbed and half-paralyzed condition because Chris- 
tianity has been its quickening force. 

Christianity is not merely historical as influencing history, but as being in itself 
historical. Our religion is to be considered first of all as a series of facts. Of cours 


deeper than those of a Plato or an Aristotle. Nevertheless, its first aspect presents — 
deeds done, events occurring, scenes transpiring in the ordinary relations of life 
These are seeds which contain the flower of doctrine. Facts involve truths. Thu 
the miracles of Christ carried in their train the doctrine of the supernatural, as Hi 
resurrection proclaimed the hope of immortality. Indeed, every act of His life, and 
every movement of His ministry, was pregnant with abstract truth. Nor should it b 
forgotten that this history formed part of the history of a period, is inseparably inter- 
woven with what for convenience we may call the secular, and cannot be denied 
without repudiating the annals of the latter as well. 
The advantages of this characteristic of our religion are manifold. Not the least 
is the opportunity it affords for a searching investigation of its claims to superhuman 
origin. By this we see that it hides behind no veil of mystery, no inexplicable a 
unintelligible mummeries, but invites the most rigid scrutiny. To all men it says, 
“These things were not done in a corner. If you can show that they did not take 
place as recorded, then the doctrines which are their legitimate outgrowth ar 
unworthy your confidence. Decide the question for yourselves, and just as you woul: 
any other in history. Search me, know me, and see whether the facts are not abund : 
antly sustained.” Begin your inquiries: Did Christ live? Did He die? Did He 
rise again? Did He send out the Word, and has it done in the earth what He said it 
should accomplish? These questions, and others like them, you can readily answer, — 
and with their answer will come acceptance or rejection of the system. i 
Moreover, there is that in the nature of man which seems to demand this historical _ 
element in religion. Few among us, if we may judge from observation, are capable 
of abstractions. Even the pagans tried to simplify and commend their doctrines by 
inventing a mythology which gave an appearance of fact to what they taught. We 
take pleasure in personal existences and their actions. We need an apprehensible 
object to worship, and if we are to exercise dependence and trust we must have some-_ 
thing more before the mind than a vague ideal. 
Then such a system furnishes examples—not merely rules and precepts, as 
speculation does. It shows in the real domain of life what men ought to be. Dut 
is revealed more clearly, and altogether more attractively. We can idealize with 
facility, but we execute with difficulty. What we want to feel is that the portrait of a 
human perfection is capable of actualization in such a world as this. It is not the — 
poet’s description of purity the heart craves, but the exhibition of it in a life. This i is ; 
furnished by the historic Jesus, and, in a measure, by the historic apostles. Moreover 
there is a consciousness of sin in our hearts. Sin is the most momentous and terrible 
fact of our experience. We know that it is in the way of our attaining moral 2 
excellence, and spiritual perfection. This must be overcome. But how? Not by ag 
dream, a beautiful philosophy, but by a fact equally real and mighty as itself. That | 
fact is supplied by the Cross; and the weary soul, burdened with a sense of its actual 
guilt, finds there an actual atonement, and actual cleansing. Thus a divine fact is set — 
over against the human fact, and whoever apprchends their relations to each other — 
attains peace of conscience. a 


The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. 433 


~ On such a foundation as this we can build with satisfaction. Here is a tower 
firmly constructed, resting on primeval granite, from whose summit we can securely 
weep the vast circumference of the spiritual heavens. In comparison with this the , 
foundation on which the New Faith builds is as cloud, mist and fog-bank. In 
exchange for this we are offered speculations—the surmisings and the hypotheses of 
modern teachers. Their guesses, their hasty conclusions from uncertain premises, 
appear to me but miserable substitutes for historic facts. 

_ Speculations are legion. In all circles, evidently, there is a mania in this direction. 


without the aid of Revelation, and as far from its teachings as possible. Science, in 
the person of its devotees, has become as speculative. as prolific of physico- 
ee Physical theories as the most bewitched metaphysician could desire. On more 


the Arabian Nights’ heroes to the genii. We have had a large, ever-increasing and 
varied crop of cosmic speculation, ranging from theories of the origin of species to 
theories of the origin of the universe. Mr. Spencer has tried to build up a science of 
the universe on a philosophy of the unknowable, which may be embodied in one 
‘citation from his pages: “The widest, deepest, and most certain of all facts is that the 
‘power which the universe manifests to us is wholly inscrutable.” 

_ But after all he has said in support of such a theory what is it but a bare specu- 
lation? And yet men profess to be guided in their thinking by a principle as self- 
destructive and self-contradictory as this. I say it is both; because if the power 
behind the universe is inscrutable how do we know that there is any power at all? 
How do we know whether it is one or many? And if it is manifest in the universe 
t is not wholly inscrutable, and may become clearer and clearer. Professor Tyndall, 


Bhings historical, and disguising the most airy metaphysics in scientific terms. Witness 
his Belfast address, the speculative character of which he himself admitted by its 
bsequent modification. 

Then we have assumed theories of development which have not reliable facts by 
which to verify them. Examples are wanting of man’s outgrowth from a lower type. 
[t cannot be proved that he is the latest outcome of Nature’s efforts at improving on 
her own experiments in organic life, or the result of some accidental variety of birth 
in a chimpanzee family. This can hardly be called a new hypothesis. It was hinted at 
by very ancient writers. Pliny wrote, “Man is the being for whose sake all other 
things appear to have been produced by Nature.” “Yet,” he remarked, “the various 


and herds among the Greeks was represented as a compound creature, having the 
horns and feet of the goat, and the face of a man. The satyrs also blended the animal 
h the human. It is to such myths Huxley tries to impart scientific certainty, when 
¢ declares “that man has proceeded from a modification or an improvement of some 
lower animal;” and we are warranted in concluding from his latest array of evidence 
at it rests as yet on guesses and inferences, which are only a step removed from those 
which haunted the imagination of the men who imposed the original myths upon the 
ncient world. 
The same may be alleged of the theories of Comte and Spencer concerning the 
volution of religious belief. It is now thought possible to explain the grand ideas of 
nonotheism and of Christian doctrine by the talismanic word “evolution.” This is 
he new “open sesame” to all spiritual mysteries. But the advocates of this speculation 


—— 


i 


424 Pulpit Power and sett 


into fetichism, and from it through intermediate stages into monotheism; and unti it 
such examples be given hypotheses, claiming to be Natural Histories of Religion, must 


be judged BP eEneSe still. 


some quarters it is ee asa nies to the Old Faith. But what does it meant 
What does it explain? It is we are told, a theory of creation. But in what sense? Does” 
it describe the cause or the method? Process is one thing, cause is another. 
ing the method is not the same as simplifying the cause. Suppose the doctrine is true ay 
regarding “the struggle for existence,” or the “survival of the fittest”—still the question _ 
remains, Whence came the existence to struggle, the fittest.to survive? Whence, after 
all, came the Nature whose potencies were to accomplish such admirable wonders 
The cause, the Supreme cause of all things, is as much in the dark as ever. 
Understand me, I do not claim that Mr. Darwin, the author of “Origin 
Species,’ has overlooked this distinction, but others have, and the result is that they — 
have speculated God out of the universe. The point I make is that the popular — 
metaphysics of science are not warranted by the facts of science, and that speculations 
only indicate the inability of men’s intellect to grapple with the problems of existence 
and to provide an adequate substitute for the Old Faith, which they are seeking to — 
supplant. f 
This limitation has been acknowledged at times by the most thoughtful of thie 4 
race. Socrates, the most celebrated among the wise men of Greece, designated his — 


Goethe, the most comprehensive intellect of Germany says, ““Man is an obscure being; — 
he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes; he knows little of the worl 
and, least of all, of himself.” ‘We are all walking amidst mysteries and marvels 


says he, in another place; and in Faust: 


“Tnscrutable in broadest light, : 
To be unveiled by thee she (Nature) doth refuse; c 
What she reveals not to thy mental sight, be 
Thou wilt not wrest from her with bars and screws.” ' 


“Nature always contains something problematical, which human faculties are 
incapable of fathoming.”” What he says in Faust is no rash exaggeration. There is 
in the race an insatiable hunger after knowledge, and yet we are compelled to add— 


4 
“That we in truth can nothing know 4 
This in my heart like fire doth burn.” 4 


Pascal declares that “the last step of Reason is to perceive that there are a 
many things that surpass her, and if she does not attain this knowledge she is weak — 
indeed.” If these opinions are worth anything, they mean that speculation cannot 
furnish a firm and sure foundation on which to build a religiolts faith or life. As_ 
Goethe says, “Human reason and Divine reason are not the same,” and it is only the 
latter revealed to us that can impart certainty to the beliefs of the former. I spoke 
of the Christian system a few moments since as built upon history like a tower for. 
astronomy. May we not now compare it to a lighthouse—while the New Faith in 
all of its phases is a ship upon the stormy sea. The vessel that is driving yonder, and 
the lighthouse, seem both to be built upon the troubled ocean. So the superficial 
would conclude that the Old Faith as well as the New rest upon the shifting billows. 
of speculation. But in this they are mistaken. Only the New Faith tosses on its” 
uneasy waves; the Old sinks down through them all, through the depths out of sight, 


The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. 425 


nd rests upon the adamant of historic verities. Therefore, in that Old tower, lone 


II. The Old Faith is Positive, the New is Negative. The correctness of this 
sharacterization of Christianity cannot be questioned. She has something to say for 
erself. She is no stammerer. Her speech is distinct, her declarations positive. 
h as well as absolute is her creed. She knows God, and proclaims Him in all the 
ircled and full-orbed completeness of His glory. His attributes are defined, His 
personality declared, and His gracious purposes delineated. The Blessed Christ is 
ot a stranger to her; for the bride knows the bridegroom. His love, tender sym- 
y, matchless self-sacrifice, and undying faithfulness, are set forth by her in words 
t burn. The mystery of His nature is unveiled, and “God manifest in the flesh” 
is the wonderful solution of the problem regarding Him, of whom Jean Paul Richter 
wrote, “that with His pierced hands He lifted the gates of empire off their hinges.” 
To her the significance of His death is not in question. ‘He died, the just for the 
unjust, that He might bring us to God,” is her inspired explanation. The blood shed 
n Calvary is in her creed, the bath of cleansing, the fount of renewal. Knowing 


sality of the supernatural, and presents herself as the most distinguished proof; nor 
foes she hesitate to proclaim that every man who sees the kingdom of God must be 
yorn from above. 
Knowing heavenly things, she knows earthly things as well. She furnishes the 
nly philosophy of humanity—accounting for its origin, its condition, and history. 
To her unclouded vision eternity is as a world touching upon this. Of heaven she 
ings, and with no faltering tongue proclaims the deathlessness of the human spirit. 
_ In a word, she supplies a positive, affirmative creed, which, as Napoleon said at 
st. Helena, “is logical in all of its parts.” She does not permit cavil or doubt to trifle 
vith her revelation. Dogmatic and absolute is she on all subjects about which she 
peaks. To this it may be objected that Christianity is too exclusive and intolerant. 
but her exclusiveness includes all that we need to know, and her intolerance is simply 
le sovereignty of truth. Truth cannot admit the possibility of its opposite being true 
ithout denying its own authority. Antagonistic views cannot be equally authentic. 
Vere Christianity to cease from declaring herself the only heavenly religion she would 
mnihilate her power over the conscience, and would even question her own right to 
exist, for she would be denying her necessity. As it is reported that at the beginning 

e rejected a place for her Savior in the Roman Pantheon, so she is compelled by 
r very nature to reject all alliances and fellowship with other systems. The question 
Pilate, “What is truth?’ was answered by Christ in the words, “I am the truth;” 
din these days His representative dare not sanction a renewal of heathen skepticism. 
How different from this is the New Faith. In its development aid in its declara- 
Ins it is a series of negations. It is a denial. Every step of its melancholy progress 
veals this. 

About the time of the Reformation a number of uneasy spirits opposed the ortho- 
x doctrine of the Trinity. This movement was expressed by the Italian, Faustus 
Mcinius, who, in 1574, gave up a comfortable position in the Medicean court and 
took himself to Germany and Poland, where he became the center of the denial of 
: Trinity. Socinianism does not deny either inspiration or supernaturalism, but 
kes its own subjective notions the standard of all truth. For this reason it rejects 
doctrine of Christ’s divinity. Wollzogen, the Socinian, said, “It is more credible 
ta man should be an ass, than that God should be a man,” 


426 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


English deism in the seventeenth century made a still further advance on the pai 
of negation. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1648) headed the movement, and was foll o * 
by Toland, Tindal, Bolingbroke, and others. It was not a frivolous, but an earne 
and moral spirit which originated this movement, whose object was to reduce Chri: 
tianity to general moral and religious principles. Lord Herbert, when he 
completed his book, prayed God to show him whether it would be to his glory t 
publish it. He says, “I had scarcely uttered these words, when a distinct, yet gentl 
sound, unlike any earthly one, came from heaven. This so supported me and gave m 
peace, that I considered my prayer as heard.” This is wonderful. That God shoul 
give direct attestation to a book that denied the possibility of a revelation; and that we 
are not to believe that He manifested himself in Christ, but are expected to believe thai 
He manifested Himself to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, are amiable assumptions, wh 
logical consistency is not very apparent. Was there ever greater credulity o 
blindness? 
The naturalistic tendency assumed a different form in France. There it w 
frivolous, immoral, blasphemous, denying the very existence of God. Rosseau, ind 
had some religious feeling, but his delusive theory of a “state of nature’ was dest 
ive of everything like religion. Voltaire, whose wit ruled his age, and to whot 
Frederick the Great wrote, ““There is but one Gom and there is but one Voltaire, 
satirized and abused the Church, repeatedly saying, “‘ecrasez l’infame;” and he ventur ec 
to predict the fall of Christ from his dominion over men’s minds in a few deca 
Singular infatuation! Jesus yet reigns, and reigns more gloriously than ever, while 
Voltaire is practically forgotten. Though these men drifted far away from truth, i 
was reserved for Holbach and his gourmands to touch the bottom of the abyss. In 
his “Systéme de la Nature,’ Baron Holbach affirmed materialism in its baldest forr mn 
and denied without scruple the existence of God, the reality of man’s spiritual na ur re) 
and all ethics, but those of self-love and self-interest. a 
In Germany, Herman Reimarus, a native of Hamburg, took the lead in religi v1 
dissent, and transplanted English deism to the soil of his own country. His polemics 
were not only against Scripture, but against the morals of Scripture characters, an¢ 
included Jesus as well. Kant, in his Criticism of Pure Reason, declared all thought tc 
be subjective, and consequently that nothing can be known of the supersensuous 
general with objective certainty. God, immortality, are claims of conscience, voi 
by this inner witness to truth, and on this foundation he shaped the moral world. 
Rationalism, which aims to reduce Christianity to the standard of sound reasor 
grew out of these elements. It teaches that there is a God, but a God who leaves the — 
world to itself, with the exception of seeing that it does not deviate from the laws He 
has imposed on it. According to its philosophy, there is not, neither can there be 
miracle, prophecy, or direct revelation. God cannot interpose directly, and as to 
Jesus Christ, He is no miracle, but only, so says this “Daniel come to judgment,” the — 
wisest and most virtuous man that ever lived. os 
Another step in this downward tendency is furnished by Pantheism. It denies — 
the personal God, moral freedom, and the immortality of soul, which Rationalism is “ 
supposed to hold. God is cosmical life, or the universal reason in all things. He 
is not essentially separate from the world. He is, as Spinoza puts it, the ocean of 
existence, and all things are but waves, ripples, spray, which subside back again in 
the common life. He is the light, and the various great types of existence are but ; 
the prismiatic colors, which are distinct, and yet are but modifications of the o 
absolute effulgence. There is no personal relation to such a God, because he 
impersonal, and has no personal relation to us. Indeed, Hegel taught that He is n 
self-known, but only known to us; that man is the reality of God, and God merely t 
truth of man; consequently, while there may be a certain religious disposition, thei 


Pally 


The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. 427 


‘an be no faith, no hope, no prayer, to such a God. Morality is virtually abolished, 
r its postulates are destroyed, as there is no deity to impose a law, and no such thing 
is free will to execute it. 

_ The last step in this dark and chiliy eamenied is Materialism. Feuerbach marks the 
ransition: ‘God was my first; reason, my second; man, my third and last notion.” 

Thus he expresses the downward course of his theological reasoning. He regards 
30d as a creation of man, and formulizes—‘Man created God after his own image.” 
‘here is no soul, no freedom, no immortality, nothing but the blackness of night 
orever. 

_ Here, then, we have the extreme of doubt. It began in denying Christ’s divinity; 
t ends in denying man’s spiritual nature, and divinity altogether. It began by revising 
le piety and morals of religion; it terminates by abolishing them altogether. It can 
descend no lower. The gospel of earth, the evangel of mud, the millenium of despair 
s been reached, and lower depth is impossible, save into the abyss profound. 

_ These opinions are misleading many persons today—and are the ever-deepening 
1adows of the New Faith, which envelop mind in the intense darkness of negation. 
ome of their advocates, to render more plausible their untenable theories, pretend to 
discard all philosophizing, and set them forth as the doctrine of common sense. The 
bservances of prayer, praise, adoration, faith, hope, are not according to common 
ense, and are, therefore, useless. The sentiment of religion, God, providence, 
immortality, are not acceptable to common sense, and must therefore be swept from 
he mind. But common sense is not infallible. Many other things are contrary to it. 
Common sense does not justify or explain heroism, the explorer’s joy, the reformer’s 
onsecration to his work, the saint’s rapture, the friend’s disinterested loyalty. In a 
vord, common sense, as proclaimed by these gentlemen, simply ignores what is con- 
r to its earthiness, its sensuousness, and its selfishness. 

And this is what is offered as a substitute for the Old Faith.- An unknown God, 
ho is also the Untalkable, who is secluded from our prayers, and excluded from our 
xve. Is this common sense? Does common sense demand us to believe that duty 
‘enyeloped in everlasting mist, and futurity in impenetrable doubt? Is a huge 
erhaps our only anchorage? Are we ever to remain satisfied trying to secure 
urselves to a bank of fog, instead of finding some solid rock under whose sheltering 
trength we can securely rest? Is it‘tcommon sense to solace ourselves in sorrow with 
he doctrine of the Uncertain? or to confront the reality of death with a may-be exist- 
Mce to sustain us? Is it common sense to repudiate the deepest and most sacred 
istincts of our natures, to turn from religion with its blood-bought pardon and its 
spirations to purity? Common sense! Rather call it common non-sense! 

Were the Old Faith burdened with greater difficulties than are alleged against it, 
tre its mysteries deeper, the reason that stirs within us, the conscience that alarms 
r guilt, the instinct that bids us look beyond the present to a home of cloudless 
licity, would rise up in its defense. Man’s whole nature pleads for the Old Faith, 
as the Old Faith pleads for man. It is light to his spiritual eye, sound to his 
iritual ear, life to his death, joy to his spiritual sorrow, hope to his spiritual despair. 
its truth he can feed; on its promises he can rest; by its teachings he can guide his 
et through this vale of gloom to the Paradise above. He dare not abandon it; he 
re not bid chaos come again, or seek strength and peace in that which is without 


imately the order and the glory of a new creation. 


‘Ill. The Old Faith is Constructive, the New is Destructive. With this final 
Stinction the sphere of the practical is reached. The ultimate test of religious 
tems must always be identical with that which our Savior applied to individuals— 
uit.” “By their fruit shall ye know them.” If the faith which claims to be from 


428 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


heaven is not abundant in good works, if it does not conserve the intere 
humanity, elevating and refining, then it lacks the most conclusive of all proofs. 
child should resemble the sire. A heavenly faith should be, and will be, hea 
Righteousness, peace, and joy will distinguish it; and only as it answers the real 
of religion in the every-day life of the world will! it receive the homage of mind 
heart. Nothing to me is so evident as that the doctrines emanating directly or in 
rectly from the Author of creation must be fitted to promote the well-being of societ 
I can no more conceive that God would make the material world in the interests of H 
thinking creatures, and then furnish a faith which should work detrimentally or 
chievously, than I can believe that sweet and bitter waters proceed from one foun 


This view of the case has been pretty generally accepted by the representatives ¢ 
all opinions; and at times has taken shape hostile to the claims of Christianity it 
Not a few of those who advocate the New Faith have taken pains to show that 
Old is evil in its bearings. They have tried to prove that its morality is such tha 
practice it would dissolve society, disorganize governments, and impede the pr 
of the race. Strauss accuses it of an unmistakable tendency towards communi 
while the communists of France and Germany reject it because of its leanings to 
monarchism. Mr. Frothingham, in a discourse on Materialism, declares that e€ 
gelical teachers inculcate the following opinions: that ‘education is of no acco 
knowledge is worthless; culture is vain; personal goodness counts for nothing; s 
kindness is valueless; the truest greatness of mind and character is powerless to 
man to health and felicity.” This is a misrepresentation. The Old Faith encour 
the broadest culture, but it denies that it can either regenerate a soul or justify it before 
God. It proclaims an atonement, not as a substitute for personal training, but as 4 
provision for its reconciliation with the Highest. ' 

But this very conception of an atonement becomes a ground of assault on 
morality of the Christian scheme. It is claimed that it justifies injustice, and 
pounds a theory that subverts every wholesome principle of rectitude. Mr. Froth 
ham is strikingly severe in his denunciations of this doctrine; and represents it 
maintaining that by a material operation the souls of men are to be saved. 

He and others fail to see that its inherent and relative morality may be vindice 
on such grounds as these; that the very idea of such an atonement has its root in 
intense realization of righteousness, moral laxity having nothing to do with it; 
no violation of a righteous law is involved, inasmuch as it is appointed and accep’ 
by the lawgiver, and undertaken freely by the substitute; that it is no more unju 
per se, that the perfectly holy Christ should die for the guilty as an expiato 
sacrifice, than it would be for Him to suffer in the slightest degree as an exampl 
and that the avowed end of substitution is not to appease personal feeling in God, but 
to vindicate righteousness in the inviolable maintenance of law. Neither do 
opponents perceive the bearing of the fact, that wherever the atonement is proclai 
it awakens an intense desire for personal purity, renders the conscience more sensitive, 
and reclaims thousands from vicious courses. Wherever the Old Faith is earnestly, 
simply, and clearly preached, great revivals follow, thousands are reclaimed and lif 
up from despair to hope. When the doctrines of Strauss and Parker result in moral | 
transformations as numerous and as distinct as those which have followed the teach- 
ings of Whitfield, Spurgeon or Moody, we shall be more inclined than we are now to 
credit them with the possession of some redeeming qualities. q 

The accusations brought by the New Faith are wholly without foundation. 
Christianity is entirely beneficial. It is constructive, formative. It imparts healt 
action to society, having supplied it with its purest ideals and noblest organizatio’ 
The dearest interests of the race are conserved by its influence. From it hum 
governments receive their stability, the family its sacredness, industry its honor, | 


The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. 429 


5 thority. It has inspired the loftiest sentiments, and kindled the genius of the 
t and the artist, while it has bound all ranks in the ties of a noble brotherhood. 


The career of the Old Faith, from the past to the present, gives abundant proof 
this. Christianity introduced the era of humanity. Not before its advent did men 
k upon themselves as members of one great family, having a common parentage 
he Supreme. Not before were the rights of human personality acknowledged as 
d and inviolable. Their recognition must be regarded as fruits of Christianity. 
made no direct changes in the external arrangements of society when it first 
D sared; it left laws and privileges, manners and conditions, customs and ranks, as 
found them, but it introduced a new spirit into all of these arrangements, which is 
idually transforming them to heaven’s ideal. It raised the condition of woman from 
degraded to an honorable one, declaring that in point of honor there is neither male 
r female in Christ Jesus. It made love, which, as Montesquieu says, ‘at the time of 
introduction bore only a form which cannot be named,” the noblest and tenderest 
wer of mental and spiritual life. It created a new family—grounding it in an 
tion, hearty and genuine, and hitherto unknown. 

Not till its dawning did the love for neighbors in any true sense exist. Chris- 
anity made the Good Samaritan the pattern of our relations with those from whom 
e differ in race or creed. By the wondrous mystery and infinite tenderness of the 
Toss it introduced humanity into the world, and inculcated the virtue of compassion. 
are for the sick and poor are of its heart—the spirit of love, of resignation, of self- 
crifice, of its essential genius. It broke down the wall of partition between classes, 
ibes, and states. Not before did there exist upon earth such a thing as international 
, upon which, in our day, the whole framework of society depends. Commerce was 
orn of this, and all that we count as progress in the material splendor of nations. 
e has likewise proclaimed liberty of conscience, and she has added comfort and 
ace, delivery from the sense of guilt, consciousness of pardon through that ever 
ailing atonement made by Christ for sin. And thus she has become the source of 
new and hitherto unknown moral power, the extent of which only the “‘dateless and 
yoluble circles of eternity” will reveal. 

_ What is more remarkable Christianity has never done otherwise than promote 
wholesome construction of society, whatever may have been its outward conditions, 
id however it may have tended towards dissolution. During the first centuries, when 
ebrated its triumphs in the sufferings of the martyrs, and its rites in the obscurity 
the Catacombs, it was only preparing a grander community for the coming Rome. 
fen in the middle ages, when feudalism and ignorance threatened to end civilization, 
ch as it was in barbarism, it was Christianity, though obscured by many super- 
tions, which held the elements of irretrievable disaster in check. At the period of 
e Reformation, when it appeared that the revolt from superstition might terminate in 
e destruction of society, the whole movement became a conserving, organizing im- 
ise, from whence modern progress has sprung. During the unhappy war which alien- 
sd the sections of our beloved country, it was the Old Faith which prevented absolute 
archy, and the utter wreck of all our institutions. It held us together, and has been 
@ inspiration, if not the formative principle, of reconstruction and present harmony. 


The indispensableness of the Old Faith to the order and well-being of society is 
tnessed to by impartial judges. Montesquieu exclaims: “Wondrous phenomenon! 
¢ Christian religion, whose sole object seems to be the happiness of a future life, 
sures the happiness of the present life.” Ziethe calls attention to this saying, and 
lis of an Indian Prince who desired to know the secret of England’s greatness, and 
whom Victoria showed neither her splendid army nor navy, but delivered to him 
Bible, with the words: “The Word of the Lord is the secret of England's great- 


ss.” The well-known saying of Goethe is in point, “All epochs under which faith 


430 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


has prevailed have been brilliant, heart-elevating, fruitful both to contemporaries and ¥ 
posterity. All epochs, on the contrary, in which unbelief, under whatever form, has — 
maintained a sad supremacy, even if for the moment they glitter with a false splendor, 


vanish from the memory of posterity, because none care to torment themselves with 


the knowledge of that which has been barren.” He adds that French scholars have 


pointed out the connection of the history of human society with religion, and with the 
deyelopment of the idea of God. Thus Franck (in “Etudes Orientals, 1861”) — 
endeavors to show how the value of a nation’s social constitution is proportional to the - 


value of its religious idea. We all know how Castellar traces the glory and stability 


of the United States to our fathers’ faith in the Old Bible. Edgar Quinet, in his a | 


lectures at Lyons, (1839), teaches that ‘‘the religious idea is the very essence of civiliza- 
tion, and the formative principle of political constitutions.” Benjamin Constant has 
taken pains to mark the transition to this opinion, and what he says of Quinet will be 


found true of some others: “He projected his work on religion in the spirit of 
Atheism”—note well—“but finished it by seeking the necessary conditions of the — 
existence of civilized society in the religious sentiment.’’ Guizot declares “that all 


political and social questions always lead to the religious principle for their final 
solution;” 
stumble upon theology.” 


and Proudhon exclaims, ‘‘as soon as we go deep into politics we always 


These testimonies carry with them the impression that the theories opposed to the __ 


Old Faith must be destructive. in their tendency—destructive to the moral sense and 


to the good of society. What else is inferable from such sentiments as those which 
pass current among its adversaries? Take the Positivist conception of moral educa- 
tion, which, according to Comte, is the mere knowledge of facts; “of causes of 
phenomena, whether past or final, we know nothing.” According to Mr. Herbert 
Spencer children should be made to experience the true consequence of their conduct. 
Mr. Mill would have inculcated as a leading principle, what he sets forth as true of 
himself in the sentence, “of direct power over my volitions I am conscious of none.” 


Mr. Bain would have education seek a deliverance from “the whole series of phrases” 
connected with the will,” as being “contrived to foster in us a feeling of importance” 


for which we have no warrant. That is, we are to train our children morally by telling 
them that there is no such thing as personal freedom or responsibility; that, as Feuer- 
bach would phrase it, “thought is but phosphorous,” that “as a man eats, so he is;” 
and consequently that conduct is but the result of forces over which we have no 
control, or which is determined wholly by physical qualities. 

The premises of the New Faith are necessarily fatal to any remarkable growth of 
lofty manhood. Contrast them with those of the Old: An indefinable, undiscoverable 
.First Cause is offered the world, instead of a personal and holy God; development of 
man from a monkey type, instead of creation by the hand of the Highest; phosphorus 
or proptoplasm, or some hidden vital principle, as the source of human action, instead 
of an undying spiritual essence; atmospheric pressure, or hydrogenic explosions, as 
the influencing agencies of history, instead of the Holy Ghost; and death and the grave 
for the race, instead of immortality and the resurrection. Here we have the foundations 
of the new ethics. But if men are merely creatures of circumstances, if the only laws 
they are to obey are only those they cannot disobey, if society is the only God they are 
to worship, and if annihilation is the only destiny they are to anticipate, the moral 
results of such a barren creed cannot be problematical. It must contract and 
materialize the nature of man, repress the divine that is in him and foster the animal. 
Spiritual character, broad, sinewy, strong, can never spring from its teachings. Such 
men as came of the French Revolution, which was itself, with all of its disorganizing 
tendencies, a practical phase of the New Faith; or such persons as Mr. R. W. Emerson 
described, in a lecture on Modern Thought, as “the dapper’ product of the new 
doctrines, are specimens of what they can do in the direction of manhood. 


\ 


+ 
4 
‘ 
4 
i 
q 
¢ q 
: | 


The Old Faith and the New—Lorimer. 431 


As I think on this subject I cannot but recall a famous passage in the writings of 
omas Carlyle, which suggests a sad illustration of the natural bearing of the New 
ith. The grim philosopher quotes from the Moslem myth regarding Moses and the 
ellers by the sea. It seems a tribe of men dwelt on the shores of the Dead Sea, 
i having “forgotten the inner facts of nature, and taken up with falsities, were fallen 
» sad conditions—verging towards a certain deeper lake. Whereupon it pleased 
id to send them Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which would 
ye sprung remedial measures not a few. But no; the men of the Dead Sea discov- 
d no comeliness in Moses, listened with real tedium to him, with light grinning, or 
h splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawns—and signified, in short, that 
sy found him a humbug, and even a bore. Moses withdrew. The men of the Dead 
a, when we next went to visit them, were all turned into apes. They sat on trees, 
mning in the most unaffected manner, gibbering and chatting very genuine non- 
The Universe has become to them a humbug. Only every Sabbath there 


To me this is a tragical picture of the tendency of the New Faith. The blessed 
alities of the Gospel are rejected, and men, taught to sneer at their own spirituality, 
nerate towards the ape species. They chatter or mew unmusically regarding 
ture, theories of evolution, or positive philosophies, and have only a dim conscious- 
sss of something they once had, which is now forever gone. Their soul is lost to 
2 And we may rest assured that apes, with their screeching and chatter, cannot 
ve such a society as enlightened Christian men can create. 

Those who expect otherwise are fatally deluded. When not put to the strain, 
len not tested by the trials of life, the new doctrines may not seem to be injurious, 
t they will prove so in the long run to the individual, and to society as well. You 
ay remember the fate which overtook Donaldson and a companion, in 1876. At 
st the balloon, to which they committed themselves, rose majestically in the calm, 
t after a little while the storm struck it, and it was driven wildly over land and lake. 
hrough the darkness of that night, through the battle in the clouds, they were borne, 
ly to perish. Neither came back, and only the dead body of the youth, washed 
ore by the lake, gave clew to the mystery. 

Now, there are spirits as reckless as these adventurers, who claim that evil effects 
in not overtake them, whatever doctrines may be received, so long as they are sincere. 
this apprehension they are wofully mistaken. They forget that Donaldson and his 
Ociate were perfectly sincere in believing that they could navigate the aerial ocean 
safety, and yet their sincerity did not preserve their frail vessel from the fury of the 
And if they hold on to a bag of gas, to an inflated theory, when the storm tries 
as we are not living in the world of shams, but of realities, they will be dashed to 
ces. The men in the balloon were never in a position of more peril than are those 
io would rise heavenward in some frail machine of their own construction, instead 
ascending the mystic ladder revealed by Christ, which leads man directly to holy 
swship with his God. 


Conclusion —To what I have written it may be answered the human mind is so 
Mstituted that it craves rew ideas and new theories. It cannot satisfy itself with 
‘thoughts and beliefs of the past; it demands fresh conceptions for the future. 
er is beyond question an error in this representation. What the mind really needs 
something true, not something new;’and in the true, however old, will be ever 
nd its most ostied aliment. If I hand you a rose fresh from the ep ak dyed 


432 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


ing, “the eye requires something new?” Surely not. In the realm of the beautift 
there is really nothing new. Its forms may be reproduced in various ways, its outli 
and expression may be copied by the art of the sculptor or the painter; but they are 
as immutably fixed as the laws of right and wrong. The fluidity or changeableness 
of the beautiful is only apparent; in fact, whether in nature, in marble, or in canvas 
we look for it, we look for the definite and immutable properties which reveal them- 
selves in a flower, and without which the object contemplated would not be beautiful 
at all. When the eye craves satisfaction, it is seeking for these permanencies; and 
when they are found, it has nothing more to seek for. Not the newly beautiful, but 
the truly beautiful is its delight. This principle is as applicable to the spiritual sight * 
as to the eye. That within man which yearns for religion can only be satisfied with 
that which corresponds to itself, and that which thus corresponds must abide; for 


which it has been instituted. 
A new religion is no more required by the race than a new world. The sunt at 


former ages, day and night succeed each other, and the flowers come and go asie 
through the centuries which never can return. I love the old world—the old earth — 
and the old heavens, because they are old. To me they are made peculiarly sacred | 
by the thought that they surround the sages, poets, heroes and martyrs of the past. y 
tread the dusty roads they trod, I behold the scenes which charmed them or inspire 
them. I hear the sounds which broke upon their ear and chased away their sense o 
solitude. Dear earth! the footprints of the noble are in thy bosom; their tears fe 
upon thee, and thou dost treasure them in thy secret places; their sighs mingled wit 
thy solemn moanings, and thou dost whisper them beneath the heavens; and their 
struggles and their triumphs stormed across thee, and though they have left many aa 
scar upon thy wondrous face, they have left an undying glory too. 

Equally as precious, because equally sufficient for all our needs, is the Old Faiths 
Generations of the best, of the purest, of the truest, have believed its doctrines, a 


assurances of eternal felicity. Thus let us live, hope and rejoice, until that bright day 
shall dawn when the immortal shall be translated from the old realm of faith to the 
new realm of sight: : 


“For when at ee from life’s dark road, = 
We climb heaven’s heights serene, 

All light upon the hill of God 
In God’s light shall be seen. 


All kingdoms of the truth shall there 
To tearless eyes be shown; 

And, dwelling in that purer air, 
We'll know even as we’re known.” 


[George C. Lorimer was born in Edinburg, Scotland, 1838, coming to the United — i 
States, 1856; educated at Georgetown college, Kentucky. Was ordained to the Baptist 
ministry in 1859, serving churches at Harrodsburg, Paducah and Louisville, Ky., f 
Boston and Chicago, and for some years pastor of Tremont Temple, Boston, where his 7 
evening audiences numbered upwards of 1,500. He has written a number of books, e 
the most important being The Argument for Christianity, Christianity and the Sone Pa 
State, Isms Old and New, The Great Conflict, etc. 4 

This sermon was preached some years ago, and is from The Gospel Invitation. i 
It is included for the reason that few men are better read on the subject treated than 
the author. ] 


(433) 


IMPORT OF THE LORD’S SUPPER. 


JOHN McCLINTOCK, D. D. 


_ “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s 
death till He come.”—1 Cor. 11: 26. 


I purpose this morning speaking of the Lord’s Supper. I can only do this in 
certain aspects of the subject, because to treat of it in full, in its nature and in its 
relation to the Church and to the individual, would require a whole series of sermons. 
Every name we give it implies a different aspect. We call it the Eucharist—a feast of 
thanksgiving; the Lord’s Supper—that is to say, a feast in which we have communion 
with Christ at His own invitation. There are a great many names, and each of them 
is significant. 


A preliminary remark upon the sacraments of the Gospel: We have two sacra- 
ments—Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. There were two rites in the old dispensation 
to which these correspond—Circumcision, and the Passover; the one the rite of 
initiation, and the other the rite of confirmation. There must be such rites as these 
in every religious organization, and there is something analogous to them in every 
form of organization. The right of initiation under the old law was circumcision, 
performed once, and once only, upon a subject who was a mere passive recipient. 
So the rite of baptism in the New Testament is performed once, and once only, and 
“upon a passive recipient. There is nothing voluntary about the sacrament consid- 
red in itself; the subject receives the baptism—the effusion of the water, the pouring 
it or the immersion in it—by some other hand. On the contrary, the right of 
onfirmation under the old law was the passover, which included certain acts on 
e part of the partaker, as well as the outward and visible elements of the sacrament 
self. The lamb had to be procured and slain, and was then roasted and eaten; all 
these implying voluntary acts of the participant. So in this sacrament there is God’s 
in providing the elements and constituting them what they are; and, on the 
ther hand, the participation of the voluntary communicants who go to the sacra- 


se two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The one is the rite of initia- 
ion, and the other the rite of confirmation. You can very easily see, if it be dis- 
ssed whether children or grown people are to be baptized—whether by sprinkling, 
fr pouring, or immersion—how trifling these differences are when compared with 
the real substance. They are akin to the disputes as to whether the bread should be 
leavened or unleavened, whether the wine should be fully pressed or fermented, or 
dr nk from cups of silver or glass. All these are minor questions. We are to be 


434 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Let us contemplate the real substance of this sacrament for us as Christian pe 


I. The sacrament of the Lord’s supper looks back upon the past, and in 
sense is a memorial. 


II. It has relation to the present time and our present personal condition, anc 
in this sense is a means of grace. : 


III. It looks forward prophetically to the future, and in this sense is a pledg 
of everlasting life to all who worthily partake of it. P 


I. This sacrament looks back upon the-past, and in that sense is a memo 
It is a commemorative ordinance. Commemorative of—what? Of that for the v 
purpose of which it was instituted—the circumstances under which it was institu 
Ah, how apt we are to forget our benefactors! How apt we are to forget even th 
that we love! Take that single sentence home now and see if it is not so. Ten 
twenty years ago you buried some one out of your sight, and it seemed as if the v 
light of your life were gone—a light that could never come back again; and you s 
so—that it should be never more. And yet that loved image now stands away b 
in the distance, dim and shadowy. and it is only when some memorial, some t 
some sign, some sacrament brings back the recollection, that the old love is f 
It is not gone, I admit; but we are so apt to forget. And so we forget our grea 
benefactors. Mankind are prone to remember those that hurt them, rather than 
benefactor who brings blessings at every step of his path in life. 


Hack a tree with an axe, and the scar remains for ages. The circles that ¢ 
around in the effort of nature to obliterate it seem more and more to perpetuate 
But the care of the gardener who planted it, who watched and watered it, that is 
forgotten. So it is with men. Even that great sacrifice of Christ upon ‘the cr 
the purchase of our redemption by that bitter death, even the circumstances of 
death itself, we are apt to forget unless perpetually reminded. And so, in this asp 
the very institution of the Lord’s Supper is a kind condescension on the part of Ge 
to our weakness and infirmity; and whenever the Church administers the sacram: 
whether once a month or once a week, it is intended as a sign, a memorial, a pi 
of the Lord Jesus, a painting of the crucifixion, a sculpture for us, if our imaginati 
faith be strong enough to take in all the scene upon Calvary. Nay, more, not mere! 
a painting or statue, but bringing back again, if our eye of faith be strong eno 
to see it, the living, breathing, suffering, dying Savior as He hung there upon 
cross, with the blood still flowing eons His veins and arteries strong and quick 
as in the flush of His maniy life; then it ebbed away and He became weaker a 
weaker, paler and paler, until at last He died. This sacrament is thus meant to be 
memorial and bring back to us the day of our Savior’s death, the nights of 
humiliation in the grave. “This do in remembrance of Me.” 


There is special fitness in the matter of the institution as well as in the form: | 
in the bread and wine which constitute the matter of the sacraments. The bread—we 
take it, and it is broken, and we eat it; the wine—it is poured out, and we drink 1 
And what are ‘these? The bread, how is it made? That bread cannot be made f 
you every day as the nourishment for your physical frame, except at this expens 
the beautiful grain must be taken at its maturity, the beautiful head of wheat m 
be rudely cut down, and then it passes into the hands of the laborer, or under 
hoof of the horse, or beneath the thrashing-flail, or into the pressure of the machin 
until it is stripped of its husk, and life is entirely taken from it so far as outwar 
material instruments can do it, and then it is put between the upper and nether mil 
stone and ground to powder, And that is not all, You must take it and cavss 


Import of the Lord’s Supper—McClintock. 435 


s elements of death to show themselves; the putrefaction of fermentation must 
gin before you can have the light, beautiful, life-preserving bread. And so with 
wine. You cannot get the mantling wine, with its beautiful color and refreshing 
operties, except by taking the grape in the full blush of its bloom and richness, 
d cutting it from the vine, and subjecting it to pressure, and after that to fermen- 
tion, that out of destruction and death shall be brought the life-producing, life- 
serving wine. 
So it is with our Lord and Savior. He lived; but if He had only lived there 
ould have been no life for us. He lived and died upon the cross that you and I 
light-live; that is to say, this bread of God came down from heaven to be our 
urishment. It had to be cut off in its full bloom, to be subject to the flail, to the 
ressure and power of the mill, to be ground between the upper and the nether 
ill-stone, to be laid in the grave, and the beginning of its corruption to appear, and 
len its resurrection; and now it is possible for Christ to be the living bread coming 
own from heaven, and whoever eats of it shall live for evermore. The bread and 
le wine are alike emblematic of the strength which the Church receives, and through 
r each individual member, from this blessed communion with Christ, which we 
mmemorate when we partake of the Supper of the Lord. So we commemorate 
is sorrows and sufferings in this way for our own'sake. And how rich a blessing 
that such a commemoration is given! 
_ And further, our faith in Christ is excited by these emblems, as He is “evidently 
‘ forth among us crucified and slain.” If we come to this sacrament remembering 
lat this bread and wine are an emblem of, and our hearts are filled with it, this 
issage will be true, that here, as we surround the altar of God, “Christ is visibly 
t forth among us crucified and slain,” for ‘‘visibly” is what is meant by the word 
vidently” in the passage; the effect of the memorial being to bring us back to 
i@ cross, to bring the cross down to us. That is the effect of it if we come with 
living and true faith to partake of the blessed sacrament. By this commemoration 
feel the dripping blood of Christ as if we had sat under His cross; the anguish 
those pains we feel as if we had seen them on Calvary. The spear that pierced 
Savior’s side has rotted long ago; the cross on which they hung Him has passed 
fay, gone into corruption; but the water and blood that flowed on the piercing 
His side by the soldier—the terror and anguish and pain that He endured upon 
at bitter cross—all these are as fresh as if the cross had been reared but yesterday, 
d Christ hung upon it today. Our faith brings them to us, because the efficacy of | 
t cross and of Christ’s redemption is an everlasting efficacy. ~ 
‘There is another aspect of this commemorative feature of the sacrament to which 
must call your attention: “‘As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup ye do 
Ww the Lord’s death till He come.” We show it as an historical testimony of 
fact of His death. Every time the followers of Jesus Christ gather around His 
and partake of the bread and wine as emblems of His broken body and shed 
od, they add an additional evidence to the truth of the Gospel history. This 
mance is a perpetual memorial and proof of the facts of Christ’s death, and the 
sed objects of it. Can you find a day in history, from the day of Christ’s 
itution of this sacrament the night before He died, on which it has not been 
ved? No single week has rolled away these eighteen hundred and thirty years 


y days after the death of the Savior. They gather in stronger numbers and 
1 stronger hopes after the day of Pentecost, and so the bread is broken and the 
€ poured out and Christ remembered, and His death borne witness to, So, then, 


436 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


brethren, we too are as historical witnesses to the fact of Christ's death, and ever} 
time we come here we add one new stone to the great fabric of Christian eviden 
one new testimony to the truth of this Gospel. There is something, to my mi 
very striking and very beautiful in this one single evidence of the truth of Ch 
tianity—that you cannot point to any other beginning of this sacrament than that 
recorded, and that there is no stronger historical proof of any event than the com- 
memoration in honor of it. Such is our fourth of July; and if it should be only 
celebrated as it is, once in each year, yet at the end of ten thousand years the force 
of it as a testimony would be just as great as it is now, unless some one could point 
to the day when it was instituted without foundation. In history testimony of this 
kind is considered better than almost any other. But we do more than this as wit- 
nesses, and not only testify to the fact of Christ’s death, but testify to it with praise 
and approbation, The cross of the Lord Jesus was to the Jews a stumbling-bloc! 
and to the Greeks foolishness; but to us who believe, it is the power of God u 
salvation; that is to say, as often as we eat of this bread and drink this wine, 
show the death of the Lord until He come, and in coming around this altar vy 
come to say, What? That the cross of Christ is no longer a stumbling-block o 
foolishness, that to us the offence of the cross is taken away for ever; not merel 
that it is not offensive, but that it is our crowning glory that we have a right 
come to it and say, with a higher emphasis than Paul said, “I am not ashamed of” 
the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one 
believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.” And when we surround tl 
altar we come as witnesses to a fact and to the glory of a pact, each of us taking up 
the strain, and saying, “I joy and glory in the cross of Christ each one of us — 
says, “I testify to the power of the religion! of the Redeemer;” each one of us says 
as Paul says, and with a higher emphasis, “God forbid that I should glory save in 
the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and 4 
I unto the world.” ; 


roe 


II. The second aspect of the sacrament is its relation to the present as a means ~ 
of grace. Christ died, and we commemorate the sacrifice; but more than +his, He 
rose again, and is with us here, a living Savior. Bread and wine come again in 
types, types of the nourishment of life and its preservation. We have in this sac a- ‘ 
ment the communion of His body and blood, which nourishes and sanctifies us in 
this life and prepares us for everlasting life in heaven. P 


The tree of life which stood in the garden of Eden was sacramental, and to e2 t 
of the tree was the law of the preservation of life under the Adamic covenant. The 
covenant was this: ‘‘Eat and thou shalt live. Here is the tree of life; the matter 
of this sacrament is the fruit of this tree, and thou shalt eat of it and shalt live.” 
When Adam was banished the sacrament was revoked; the tree of life was guarded 
by cherubim with flaming swords turning every way. But under the promise th q 
Christ should come again, under all dispensations—Abrahamic and Mosaic—all t 
way along up to the time when Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper, you will find 
some sacrament, some sign between God and man. The tree of paradise was the 
ante-type of the paschal blood that saved Israel’s first-born in the hour when the 

angel of death passed over Egypt; of the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by 
night; of the manna that sustained them in the desert, and of the passover estab- 
lished in the promised land and kept up until the coming of the Lord Jesus. The 
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was substituted for the passover. Christ our Pass- 
over is slain for us. All these were in their time means of grace, comforting and 
sustaining. The Israelite was likely to doubt the strength and willingness of God 
to carry him onward, but could be conyinced by Moses suddenly pointing upward, 


Import of the Lord’s Supper—McClintock. 439 


See there! behold that rising vapor as it curls above the marching millions of 
fsrael, and then no longer doubt!” So in the hour of night and darkness the same 
leader and guide could tell him, “See there! behold that pillar of fire, beginning 
aver the ark, ascending, and widening as it ascends! That is the type and pledge of 
God’s promise to His people.” And so in all ages the natural heart of man has seen 
in the rainbow spanning the sky the type of God's attributes of mercy and grace, 
and all people in all ages have looked up to that unimaginable beauty as a sacra- 
ment between God and man, an assurance that God’s blessing should never more 
ail to mankind. 


In the Lord’s Supper we come to refresh ourselves more than the Israelites 
sould in sight of the cloud and fire, and be fed more than they could by the manna, 
or our celestial manna is the bread of this sacrament, and whosoever eateth and 
drinketh in the name of the Lord Jesus eateth and drinketh to his salvation. ‘The 


The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” How 
can this be true? It is really and literally true that in coming to this communion 
rist is actually and substantially to be partaken of by those who believe on Him. 
I do not mean that the bread and wine are turned into the physical body of the 
Lord Jesus. What a delusion that is that anything is substantial that can be seen 
and touched! The least substantial are those that can be seen or touched. The 
substance of this outward physical form is that Which we cannot see. We do not 
sven know what it is. Take the substance of the oak wood or pine wood. You do 
not know what the substance of it is at all; you know certain outward properties 
ich it possesses, but that is all. Christ is really and substantially present with his 
hildren in this sacrament. Though we do not see Him, or eat of His body in a 
tangible and physical sense, or drink of His blood, yet we do really find our Savior 
in those memorials of Him. Let me illustrate this by a single case out of the 
Gospel. Our Savior, passing through a great crowd of people, suddenly said, “Who 
is it that touched me, for I find virtue has gone out of me?” Yet no one had 
touched His person, His face, or hands, or feet, or any part of His body. It was 
nothing but a poor woman who had taken hold of the outer edge of his long robe, 
perhaps four or five feet from His person; only the hem of His garment was touched, 
nd yet the touch brought life to her, and the Savior knew it, and said, “Some one 
touched me.” So when we come to surround this table, and come so near to 
Christ as to take the emblems of His body and blood, we are nearer than to be 
ouching the very hem of His garment. If we have faith to believe it, our Savior 
is with us. 

We have nourished in our souls, in our love for Him, in our purposes of good, 
nd get ourselves strengthened to bear the ills, temptations, and shocks of life, and 
© prepare for death and judgment. And so we have often found a means of grace 
n this communion. When our faith is strong in it 


“Our spirits drink a fresh supply, 

And eat the bread so freely given, 
Till, borne on eagle’s wings, we fly, 

And banquet with our Lord in heaven.” 
f there be a doubting Thomas in the congregation who has never been able fully 
9 realize our Lord, and has been going for years with his head bowed down, I 
ly come to the communion, to the altar of God, if you are willing to see Him. 
Jo this in remembrance of Christ, and open your eyes, and you shall see the hole 


438 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 
caused by the spear of the soldier, and put your hand in it; you shall see the 
wounds in His hands and feet; you see Him with His body broken and crushed 
for you, and you shall be led to say, “My Lord and my God.” Come, and let this 
communion be for you the means of grace. How many have felt in surrounding 
this altar not only their own resolutions renewed, but the baptism of the Holy 
Ghost renewed, fresh power given to them, and that the mysterious manifestation — | 
of grace in the sacrament has renewed their faith as followers of Christ! : 


III. Looking toward the future, we find in this sacrament a pledge of glory 
and everlasting life. ‘‘He said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this | 
passover with you before I suffer: for I say unto you, I will not any more eat . | 
thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And He took the cup, and 
gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: for I say ume | 
you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.’ 
There Christ institutes this supper, and tells His followers that it is His supper 
and His supper of communion, but that He will drink it no more with them until 
the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. Then He will drink it and join them again % 
in it; then an everlasting supper will be renewed—an everlasting supper of the e 
Lamb—and not till then. ‘‘As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup you do ~ 
show the Lord’s death till He come.” That is to say, we are keeping up a memorial © ; 

of it here in the wilderness until He shall come again; until the wilderness shall = 

blossom as the rose. And surely this communion is a pledge of that coming—a seal 7, 
and assurance of it. As often as we partake of it we know that our Master shall — 
come. He comes to us in the communion itself as a pledge of that last coming. — 
More than this, the Lord’s Supper is to last until His coming, but no longer. We ~ 
are not to have it in this shape in heaven. It is a memorial of Christ's coming. — 
Whenever a pledge is given it is given as security that a certain contract shall be — 
performed, and when it is performed the pledge is given up. So it shall be with 
the Lord’s Supper; when Christ’s kingdom is come the Lord’s Supper shall end. 
But what shall take its place? The Lord’s Supper is a pledge and earnest of the 
marriage feast of the Lamb. “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude,” 
writes John on the Island of Patmos, “and as the voice of many waters, and as the 
voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. — 
Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to Him: for the marriage of the Lamb is 
come, and His wife hath made herself ready: And to her was granted that she © 
should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white, for the fine linen is the righteousness _ 
of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto 
the marriage supper of the Lamb.” 


Every time we surround this altar and partake of the Lord’s Supper we have a ~ 
pledge, a foretaste and assurance of that great marriage supper of the Lamb, an invi- [. 
tation to which shall be the crowning glory of every redeemed soul. Oh, to be sure s 
of that invitation! Oh, to be sure of the wedding-garment! that when these guest 
tables are prepared, and these viands of heaven are set out by celestial servitors, © 
when the fruits of the immortal garden are for the Lord’s army, and the vines of 
the heavenly vineyards have been pressed by the Lord’s husbandmen, and the ever- 
lasting bread of the kingdom of glory shall be set out on the golden plates and 
dishes of that great banqueting-house, that I may be called, and my seat be ready, 
that I may have only to come at the sound of the last trump and obey the willing 
impulse of my own regenerated and redeemed soul; that my ears may be open to 
listen when that sound which shall wake the dead to life shall burst upon the dark- 
ness and silence! Then the angels shall carry me to the entrance of that great 
banqueting-hall, and I shall rise with the marriage festal garments on me, ready — 


ale pepariranven strtechaii 


Import of the Lord’s Supper—McClintock. 439 
nter mt, This is what the Lord pledges me when I partake of it, and what He 


. 


‘John MeClintock, D. D., LL. D., an eminent Christian scholar and divine of the 
fethodist Episcopal Church, was bared in Philadelphia in 1814, and in his twenty-first 
ar graduated at the University of Pennsylvania. For eight years he edited the 
Methodist Quarterly Review.” He was pastor of the American Chapel in Paris, 
nd bore eloquent testimony for his imperiled country during the civil war. In 1867 
e became president of the Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J., and died 
| March, 1870.] 


440 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE LITTLE FAITE 


ALEXANDER McKENZIE. 


“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?’—Matt. 14:31. 


“O thou of little faith” is one word in the Greek. It had need to be so, for 
it was an exclamation in surprise. There was no time for formal words. A man 
was walking upon the sea, and beginning to sink he cried, “Lord, save me!” © 
Jesus answered him, calling him by a single name, “O thou of little faith, wherefore 
didst thou doubt?” It was not the last time that Peter surprised the Lord. It was 
stranger at the last, but it is strange enough here. We think of him as a stout, 
hardy sailor, used to the sea and the storms of Galilee which are sudden and severe, } 
while the boats are not large. It had been a bad night, with head winds and a heavy — 
sea. They could not carry sail and had taken to their oars. It was very early, from 
three to six o’clock in the morning, when they saw Jesus walking on the waves. — 
“Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water. And He said Come. 
And when Peter was come down out of the ship he walked on the water to go to 
Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid and cried, “Lord save ~ 
me.” It was a good example. Was it? Why did he not swim and work his way ~ 
back to the boat? Or if it were the time of transition with him, between a sailor — 
and an apostle, why did he not trust, and keep on? Why did he doubt both Christ 
and himself? He resorted to that which is commonly unsuccessful, that is, a com- 
promise. He did not swim, and he did not trust, and failing of both, he does not 
appear to advantage, as a sailor should. Yet we do not judge him. Who of us 
knows what he would do on the Sea of Galilee with the waters giving way under 
his feet and the gray dawn blowing its tempests on him? There is a much better © 
illustration of faith than this in the instance of a man who consented to sink but 
went down with trust. Abraham was called to take the life of the child of his own © 
age, the child of promise in whom all his hope was invested, who was to be a bless- 
ing to his people and to the world. Obedient to the voice of God he took the boy 
to the mountain and bound him and laid him on the altar and raised the knife. — 
This was more than beginning to sink, it was sinking; and so far as we have heard, — 
there was no voice crying for mercy. He believed that the promise would be kept 
—he knew not how—‘accounting that God is able to raise up, even from the dead.” 
He would have gone down to the bottom of the sea in that confidence. It is sublime. — 
He may well be called the father of the faithful and the friend of God. The cry of — 
faith is fine; the silence of faith is nobler. f 

The teaching of these two incidents of Abraham and of Peter is this: Have 
great faith and trust it: but more than that, trust the little faith if that be all you 
have. It is of this that we are to think this morning. It is to our credit that we 
have faith, whether it be large or small. In this world where we are begirt with 
things seen and temporal and these demand our thought and our toil, and usurp 
the control of our time, it is something creditable if one does think of the unseen, 
and endure as seeing Him who is invisible; if because of a spiritual life above him 
he is brave and obedient, controlled and comforted by his trust, singing and praying 
into the seemingly vacant light, laying up his treasure in a world he has never seen, 
cherishing reverence and virtue and keeping his soul. It is something for which — 


ae D 


The Little Faith—McKenzie. 441 


should be grateful if through changes, disappointments and misgivings, we are 
ble to walk with God in the power of an endless life. It was something for which 
should give Peter credit, that at the call of the Lord he left the ship. I think 
there is nothing finer in the narrative than to see this man going over the side of 
the ship in the belief that he could do what no man had ever done, save the One 
who called him, and could tread upon the waves which in all their fury waited to over- 
Bicim him. If there was not in his faith all that we could desire, we will not fail 
© recognize that in it which was admirable. He believed. He believed in Christ as 
the power of the unseen world who was able to control even the winds and the waves, 
for the eternal forces were in His power. 

When the hand of Christ seized his hand, the Eternal held the fisherman and 
he was held by the Eternal. It was only a hand holding a hand. Children rested 
in the arms of Christ. A man leaned upon His bosom. Here it was only a hand, but 
Christ was back of it. It held only a hand, but Peter was behind it. It is our duty 
to regard the life which this fearful fisherman came afterward to live. We have his 
letters, or copies of them, letters written thirty years after this event upon the sea, 
and there is no sign of fear, no token of an uncertain confidence; but the quiet, 
steady, hopeful reliance of a brave man who had advanced in the knowledge of him- 
self and God. Let me read a few words: “Who are kept by the power of God 
through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. That the trial 
your faith might be found unto praise, and honor, and glory, at the appearing of 
Jesus Christ: Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him 
not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: Receiving the 
end of your faith. . . . Casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you. 
. . . The God of all grace who hath called us unto His eternal glory by Christ 
Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, 
settle you.” 

Ido not find that our Lord ever reproved men because of their little faith. He 
marvelled when there was no faith. He did upbraid His disciples when, after His 
resurrection, and after the word was brought to them by those who had seen Him, and 
after all Bis assurance that He would rise from the dead, they were still sad in their 
un belief, trusting neither Himself nor their own friends. I do not think that the 
eproof was severe, for the fact of unbelief when it was brought home to them was 
eproof enough in itself. He was hindered by the unbelief of those who needed 
Him, and He could not do the works or give the teachings which their reluctant 
learts were not ready to receive; but towards the little faith He was always con- 
iderate. He seemed rather to encourage it than to censure it. The only measure 
hat He gave for faith was as small as it well could be; it was a grain of mustard 
eed. The words of Isaiah were applied to Him: “He shall not quench the smoking 
lax, nor break the bruised reed.” The foolish virgins who shut themselves out from 
he marriage feast were not denied admittance because They Tape Wickered-and 
hey had very little oil. ey had no oil, and their lamps were going out. DeTiEeve 
f there had been so much as a Spark upon their torch it would have carried the 
dearer into the joy from which she was excluded, The dimensions of our faith 
r¢ not the chief point, but the reality of it. If it be whole, though small; alive, 
iough small, it is of service, for it has the power of an unmeasured increase. Between 
nothing and a seed is infinitely more difference than between a grain of wheat 
inc the harvest. From nothing will come nothing, but from a grain an army can 
fed. Faith is trust alive, confidence in action. The great element is its vitality. 
It is not well to measure ourselves or our attainments. Weights, measures, num- 
Jers have little use in matters of the spirit. Mathematics have been ‘a hindrance 
© knowledge and belief in the domain of spiritual thought and life, 


442 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


We are bidden often in our time to pray for faith. It is well. We are told 
that the great want of the church today is faith. I do not think so. If it were given 
me to choose one blessing which should come to us I should not ask for more ~ 
faith. I should ask for the good sense to use the faith we have. It does not seem | 7 
quite proper or in reverence to ask for more when we are not employing that we 
have. It would be much better to give to that which we have the opportunity to 
grow by the service to which we are appointed. This would encourage us to ask 
for more, and it would be the best form of request for the increase that we desire, 
No, I should not ask—if there were one thing that I might choose for you—I * 
should not ask for more faith today. Faith without works is dead, and I should ask 
for the works which are at once the witness to the vitality of a thing and the pledge 
of its enlargement. Great assurances are given us by those who sincerely desire a 
larger religious life. They tell us truly of great things which might be wroleia a 
by great faith in God. I do not wish to travesty any man’s thought. It seems very — : 
much at times as if they were saying “If you had faith like a mountain you might 
remove a mustard seed.” Perhaps we could; but Christ’s way is better, kinder. 
The New Testament is always better. Other books are well enough, books of coum 
advice, and pious reflections; but when you want a book to’ stand by you, to en- 
courage you, to make the best of all you do, go always to the New Testament. The = 
ways of Christ are easier than the ways of men. Religion as taught by Christ ish 
simpler and easier than religion as it is taught by anyone else, whoever presumes — 
to instruct us. It is not difficult to be the Christian whom Christ seeks, the friend 4 
who follows Him, who loves Him, believes in Him, finds truest joy in doing His — 
will. This doctrine of faith illustrates it, and from those who bid us, and with reason, ~ 
obtain more faith I turn hopefully to Him who never had an unkind word for the 
smallest faith, but gave to it the opportunity to grow. He encouraged the mustard — 
seed to believe that small as it was it could become large enough to give a place to 
the nests of the birds who needed its branches. 


Do not despise the little faith which the Lord highly esteems. Do not despair 
of it. Simply employ it. Do not let it go, or crush and smother it. Give it a chance. 2 
If it is real, it will be large enough presently. We must learn not to think lightly of — 
small people and small things. There was a young man, a shepherd boy, who came ~ 
to his brothers who were in the army. He was of a ruddy countenance, and full 
of the ardor of youth. His brothers were disposed to patronize him. “You have — 
come out to see the soldiers, have you?” He asked what the tumult meant in the — 
army, the eager talking on every side of him. They told him that a man in the 
other army had challenged their side to send out a man to fight with him, and it 
should be in its result as the battle of the armies. Why did not one of the brothers 
gO, Or some man from the ranks? The spirit of the boy was kindled within him, 
and when he was taken to the king he offered to be the champion of Israel. The 
king told him that he was not large enough or strong enough, that this was a giant 
who had sent out this challenge. But in a boy’s way, the youth said “I was keeping 
my sheep, and a lion and a bear came down upon the flock and I caught them, and 
holding their jaws I tore them asunder.” The king said he might go and fight for 
his country. He gave him his armor and sword; but the boy was not used to them. 
He took a little weapon, one that he had tried. For oftentimes when a sheep had 
wandered he had thrown a stone from his sling and brought it back. He had not 
quite confidence enough in himself. It is the only point where his confidence 
faltered. He went down to the brook and took five stones. It was four more than 
he needed, as someone has said. But one stone hurled with the skill and strength 
of a youth brought the giant to the ground. It was as well as if an army had sur- — 
rounded him. Yet it was a little thing—the power of a boy’s faith. Let us learn 


: 


; ~ The Little Faith—McKenzie. 443 


0 recognize this truth, that force has very little to do with size; that it is life, with 


Oftentimes we look upon men whose lives seem strong, immovable, and almost 
nvy them their constancy of feeling and faith. Little do we know what lies behind 
it all, through how much of effort they have come into the firmness we admire, by 
how much of effort they are preserving it. Let us not think that while we have 
fear, weakness, dismay and struggle, others have serene lives, undisturbed. | Their 


such men, who make no effort to live, and yet keep faith with their conscience and 
with truth, and find life easy and agreeable as they pass softly on to Paradise. 
There may be saints, to whom the common words “strive,” “run,” “contend,” are 
obsolete. But for most good Christians in this world those words retain their mean- 
ge. We know what they signify. It is an effort to hold the truth against ques- 
fionings within and denials without. Or, for others, to keep the life truthful, honest, 
generous. Or, with others, to overcome sin, to have the mastery of feeling and 
desire, to grow in grace, to be like Christ. Many saintly men and women who telt 
li le of themselves, when we come near enough to them will whisper of the noiseless 
effort to control their minds, to govern their temper, to preserve their charity, to 
make the inner life as sweet and constant and beautiful as the life which we see and 
admire. It is to their credit and not against them that the effort is real, for merit 
does not consist in having no warfare, but in having courage and never flinching, 
and so winning. The fear goes with courage. How can one be brave unless he is 
afraid? To dare is for our honor, In a battle of the war two officers came together, 
the one confident, daring, the other with his face pale, his hand trembling as he 
Id the reins of his horse. The first said, ‘‘Man, you’re afraid!” “I know I am. 
If you were half as much afraid as I am, you would run away!” Oh, there is a 
evelation in the lives of saints that surprises us! One of our wisest clergymen a 
years ago preached a sermon upon faith as the gift of God. In it he alluded 
to a man of whom few of us have heard, though he was well known to the genera- 
tion before us. He told of Cecil’s confession that he was greatly disturbed, shaken 
his faith, by some things that he had read. He could not be quiet, and, greatly 
roubled, he rose at two o'clock in the morning, and fought the battle against doubt 
ind unbelief, and conquered them. As the preacher came down the pulpit stairs, 
nm old man met him, a clergyman of distinction, who held a high place in the 
shurch and was renowned for the strength and beauty of his life. He took the 
D1 acher’s hand and with emotion said to him, “I fight my battles at two o'clock 
n the morning!” 

q If our faith is small there is reason for keeping it lest it should grow less. One 
tho fights for the little faith he has will win his way to more. Strong men and 
trong faith are made by exercise. There can be no question that if faith is to live 
ind to grow, it must be used. I do not know how many falter in the ways of life; 
mut let every soul of little faith keep it and move on, and let it rule. There may 
some to repeat with me the familiar lines: 


“T- falter where I firmly trod, 
And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world’s altar stairs, 
That slope through darkness up to God. 
I stretch lame hands of faith and grope 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all. . .” 


444 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


A small faith may avail much if it grasps that which is able to reward it. 
faith clinging to great strength is of much more value than when the order is revers 
and the faith is great and that which it trusts is small. If I have faith enou: 
to call a physician, then my faith is rewarded with his skill. If I have f 
enough to join myself to Christ it is not the faith that blesses me, but He y 
gives to me all that He is, and can give it because I have united my feeble life to 
His. The great thing to regard is the one to be trusted. If the ship has gone dow 
I would rather hold by one finger to the gunwale of a boat than with both hands 
clasp a chip. I would rather that with one hand you should touch the cross 
Christ than that with both arms you should encircle the world. The world w 
slip away from you or draw you down with it, but Christ will draw you up to Hi 
self. He seized Peter’s hand and saved him, and if He can have your hand 
will save you. It is not the amount of your faith. What is it you are trusting? The 
vital point is there. A man may trust himself and fall with himself. He may trust 
to men who are infirm like himself. The Christian is the man who trusts Christ wi 
his whole being, or his whole finger, and then goes up to reign with Him. 

We are in need of eternal life. How shall we obtain it? It is a true saying that 
we are saved by faith. What the words mean is this: We are saved by Christ a 
faith is the act that lays hold upon His strength. The words by which He calls 
are simple words and make their appeal to those who are able to regard them. We 
may not be equal to mysteries and systems, but we know what these words mean, 
“Come,” “follow,” “look,” “drink.” We must come to Him, but it may be a very 
simple way. The description given long after He had returned to heaven is full of 
encouragement for those who have little knowledge and little strength. “Behold” 
He said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” It was a long and weary way a 
for Him, but He stands at the door. What have we to do? So little that we may ~ 
fail to do even that. If it were more, we might rise to perform it. “If any man 
hear My voice’—that is not very hard—‘‘and open the door.” A child could do 
that. Not very much, but essential. Not a great faith, but some faith, real faith. 
Not large desire, but some desire. Not great action, but something done. “Hear 
open, I will come in to him, and will sup with him of that which he has to offer me, 
and he shall sup with me of the bread of heaven which I bring to him.” If once our } 
faith unites our heart to His, then His life becomes our life. He is the Savior. — 
Touch Him. Trust Him. With the faith you have look up to Him for more, but — 
look with the full use of what you have. By grace are ye saved, through faith, an 
that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man shoul 
boast. Hear also the words of the Psalm. ‘“‘For the Lord God is a sun and a 
shield.” “The Lord will give grace and glory.” ‘‘No good thing will He withhold — 
from them that walk uprightly.” “O Lord God of hosts, blessed is the man that — 
trusteth in Thee!” * 


But the trust that has the blessing is alive. If God has chosen the poor of this . 
world who are rich in faith, still not many mighty, not many noble are called, and — 
the wealth of faith consists not in its abundance, but in its obedient use. With the — 
faith we have let us venture out, dare something. Let us go beyond ourselves. 
faith breathe the outer air and get vigor by exercise. In your faith believe. Believe — 
that if you give yourself into Christ’s keeping you shall have eternal life. Rest quietly — 
and seek no other way of life. With your little faith make your confession as a man 
who, according to the measure of his strength, is following Christ. With your little 
faith go on to serve Him beyond the path which you are treading, deepening and 
broadening life. In the faith you have, let conscience and opportunity and Christ 1 
you where they will. If our faith be small, our conduct can be large. It has bee 


very well said that “we only believe as deep as we live.” Perhaps it might be rea 
i 


The Little Faith—McKenzie. 445 


another way. “We only live as deep as we believe.” This certainly is true, that 
ith and life belong together and depend upon one another, and by the increase of 
we gain the enlargement of both. So shall we prove in our life the worthiness of 
ur faith, for we have years before us, centuries of broken life in Him in whom we live. 
o begin the life of trust, of close and vital confidence, is to live. It is not the size 
it, it is the truth of it, and its power shall have the witness of our daily walk and 
ork— 
“Till from the pillow of the thinker, lying 

In weakness, comes the teaching, then best taught, 

That the true crown for any soul in dying 

Is Christ, not genius; and is faith, not thought.” 


_ [Alexander McKenzie was born at New Bedford, Mass., December 14, 1830, 
graduating from Harvard 1859, receiving degrees from Andover and Amherst, pastor 
9f First Congregational Church, Cambridge, Mass., since 1867; preacher to and 
lecturer at Harvard College, president of trustees of Wellesley College, and on board 
of many other public institutions. Among his literary work is A Door Opened, Some 
fhings Abroad, The Divine Force in the Life of the World, etc.] 


446 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE BELIEVER’S PORTION IN CHRIST. 


CHARLES PETTIT McILVAINE, DVD: 


“Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the 
inheritance of the saints in light.”—Col. 1: 12. 


~ 


Iti is as much the duty of the Christian to give thanks, as to pray, unto the Father. 
If we are commanded to “pray without ceasing,” we are also commanded “‘in every- 
thing to give thanks.” In everything, it is a Beeat matter of thankfulness, that we are 
permitted, enabled, and so graciously encouraged, to pray. A sinner permitted to 
under the invitations of the Gospel, instead of being condemned to live eternally where 
only the wrath of God abideth, can never in anything lack a theme of thanksgiving. 
But a sinner whose heart has been drawn by the grace of God to the embracing of 


he is now made meet to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light, hav 
in that very condition of his heart the indwelling earnest and witness of the Spirit that | 
he will finally become a partaker in that glorious inheritance; he surely must in every- 
thing give thanks; no adversity, no affliction, must ever hide from his sight his bound-_ 
less debt of pee to the riches of the grace of God to his soul; all his life long he 
must be so deeply sensible of the preciousness of his hope in Chess and of the wonder-_ 
ful mercy of God in bringing him thereto, out of the sinfulness and condemnation of — 
his unconverted state, as to make it his heart’s delight to give thanks unto the Father, — 
who thus hath made him ‘“‘meet to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in 
light.” 
In considering the words of the text, let us attend: z 
I. To the manner in which the future blessedness of the people of God is pre- 
sented: an “‘inheritance’—“‘the inheritance of the saints’—‘‘the inheritance of the saints _ 
in light.” _ 
The portion of the people of God is an inheritance. They are called elsewhere, 
“heirs of salvation,” “heirs of the kingdom.” ‘He that overcometh, shall inherit all 
things.” Christ will say to His people in the last day: “Inherit the kingdom prepared — 
for you from the foundation of the world.” 
Now there is a great Gospel truth contained in the word inheritance. It teaches 
that the future portion of the righteous is not their purchase. They do not obtain it 
on the basis of merit, but of relationship. They do not make themselves heirs; but 
they are made heirs by the will and favor of their Heavenly Father. A father makes’a — 
son his heir, not because the son has merited the inheritance, but because he is a son, 
a dear son. Thus it is written: ‘The Spirit beareth witness with our spirit that we 
are the children of God. And if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with — 
Christ.” If children of God, then heirs of God—children by adoption, taken up out of 
a miserable beggary, and adopted as God’s dear children, and thus made inheritors of 
Himself as our boundless portion. But this is not all: “joint heirs with Christ.” If 
God’s children, then Christ’s brethren; and in virtue of that union with Christ we 
inherit jointly with Him. In ourselves we can have no title to the inheritance. In 
Christ, the only begotten Son of God, the sons, by adoption, have a most perfect, 
indefeasible title. He, in His mediatorial office, is “heir of all things.” We, in Him, 
shall inherit all things. Thus it is that such glorious things are spoken of the future 


The Belicver’s Portion in Christ—Mcllvaine. 447 


possession of His people. “To him that overcometh,”’ He saith, “I will grant to sit 
with me on my throne;” not merely in my kingdom, but on my throne; not merely to 
share the blessings of my kingdom, but to share the glory of its King; my brethren in 
glory, my joint heirs in all that I inherit of my Father. Thus it is written, that “His 
P ople shall reign with Him,” “shall be glorified together” with Him, and that God 
doth make them “‘sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.’ In the last day, 
when our Lord shall be receiving His people to Himself, His words to each will be, 
“Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord,” into mine own joy, which thou dost inherit, 
because thou art in me and I in thee. And when He shall have thus gathered together 
all His beloved ones that believe in Him, to be with Him where He is, to be glorified 
with Him and in Him, then shall His own inheritance of joy be completed in their 
salvation and blessedness—all having come “‘in the unity of the faith, and of the knowl- 
edge of the Son of God, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” 
And thus we see how much of the portion of the people of God in the world to 
come is described, in its being called an inheritance. It teaches how that portion is all 
of grace; how it results simply from our having received “‘the adoption of sons;” how 
necessary as the evidence of our title is “the spirit of adoption” in our hearts; and how, 
‘since our inheritance is a joint inheritance with that of Christ, we must look only to 
His merits for the title, and to a vital union with Him through faith that we may share 
herein. It teaches, moreover, what St. Paul calls the “riches of glory” of that inheri- 
tance. What description of riches of glory can exceed that of simply telling us we shall 
be “joint heirs with Christ?” 

We have in the text another feature of the future bliss. It is called the “inheri- 
tance of the saints.” 


The saints are the “sanctified in Christ Jesus.”” To none else is the inheritance, and 
in that exclusiveness do we see much of its excellence. It is thus an inheritance ‘“unde- 
. None are there but those whom God hath perfectly sanctified. All there have 
“the mind of Christ in its perfectness.” It is a Church which He hath sanctified and 
cleansed, “that He might present it unto Himself, a glorious Church, not having spot, 
wrinkle, or any such thing.’ Sin enters not into that inheritance, sorrow goes not 
Tears have no fountain there. ‘No spot, nor wrinkle, nor any such thing” 
hh pon the white raiment of that holy fellowship. Holy ones made perfect are the only 
dwellers there. ‘The former things are passed away.” The Church of Christ will not 
then be as now, a church defiled; tied to a body of death; the living mingled every- 
where with the dead; the Christian of a vital faith, and the Christian of a mere lifeless 
form, united under the same profession of discipleship; the children of this world 
communing outwardly with the true, but imperfect family of God. Oh! no. Nor will 


i this life; holy indeed essentially, but so imperfectly holy; saints indeed, because truly 
sa netified in Christ Jesus—but saints conscious of coming so far short i in holiness, that 


will then have become new—not only as being Hal but as being all perfectly holy. 

‘The spirits of just men made perfect,” is the description of that fellowship. Oh! it is 
precious to think of a heritage so excluding all unholiness: But it is most alarming’ 
for you, my hearers, in whom the work of holiness is not commenced. 


While, however, it is good to think of that inheritance as exclusive of all but saints, 
we love to think of it as inclusive of all that are saints. We drop our denomination 
uniform when we undress at the grave. It belongs to those things that are seen and 
are temporal. We enter into eternal life in no raiment but the white robe of Christ, 


which are unseen and eternal. If it be necessary to this most imperfect state of the 
Church, that we should be divided as we now are; it is good to think of it as a humilia- 


448 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


tion which can last only while we are here. The grave will cover it with our corrupt 
ible bodies. The only name to be inquired for, in ascertaining the inheritors of Christ, | 
is saints—the sanctified—those who have been born again of the Spirit of God, and are | 
walking in newness of life. Bring them from the east, and west, and north, and south— 
from all generations, from out of all divisions of the Christian family, from under any | 
name, or form! Each has his lot in that good land. All inherit by the same title im 
Christ; and therefore all “inherit all things.” In the poverty of earthly inheritances, 
the more one heir obtains, the less all others have. But in the fullness of the inhert- 
tance of the saints each inherits all, as if there were no heir but himself—or rather 
because all inherit as one body in Christ. Oh! it is a most blessed heritage that shall 


ship of the people of God, out of all nations, and kindreds, and tongues; all seeing eye 
to eye; all feeling heart to heart; all children of the same redeeming grace; all brethren 
of the same wondrous adoption in Christ; all most glorious in His likeness; “the 
communion of saints” in its perfectness; “the Catholic Church” in its fullness; “the 
general assembly and Church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven.” 

But there is another feature of the inheritance. It is the inheritance of the saints 
in light. In light! What so pure as perfect light? Whence all the varied beauties of 
nature, but from light? Light is an expression for God Himself, its Maker. “God 
is light.” It describes His people here; they are “children of light.” It describ 
their progressive advancement in grace; their path is pictured in scripture “as the 
morning light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” And here 
describes their future glory, when their path shall have reached meridian—the perfect 
day; they shall be saints in light. God is light; and they shall be like Him and i. 
Him as He is. 


But how shall we understand this description of the inheritance? I read it as 
having reference to the comparison between the perfect state of the saints in heaven, 
in point of spiritual knowledge, and their imperfect state while here on earth; just 
what the same Apostle referred to, when he said, ‘Now we see through a glass darkly, 
but then face to face. Now we know in part; then we shall be known even as we are 
known.” Now we see by aid of a glass—a revelation, an instrumental medium. We 
see at a distance, at second hand. A thousand motes and mists hinder our vision of 
spiritual and eternal things. Constant vapors rise up from earth and our own evil 
natures to obscure our vision. At best we know but in part—nothing entirely; nor 
can we know how little we are capable of knowing of that boundless field. But then 
we shall see face to face, in open, boundless vision. We shall dwell with God, in the 
light which no man can now approach unto. We shall know without tuition, see 
without a medium, understand without interpreter—‘‘saints in light.” 


Thus I understand that description of the city of God in the Revelation of St. John. 
“The city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it; for the glory of 
God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.” 


God is light—its fountain, its fullness; and what need of lesser lights in heaven, 
when He is there? They will need no sun or moon; in other words, no intervening 
medium of communication from God to them. Their communion with “God and the 
Lamb” will be “face to face.” Now, we do need the aid of the sun and moon—we 
depend upon secondary lights. In this world we must walk by faith, not by sight, and 
must have the aid of means of grace. What are the ministers of the world; what the 
sacraments of the Church; what the revelation contained in the scriptures, but parts 
of a system of instrumental secondary lights, teaching us that we see not yet face te 
face; that however great our knowledge and privileges, compared with what they woulc 
have been without those aids; however sufficient and most precious our revelation fo! 
all the present necessities of the soul, we are far yet from the perfect day. Ministers 


The Belicver’s Portion in Christ—Mcllvaine. 449 


d sacramental signs, and a written inspired word, are marks of the Church in the 
derness. God is with her, but in the pillar of cloud. They are marks of a state of 
ace not yet complete. God is communicating with His people, but it is from behind 
e veil of the inner sanctuary. But the Church in glory will have no need of human 
linistry, nor of visible signs of spiritual grace, nor of an inspired book, revealing, 
der the imperfections of human language, the things of the Spirit of God. The 
ints being “heirs of God,” their portion will be therefore His fullness. God is light— 
iginal, perfect, boundless light. They will commune directly with that light, that 
oliness, that truth, that infinite knowledge, that boundless wisdom. They will be 
ints in light, because saints in the full vision of God. In contemplating that blessed 
tate, Isaiah dipped his pen in the same effulgence as St. John, and wrote: “The sun 
hall be no more thy light by day, neither shal! the moon give light unto thee, but the 
ord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory, and the days of 
hy mourning shall be ended.” How sweet that sentence, “the days of thy mourning 
hall be ended!” St. John’s account of it is: “God shall wipe away all tears from their 
yes.” We know not which descriptionis the most engaging—that of the evangelical 
rophet, or of the prophetic evangelist? Neither could speak of the light of that 
brow of the saints, without telling how it would banish all the sorrows which sin 


$ brought upon our hearts, even to the drying up of the last tear; just as all the 
emnants of night, even to the last drop of dew, are wiped from the face of nature by 
he radiance of the sun. 

But we must come to the second division of our discourse. St. Paul, in the text, 
nites with his fellow Christians in giving thanks unto the Father, because he had 
jade them meet, or fit—qualified in Spirit, to be partakers of the inheritance of the 
aints. And from this we take our second head. 


II. We cannot partake in that blessedness, unless we are first, by the transforming 
Tace of God, in this present life, made meet for it. 


_ One would suppose it could hardly be needful to use many words to demonstrate 
> plain a truth. We really partake in nothing unless we are meet to be partakers. 
{ sick man cannot partake in a sumptuous feast. It will not be a feast to him; 
€ is not meet for it. A man without an ear attuned to musical sounds may sit in 
e midst of the richest harmonies; but he cannot partake in them, however he 
ay hear them. Take a man of grovelling mind, and place him in a circle of 
he most refined and intellectual; bid him associate his mind with theirs. You 
might as well command the deaf to hear, or the blind to see. How irksome 
at company! You easily perceive the reason. His mind is not fitted, his 
astes are not qualified for such privileges. Well, then, suppose I should find a 

tle company of saints made perfect, come down from heaven, on some errand from 
id, to earth, and keeping here for a little while their endless Sabbath of holiness and 
fappiness, as they keep it in heaven; and suppose I should take a man of the world, 
ch as we meet with everywhere—his affections all running upon earthly things, all 
fined to earthly things, and set him down in that circle, and say to him, “Now, 
ake in their happiness. You think that all you need to make you happy hereafter 
s Only to be admitted to heaven. Try! Here is a little of heaven; join those blessed 


own blood, and hath made them kings and priests unto God.” Why, one might as 
speak to the dead. Not a chord is there in his heart to harmonize with their joys. 
2 is all strange in his sympathies to them, and they to him. How would he like to 
nothing else but their company and their pleasures, with his own present disposi- 
jon s, for ever and ever? What heaven would that be to him? His whole moral being 
be changed, before he can be meet to partake with the saints of God on high in 


; 
| 
| 
; 


450 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


their holy blessedness. And so long as that change is not wrought, no decree of God 
is needed to shut him out of the presence of His glory, or the fellowship of the heavenly 
host. A decree powerful enough is written in the man’s own affections. His own | 
heart excludes him. A mere title to heaven would not help him. What if he should 
even be allowed to come to the table of that heavenly feast? He could not partake. 
He would sit there all deaf and dumb and dead amidst boundless life, 


My dear hearers, let us well understand what constitutes salvation. Two things are — 
essential, and both are brought to view in the connection of our text. St. Paul, speak- 
ing of Jesus, says: “In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the 
forgiveness of sins.” That is one of the two—forgiveness of sins. It opens the door © 
to the habitation of the saints in light. Very precious, indeed, but it is not all. Then, 
in the text, we have those who have obtained the forgiveness of sins, that open door, — 
now giving thanks for another thing, namely, that they have been made “‘meet to be — 
partakers of the inheritance” to which that door admits them, That is the second of — 
the two great gifts which make up our salvation. The one removes the barrier on the © 
side of the broken law; the other, the barrier on the side of our own corrupt, carnal 
nature. The first is taken away in God’s being reconciled to us through the mediation 
of Christ. The second is taken away in our hearts being reconciled to God by the 
renewing of the Holy Ghost. They come inseparably. Neither is ever without the 
other. They come both out of the great sacrifice on the cross. Faith draws both 
together from Him who “was wounded for our transgressions, and by whose stripes 
we are healed” —‘“the water and the blood.” Whom God justifies, He also sanctifies ~ 
In whom these two are united, the forgiveness of sins and the meetness for the inheri- | 
tance, in them is salvation. They are saints. In whom both are perfected, salvation is 
consummated. They are saints made perfect. p 


But what is that meetness for the inheritance of the saints? It is surely likeness to 
the inheritance. It is conformity of our affections to the nature of the blessedness. Is 
that blessedness the presence and glory of God? Then the meetness for it is to be holy, 
since God is holy. Is it a joint inheritance with Christ? Then to be meet for it, is to 
be like Christ; to have His mind in us, that His joy may be in us. It is to be assimi- 
lated to Him in our affections, that we may be associated with Him in His heritage. 
It is to be not of the world, even as He is not of the world. It is to have our affections. 
set on things above, “where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.” It is to be “dead 
indeed unto sin, and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It is to love the 
will and service of God as our present happiness; to know by our present experience 
the sweetness of communion with Him as His own children; to have such a’sense of 
the preciousness of Christ to our souls that we can participate with some degree of 
real consciousness in that declaration of the early believers: “‘Whom, having not seen, 
we love; in whom though now we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice, with joy 
unspeakable, and full of glory.” a 

Vast, indeed, is the difference between that meetness for the inheritance which 
believers in their highest sanctification, this side the grave, possess, and that of those 
who have now entered into possession. It seems, indeed, that it must take a mighty 
work of grace to make any Christian now on earth, with all our infirmities and remain- 
ing sinfulness, capable of the presence of God in His manifested glory. So it must, 
unquestionably. The eye that has never seen “the things of the Spirit of God” but 
“through a glass darkly,” must needs undergo a mighty change of capacity before it is 
capable of looking on all those wonderful and glorious mysteries, face to face. The 
heart that has never communed with the holiness and majesty of God, but on this side 
the veil, must needs be prepared with a vast measure of new adaptation before it can 
bear to be introduced to the presence of that unveiled, infinite holiness and glory, on 
which even the seraphim look not with open face, 


The Belicver’s Portion in Christ—Mcllvaine. 451 


But the change required is only like that of a child that is now meet essentially for 
he inheritance of his father, because he is a true child, with all the faculties of a child; 
it who must attain to manhood, and have all those faculties matured, before he can 
be ready to enter into full possession of the inheritance. What would you say of the 
ieetness of an infant to possess, and manage, and enjoy, a magnificent estate inherited 
from his father? But in one most important sense that infant is meet. He has the 
nind—he has the faculties. All he wants is their development, their ripening, their 
manhood. The essential preparation he has. It is only the perfecting he needs. You 
have not to change what he is, but simply to mature it. 

And thus we understand the present meetness of the Christian in the imperfectness 
of his earthly state, for the presence of the glory of God in heaven. What though but 
the youngest child in grace, however old in years—just born again of the Spirit— 
just beginning the experience of newness of life—every affection and faculty of his 
heart in infant feebleness, but all nevertheless in living reality? Great indeed is the 
growth he must make, now that he has just opened his eyes upon such light as comes 
to us here in this moonlight night, before he can be qualified for the light of that city, 
where moon and sun are invisible by reason of the light of the unveiled countenance 


‘of God. 


eady) made him “meet to be a partaker with the saints in light.” He is meet, 
iecause he is God’s regenerate and adopted child. He is meet, because he has all the 
lind, and heart, and sympathies, and relations, of a child of God. He is meet, essen- 
tially, though not maturely. The time to enter upon the inheritance has not yet come. 


Meanwhile, his calling is that of a child of God in minority and pupilage; to see 
ie inheritance only in reversion, and in the distance; to live in the hope of it, and to 
be educated for it; and God giveth him grace for that need. When his calling shall be 
‘to go hence from the nursery of spiritual childhood, and take his place in the full 


Citizenship of “the commonwealth of Israel;” to stand in the General Assembly and 


is meetness will grow with his privilege. When God shall take him to the highest 
, He will bring forth the best robe and put it on him. 


Oh! but what a difference there is between the change which that child of God 
Must undergo to make his present feebleness of holy attainment meet for the fullness 
the future inheritance; and, on the other hand, the change that must take place in 
man, in whom not a feature, not an affection, not a sympathy, not a faculty, of the 
ild of God has ever found a place! In the former case, it is only a change from 
ning to noon—the day is the same. It is only a transition from the child to the 
man; the being is the same. But in the latter, it must be a change from night to day, 
from death to life; from the man who is in no sense a child of God, to the man who is 
| everything His living, loving child. In the former case, death is the certain intro- 
ction to the full completion of the glorious advancement. In the latter, death, 
ding the essential change not made, sets the seal to the certainty of its never being 
lade to all eternity. 


And now, would you be told how that meetness for the inheritance of the saints is 


tained? I answer, it is no endowment of our natural state. All the meetness of this 
en and depraved nature of ours is for the inheritance of the unholy in darkness 
erlasting. The mind that is in man by nature, and the mind that is in the wicked 
lost in hell, is essentially the same mind; just as the mind of the Christian here, 


452 Pulpit Poreer and Eloquence. 


and of the saint with God, is essentially the same. I doubt not there is an awful 
maturity of wickedness in hell, for which the unregenerate in this world are not pre- 
pared in point of present growth. It would shock them, were it now seen by the worst 
of them: just as in “the brightness of the Father’s glory,” as seen by the saints in light, 
there is a manifestation for which the regenerate on earth, in point of maturity of grace, 
are not meet, But in every unregenerate man here there is “the carnal mind,” which 
“is enmity against God, and is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” 
That is all that is needed. The meetness for the fellowship of the lost is thus in him ~ 
essentially. It needs but development. Change of worlds, irom a place of hope to 1 
prison of despair; from a condition of a thousand corrective and restraining influences, — 
to one where none exist, and where every pent-up corruption of the heart is set loose, ; 
and set on fire, to range and rage without limit—such change will soon consummate 
the meetness of a lost soul for all the wickedness and misery of the outer darkness. 

Do you ask again, whence comes that essential meetness for the inheritance of the 
saints, which I have described as the possession of every child of God in this world? 
The answer is in our text. St. Paul, with his fellow-Christians, said, “Giving thamks — 
unto the Father, which hath made us meet,” etc. They ascribed all they had of prepa- ; 
ration for the inheritance to the power of God. He made them what they were, as 
Christians. “We are His workmanship (they said), created in Christ Jesus.” 

So mighty a change as that which forms out of such a being as man, in all t 
depravity of his natural heart, a being meet to associate with Christ and His saints, © 
they could ascribe to no power less than God’s. He who created man originally in His 
own likeness, that He might qualify him for His own fellowship, now that we have lost | 
that likeness, must by the same power create us anew, or we cannot be heirs of God 
Hence that strong declaration, “If any man be in Christ;” if out of all mankind there 
be a true Christian, a child of God, a joint heir with Christ, “he is a new creature.” 
The work that made him what he is, was a new creation. The power that made “— 


what he is, was the power that created the heavens and the earth. 

Of the like testimony are these joyful words of St. Peter: “Blessed be the Gost 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, accerding to His abundant mercy hath 
begotten us again into a lively hope, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and 
that fadeth not away.” What prepared them for such an inheritance? They were” 
“begotten again.” Who accomplished that new birth in them? ‘The God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ,” in His abundant mercy. That new birth made them His 
children. That relation of children connected them with the inheritance. “If children, © 
then heirs.” Invert this sentence and it will be equally true and important—lf heirs, 
then children. Add—If children, then begotten again by the spirit of God. Add 
further—If not so begotten again, then ye cannot see the kingdom of God. : 

Oh, what alarming conclusions necessarily follow from all we have said, in regard 
to the hopelessness of those of you, my hearers, in whom no such inward, transforming 
work of grace is found! How painful to be obliged to draw such lines of exclusion | 
from the blessed heritage in prospect! But we have this alleviation and comfort, that 
the line is not yet so drawn as never to be crossed. You that find it marking you off 
from the fellowship of the kingdom, you may cross it yet, if you will strive; the hand 
of God is outstretched to lift you over when you strive. And it is by this painful 
plainness in drawing that line before you, and showing where it places you, that we 
hope, by the blessing of the Holy Ghost, to contribute to the raising up of a fixed 
determination in your hearts, that by the grace of God you will overpass it, and so gain 
a place among the inheritors of life. 

But what precious encouragement and assurance there is in all we have said, to 
those who, having the love of God in them, and habitually loving His ways, are thus 


— 


The Believer’s Portion in Christ—Mcllvaine. 453 


‘ 
J 


repared essentially to be with Him in glory! Their pleasure of heart in His word and 


ess, is “the earnest Of the Spirit.” It witnesses with their spirit, that they are children, 
id therefore heirs of God. The Lord “gives grace and glory;” glory, the maturity of 
race; grace, the promise and preparation for glory; both where there is either. The 
ie, the first fruits of the Spirit; the other, the fullness of the ripe harvest of grace. 

sure as we have now the one, we shall hereafter possess the other. The heart that 


meumber it no more. To be meet for the inheritance is the assurance of obtaining it. 
fe that fashions you for it, will certainly take you to it. Then be joyful in God, and 
raise Him for the riches of His grace! So run that ye may obtain So seek that ye 
nay find. So press toward the mark of the prize that ye may be sure of the blessed- 
ess promised to him that endureth to the end. Amen. 


[Rt. Rev. Charles Pettit McIlvaine, D. D., D. C. L., president of the American — 
‘ract Society, was born at Burlington, New Jersey, January 18th, 1799. In his seven- 
th year, he graduated at Nassau Hall, Princeton. From 1825 to 1827, he was chap- 
ain and professor of ethics at West Point. He was consecrated Bishop of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Ohio in 1832. By speech and pen, he 
s ever allied himself with the whole Church of Christ, well saying: ‘We drop our 
enomination uniform when we undress at the grave.” Although past threescore and 
en, Bishop Mcllvaine crossed the Atlantic to intercede with the Czar of Russia for the 
Jigfous rights of his Protestant subjects. He died at Florence, Italy, March 13, 1873. 

_ This sermon is from a volume entitled The Truth and the Life.] 


454 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


WHAT DAVID SAID IN HIS HEART. — 


JOHN McNEILL. 


David said in heart, “I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul; there is 
nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land of the Philis- 
tines.”—1 Samuel 27: 1. , a 


We find David here where the Word of God allows us occasionally to find some — 
of God’s best and greatest servants. Lest they should feel exalted above measure they — 
were brought down into great depths, and made to dwell in dark places many a time. "4 
And I suppose, lest we also, reading their lives, if there had been no such record as” 
this, lest we might be depressed by seeing how unshaken was their strength and 
courage, even in the darkest hours, the Word of God shows us carefully that they were 
men of like passions with ourselves, even the “brightest and best of these sons of the 
morning.” Elijah lies down under a juniper tree, fleeing from the curse of a woman—_ 
he who has withstood all the godless power of his age alone on the heights of Carmel. — 
And David, here at last, gives in and says, “I shall now perish one day by the hand of | 
Saul; there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land | 
of the Philistines.” 7 

David in the dumps: just to state it plainly, and without too fine a point upon it 
Does not this bring him near to us, who are so often dull and dispirited and discour- 
aged? Let us learn from David here. Notice, first of all: David said this in his 
heart. Watch, as David ought to have watched. Watch against the tendency to- 
brood over your troubles and say sad things to yourself, in your heart. It would be. 
a much better plan sometimes to say them out loud. I know that from this very place © 
I have discouraged the spreading of doubt; and have said, and would repeat, “If you ~ 
have doubts keep them to yourself.” But that depends upon what kind of doubt it ise 
In an hour like this it would have done David good (and it will do you good, my 
discouraged brother and sister) to have expressed to some friend, in actual word and © 
shape, that dull, heartless, despairing thought that lay on his heart like a lump of lead. 

David said it in his heart. If he had only gone and said it to some boon com- ~ 
panion “It is all up; I am marked for destruction; I am done for, and my time is come,” — 
it would have given the friend a chance to have vigorously but kindly contradicted him; — 
to remind him of things he was forgetting; to have spoken to him of God, and the 
covenant and promise of God, of that far-back day when Samuel in God’s name called 4 
him to be king in the place of Saul; when he was anointed in the midst of his brethren, q 
and the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, as the Scripture says, “from that day and 
forward.” Yes, to unlock our hearts at times would do us good. It is a precious — 
privilege when you are in—shall I say—the blues; when you are in this kind of spiritual — 
delirium tremens; when you are intoxicated, not with liquor, but when your brain and 
heart and judgment are reeling because God in His providence has put a bitter cup to 
your lips and is compelling you to drain it to the dregs; when hope is deferred, and 
therefore your heart is getting so sick that at last you cast away both shield and spear 
and say, “I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.” 

Don’t say it in your heart. In an hour of weak faith, which is virtually an hour of 
unbelief, the believer’s heart is a place of darkness where it is always November, with 


What David Said in His Heart—McNeill. 455 


a fog that seems to be impenetrable, and nothing all round but rushing noises and 
gruesome, flesh-creeping sounds that increase your fright and despair. Turn, then, 
rom solitary brooding to some brother born for adversity, some “Son of Consola- 
ion,” and unpack your load to him. But further, if David had just taken this thought 
out of his heart and gone in before God with it! David could pray; he was a power 
n prayer. And if he had gone in before God and tried to make this thought of his 
sad heart into a prayer, he would have found that there wasn’t enough tow to make 
a rope that would reach to God. You can spin away at it as long as you like, but you 
will never make a prayer of it. Such a thought as this, “I shall perish,” won’t pray. 
To get deliverance try to turn your doubt into prayer and see how your tongue wags 
empty in your head. You cannot pray this. Go and try it, you who are badgered 
and worried and threatened by besetting sins—by troubles that seem to blot out heaven 
and make the present evil world more noisy and oppressive than ever. Let David go 
in before God and say “out loud,” ‘“‘O God, here Iam. I am David. I am the man 
with the promise. I am the man over whose head the horn of oil was poured. I am 
he man to whom Thou didst promise to give the throne of Saul; and I have come 
before Thee to say, ‘It’s all over: I shall perish by Saul’s hand.” Then he would have 
‘discovered the blasphemy of it. Then your tongue would cleave to the roof of your 
‘mouth, and you would say, “Perish the thought of perishing! I shall not die, but live 
and declare the works of the Lord.” Ah! the thought that won’t pray is of the devil; 
md you are relieved when you discover it. You bend your knees before God and say 
*O God, I must not say, ‘Thou art a liar, and Samuel is a liar; and everybody is a liar 
but me’” (but rather means that). “‘O God, Saul is greater than Thou art. Thou 
hast taken a work in hand, and Thou art not able to finish it. Thou didst begin to 
nild a tower, and Thou hast run short of material. I shall one day perish by the hand 
of Saul.’” 
_ Then there is another way of getting rid of these thoughts that burrow in our 
earts. First, as we have seen, speak to another and he will help you. You will find 
our better self in him. Or, next, speak to God in prayer, and you,will find this 
loleful thing won’t pray. Or, yet again, try to sing it; I say again, David was some- 
thing of a singer. Now, suppose he had tried to compose a song on this magnificent 
theme, “I shall now one day perish by the hand of Saul,’’ what a psalm that would 
ve been! What a grunt in it, what a squeak, what a growl! Here is a specimen of 
the dreary doggerel which would have been produced by such inspiration, or despera- 
on rather: 


God said that He would raise me, 
And set me up on high; 
But mighty Saul he slays me 
In Howling Engedi. 
Chorus: In howling Engedi, etc. 


| 
i. 


| He never dreamed of doing that. If he had only tried he would have found that 
his thought, “I shall perish, God notwithstanding,” will neither say, nor pray, nor 


And when you find that out, you are able to say, “Get thee behind me, Satan. 
ou art an offense unto me. Thou savorest not of the things that be of God, and the 
nant and the oath that shall outlast the heavens. But thou savorest the things 
ut be of earth, and time and sin.”’ I am inclined to push this even further. David 
S a good musician, and he might have tried to play it on his harp; but no well con- 
sted instrument would ever lend itself to such blasphemy. You can neither say, 
ay, sing, play, or even whistle it: “I shall perish by the hand of Saul.” It is a 

ght that will only live in a desponding heart. And that David said it “in his 
heart” the Bible is careful significantly to record. 


) 


456 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Then notice how extremes meet. Notice how a believer in the extreme of timidity 
and fright joins hands with an atheist. David said in his heart, “I shall perish.” “ 
fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Extremes meet, the extreme of atheis n 
and the extreme faithlessness in a believer; paradoxical though it may seem, they co ne 
virtually to the same thing: “There is no God. This world was made for Cesar, and 
Cesar has me in his clutch, God and the promise notwithstanding.” 


I want to be hard, you see, on us, for when it comes to this, sharp, strong tonics 


landed himself. By looking on Saul, and misreading the past, and taking a wrong 
forecast of the future, he came to the same position as the poor atheist, whom he him- 
self, in a brighter moment, called a fool: “The fool hath said in his heart, No God.” q 

We are very much like each other. If I lose hold of God, where am I? If I lose 
hold of my simple faith in what God has promised and what He has revealed in Christ 
Jesus, there are no depths of blackness and godlessness into which I may not descend. 
My strength—my only strength—is, not genius, or learning, or a high position 


in the love of God, who spoke to me by Jesus Christ, and said, “Believe in me, and 
will crown you and set you on the throne.” All I have for it is His word; and if I 
lose faith in that, the devil in the meantime has cut with his long shears the cord that 
binds me to the throne of heaven, and I fall back into the pit of practical atheism. 
have no hope’and am without God in the world. 

Then another thing I want you to notice is, when we get faint-hearted, and lose 
sight of God, and Christ, and the exceeding great and precious promises, how unbelief 
waxes strong, and bold, and very imprudent. It begins to get exceeding proud. 
“How absolute the knave is!” ‘I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.” 
Unbelief gets hold of the imagination, and working through the imagination, when 
faith ought to be working there, conjures up the whole circumstance. He sees himself 
in the grip of Saul, and almost imagines that the hour of butchery is come. Unbelief 
in your heart will do the same. The weak, timid, overborne faith will feed itself on 
all that is dark (seemingly) round about, and bring vividly in close upon the hea “ 
this thought, “By the hand of Saul.” * 

The relief is found just this way: Let us turn round upon ourselves, let us tu 1 
round upon this unbelief, and try to get the thing definitely and plainly. For there 
is a wonderful vagueness after all in this threatening, “I shall now perish one day.” 
Oh, the meanness of the devil! ‘One day.” If he would just come and tell me — 
explicitly what day it is, and let me know the worst, and get ready for the funeral, and 
serve the notices upon my friends that they may be there! But he says, “One day,” 
“Some day.” It is coming, it is coming, “I will not blot you out. I will destroy you 
Some of these days I will be round. Don’t you say ‘cheep’ to either God or man. Tam _ 
at the door, and I will have your blood some of these outings.” When, O devil? Whe r 
O world? When, O flesh? Tell us when it is to be. Give us the day and date. I me | 
busy man myself, and my book gets very rapidly filled up with engagements, but real ‘i 
this is an engagement I would like to attend. Tell us precisely when it is to be, that 
we may enter it in our book, and be sure to be there. Name the day! That is how 
to get at the devil of unbelief. He never can name the day. He is a big, blustering 
bravado and bully, forever talking big, vague threats, but you always find him out 
when you come to particulars. When is the day that I am to perish by the hand of 
Saul? 

Well, evidently it is not in any of the yesterdays. It is worth while just to ope 
he calendar and see. If it is to be, let it be. As well kill me, as frighten me to death 


What David Said in His Heart—McNeill. 457 


So we look through past yesterdays, and say, ““Well, of course any fool can see that I 
can’t die yesterday. The date can’t be found in the past.” Don’t smile too readily at 
that, my friend. Weren’t there some yesterdays that looked full like the days you 
should have been killed? Days when so far as your watchfulness was concerned, you 
might have been killed. Days when you were not watching. Days when you were 
not praying. Days when the enemy, like a roaring lion, was going about seeking to 
‘devour you—and it was not your own vigilance that kept you from him, and yet, 
behold! you live! not dead yet, notwithstanding all these dark, gloomy days through 
yhich, by God’s grace, you have come. Might you not get an argument from that? 
From the past might not you borrow comfort for today? Let memory bring up to 
you ‘actual experiences when you and Saul were together—that is to say, when you 
and sin were together—and you were down and Saul was up, and his spear was at your 
throat. Why was it not driven home? It was not you that kept it; it was not relent- 
ng in Saul that spared you. He meant well to destroy you. Then why do you live? 


Then this evil day about which the devil is always bullying you, I do not, some- 
how, think it is going to be today. Surely God will never allow the devil to kill us 
“on Sunday, in the house of God and at the gate of heaven. Watch your own heart 
and you will find it is not to be today. Even at our lowest, and worst and gloomiest, 
we do not allow ourselves to write down today as the day and date. Somehow or 
nother we shove it on a little bit. Take courage, then. If you can be kept today, it 


comfort from it. “Out of the. eater comes forth meat, and out of the strong comes 
forth sweetness.” Your yesterdays are like Samson’s rent lion. Your yesterdays are 


and go on eating today. 
It is not to be today. Since you woke up, God has kept you safe. He has some- 


you opened your eyes this morning till ten minutes past twelve. This is what He has 
done in all the days, ever since He began to deal with you. 

In this last day in which you have lived, this day when all these things are fore- 
Shortened and made prominent and vivid, God has kept you. And I want you to 
believe that the same grace, the same Invisible Presence that has been a wall of fire 
round about you since you began this morning, that has kept you for twelve hours, 
can keep you for twelve millenniums. Narrow the thing down. Do not let fear and 
_ gloom forever drive you out before them; but turn round, resist this devil, and he will 
flee from you. Don’t be overborne by bluster and vague threatenings. “I shall perish 
one day by the hand of Saul.” You did not perish in the days past. It does not look 
as if you are going to perish today. And as for tomorrow, you, and tomorrow, and 
aul are in wiser and stronger hands. Don’t cross the bridge before you come to it. 
on’t carry tomorrow’s burdens, and today’s. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil 
thereof.” “Tommorow will take thought for the things of itself.’ Thank God that in 
s brief hour, today, we have been able to see the hollowness of our fear; their unsub- 
fantialness. Even you at your lowest can see that the day’ cannot be found in all the 
Oary registers of time. The day you shall go under, and when the world shall have 
s foot upon your heart—that day, heaven, nor earth, nor hell know aught of such a 


_ “There is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land 
of the Philistines.’ Ah! poor David, I know you are about to go wrong. I have 
gone wrong in that way myself. You are going to take Saul, and your salvation, and 
God into your own hands. We all often do that. We get tired, the road seems long, 


idea. Go over to the Philistines, Saul will trouble you no more.” And they would — 


458 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


know; and is there knowledge in the Most High?” ‘Why is He so long?” And we 
force ourselves. like Saul, on one occasion. We force ourselves, we cannot wait. We 
are being kept too long in this purgatory. ‘‘There is nothing better than this plan,” we 
say. Now, of all the foolish words in this foolish text, this is the foolishest. Even 
unbelieving German critics have been swift to see that this was the worst move on the 
chessboard. He could not have done a worse thing than the thing he did—to quit the | 
land of promise, with all its trials, and go over to the Philistines. By doing this David 
put the clock back for years. He really set God upon His omnipotence to extricate 
him from the fearful tangle into which he put himself, when he said: “There is noth- 
ing better than that I should speedily escape.” 4 

Oh, again I repeat, watch yourself when the fog comes down. How many persons | 
last winter, and, I fear this winter again—how many persons will be killed through 
fogs! Down at some busy place is some poor woman—shall I say? In the midst of — 
the fog, and darkness, and grinding wheels, and contradictory shouts and cries; her 
judgment reels, and she makes a hasty decision, and rushes in this direction—nothing © 
better than to fly here , she thinks—and she lands beneath the horses’ feet. In trying ~ 
to escape from harm, you walk right into it. Then, stand! Having done all, stand! 
Hold hard! Stand fast in a time like this. Wait for God. Wait; hope in His Word; 
but yield an inch—never! And you will not wait in vain. 


It was the worst thing you could have done, and it seemed at the moment so wise. 
“Must I lie rotting in this cave? Must I be forever badgered in this way?” Go to, 
call in Mr. Worldly Wiseman. A very clever fellow he is when God has gone to sleep. 
Go to, call in Mr. Carnal Policy, another sharper. And the two of them sit down — 
together—three heads are better than one. And they said, “David, here is a bright 


wax eloquent upon the political aspect of this move, and how the land lay across the 


became as wax in these ill hands—he yielded to these suggestions, and bitterly he 
rued it. 

My young brother, are you tempted today in the awful conflict with sin to say, 
“Preacher, the struggle is harder, and longer, and more taxing and severe than I 
bargained for. Preacher, I am going to slip my cable a bit, and I am going to take 
it easier. This being forever on your guard is too severe. Is there no easier way of 
getting there, preacher? You see, I meet the feliows who tell me, ‘Don’t be so holy 
as all that comes to. Don’t needlessly put your bows into the front of all these big, 
tumbling seas. Don’t forever be rowing against the current. Do as I am doing; 
slack off, take it easy, go with the wind. Be not righteous overmuch. Why shouldst 
thou destroy thyself? What has religion given you?’ they say.” Religion! It speaks 
the word of promise to our ear, but breaks it to our hope. As the devil would whisper 
to David, “What has God given you since you believed His promise, and left keeping P| 
sheep, and came out to be His king? Has He brought you to the crown? Saul is nA 
more firmly on the throne than ever. You have simply brought yourself into a peck — 
of troubles, and the sooner you quit the scene the better.” “What has religion done 
for you?” the devil whispers in a man’s ear in Chicago. “Has Faith furthered you in 4 
your business? You know it has not. By keeping true to Christ, and a clean con- 
science, you have had to let profits go past you. Other men ‘took it easier;’ they 
sailed with more wind in the sheet. Now see the speed they have made, while you 
are forever close-hauled, and lying-to through stress of weather. Trim your sails the ~ 
other way; be getting on—be getting on!” 

So with other suggestions about other things. We are all kind of soft when the 
struggle is prolonged. We all feel it is hard to crucify the flesh, with its affections and 


* 


What David Said in His Heart—McNeill. 459 


live unto righteousness. The life of the believer is like the life of David—progress by 
antagonism, living to God by dying to self. For ever subject to two kinds of pains— 
he pains of dissolution, and the “growing pains,” caused by the soul shooting up into 
nore holiness and manliness. 


Now, don’t yield. Don’t escape to the Philistines. The Philistines will use you. 
yes, the Philistine will use you. The Philistines will say, “Come along, David. 
We are glad to see you. We always wondered, David, why you took the dangerous 
course you did. There is another way—a more excellent way than that way—hiding 
like a rat in a hole. What an undignified life you have been living. Come to us, and 


fe will show you how to trump the game and win every time!” 


Abide with God. Keep faith, keep heart, keep hope; be not in subjection—no not 
an hour—to the thoughts that make you depart from your integrity. 


‘ 


“When we in darkness walk, 
Nor feel the heavenly flame, 
Then is the time to trust in God, 
And lean upon His name.” 


Light will come; day will dawn. “Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, 
live till tomorrow, will have passed away.” Stand still and see the salvation of God. 


“Blest is the man, O God, 
Who stays himself on Thee, 
Who wait for Thy salvation, Lord, 
Shall thy salvation see.” 


_ Oh, let us hold fast through stress of weather. Cast not away your confidence, 
ike poor David, who pulled up his anchor and ran for a false harbor. 


Of course the waiting time is a testing time. David was required to wait. It’s a 
and hardening, toughening process, having to wait. While you are waiting, Provi- 
lence has you on the anvil, and is hammering, pounding, and seeming to destroy you. 
It is not so; God is working you, and the end will show how splendidly, to His own 
veet will, and to His own magnificent design. 


_ The last word is this—David as we know survived Saul. His fears were all wrong. 
hey were bound to be wrong. Saul went down to death “unwept, unhonored, and. 
insung.”” David came to the throne, and sat for long years upon it; and this time of 
rouble was left far behind him; a vanishing speck on the dim horizon. But when days 
f honor, and affluence, and power came, then David well-nigh perished, not by the 
hand of Saul, but by his own. His own unbridled lusts warred against his soul. Look 
earer home ‘or your enemy, my friend. Your last enemy never is an external Saul. 
Your real enemy is never outside. Your last worst enemy is the unsubdued sin of 
own heart. Watch for this Saul. Never take your eyes off this traitor; for in 
ich an hour as ye think not, he will lull you to sleep, make you think he is not there; 
nd when as stealthily as a panther he will spring upon you, I say look nearer home. 


Watch in the right direction, not in the wrong. Let us be wise: 


_ My last word is, trust in God. Our fears are liars; our hopes are stars that stud 
sky, till the day dawn, and heaven’s morning break. “They that wait for Me 
never be ashamed.” “He that believeth shall not make haste.” You may have 
aited long, you may have come through many trials, and still they seem to thicken 
bon you. Don’t lose hope; don’t lose heart; nil desperandum—never despair. 


460 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


“NTy God who caused me to hope, 
When life began to beat, 

And, when a stranger in the earth, 

Didst guide my wandering feet, 


“Thou wilt not cast me off when age 
And evil days descend; 

Thou wilt not leave me in despair, 
To mourn my latter end. 


“T know the power in whom I trust, 
The arm on which I lean; 
He will my Savior ever be, 
Who hath my Savior been.” 


Yes, the thing that hath been is the thing that shall be: “Saved in the ; 
with an everlasting salvation.” Amen. 


[Mr. McNeill was regarded by Mr. Moody as one of the great preachers 
world. He was called “The Scotch Spurgeon,” and visited Chicago, during 
World’s Fair, to assist Mr. Moody in his great evangelical work. The above is 
of his sermons delivered in Chicago. Reproduced here by permission of Rhod 
McClure. ] ; 


(461) 


AN OLD PREACHER ON PREACHING. 


‘ 


ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D. ° 


Fact and logic are both outraged by the names of the two Unions which join in 
this assembly. The division into Congregationalists and Baptists is faulty as if one 
said, Englishmen and Londoners, for all Baptists are Congregationalists. We are 
closest of kin among the Free Churches, and perhaps, therefore, have sometimes been 
furthest apart, for cordiality often increases as the square of the distance. But we all 
eel the influence of the uniting tendency which is so marked a feature of the present 


l nited Free Church of Scotland. Our joint meetings do but demonstrate, on a some- 
what larger scale, our relations in most cases all through the country. They are the 
natural expression of a real and felt unity, not a hollow show of an unreal. I some- 
es venture to think that the ministers of the two churches are in more cordial and 
closer relations than their flocks are. But be that as it may, we all meet today as 
rethren with hearty good will and mutual sympathy, and I esteem it a signal honor 


to occupy the place which I do on so happy an occasion. 


In casting about for a topic for this address I have thought of many burning 
questions which it would be timely to discuss, but I feel it wisest to keep to my own 
‘metier. I am a preacher, and have been for more than half a century; I speak here 
mainly to preachers, and I venture to offer some considerations as to the preacher’s 
Office, its themes, its demands, its possibilities. No one will deny that the question of 
Whether our preaching is as efficacious as it might be is a burning question, too. 
Widespread searchings of heart are at work among the Free Churches on that matter. 
And they have only too good ground in the contrast which would strike us as alarming 
if we were not so accustomed to it, between the immense amount of effort and the 
small results apparent. I suppose there are some 6,000 or 8,000 sermons delivered 
every Sunday by the ministers of our two denominations—and what comes of them 
all? We have covered the land with chapels, and yet do we even keep up with the 
growth of population? ‘Ye have sowed much, and brought home little;” and if so 
much seed yields so scanty a harvest the sower may well ask himself why? No doubt 
t! ere are trends of thought and habits of life today which make the preacher's task 
eminently hard, but we have no such difficulties to face as the first messengers of the 
Cross had to encounter and overcome. Are the philosophical or scientific tendencies 


honeycombed the luxurious sensualism of Asia? Is the secularizing influence of trade 


and imperialism more hostile than was the self-centered pride of Rome, with its cult 


Are these His doings? Surely there can be but one answer to the twofold question— 
an answer which throws us back on ourselves, and bids us look to ourselves as the 


462 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


causes of the loss of power. The last character in which I should desire to stand 


I have nearly finished my work, and I would fain use the opportunity given me today, — 
to leave some words which my younger brethren, whose task promises to be still more _ 
difficult than that of us older men, may perhaps feel to derive some additional weight — 
. because they may be the last which the speaker will address to such an assembly. If 
I venture to speak of the preacher and his work I must lay bare my own ideals, and 
to do that is to lay bare my own shortcomings, for our ideals are the sternest critics of - 
our accomplishings. 


It may be freely admitted that the preacher, as the Free Churches know him, is 
the result of a process of evolution starting with the simple New Testament arrange- | 
ments. Whether the process has been iegitimate, and the product satisfactory, or - 
whether there are further developments to be expected and desired, need not concern 
us now. The point which I seek to make is that, whilst great authorities have told us 


that differentiation of functions is the mark of progressive evolution, we have in the : 


preacher of today an apparent coalescence of three offices which are separate in the 
early church—those of evangelist, teacher and prophet. I purpose to deal with my 
subject under these three points of view. 


THE PREACHER AS EVANGELIST. 


The preacher is, first and foremost, an Evangelist—a bearer of good news. The ~ 7 


very name contains a designation of the preacher’s theme, for it, at least, makes this — 
clear that he has to tell a fact, which is freighted with gladness for a sad world. What- 


ever more the Gospel is, it is primarily the history of something that did occur. The 


far-reaching presuppositions and implications of the fact, its force as the spring of 
transformed humanity, of individual and social progress, open out into a wide room c ¥ 
where all speculative and practical intellects may expatiate, but the beginning of all 
these is a person, and the fact of His life and death. The grain of mustard seed grows _ 
into the great tree in whost branches all the birds can nest and sing, beneath whose — 
shadow all the peoples can house. “We preach Christ crucified.” It is one thing to 


preach salvation by Christ; it is another to preach Christ as the Savior. The more 


we can free ourselves from the abstract and technical theology of the schools, and can 
make our words throb with the miracle of that loving, human heart, and with the 
pathos and power of that death for a world’s sins, the more shall we deserve the name j 
of evangelists. Hearts are more surely to be won by showing them Jesus crucified 
than by our comments on the sight. A Christ without a cross is a king without a 
throne. If our ministry is to have power, it must all center in the death for the world’s 
sins. Otherwise it will be like a lighthouse without a lamp. It will have no grip, no 
impulse, no regenerating power. “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men.” There are 
preachers who demagnetize the Gospel, because they falter in the proclamation of ‘ 
that “lifting up” which, because it is the secret of Christ’s power to heal the fiery 
erpent’s poisoned sting, is the secret of His power to draw, first, the languid looks of 
the victims, and then their whole nature, yielded to Him in love and loyalty. The 
experience of the recent Free Church missions taught us all, that when we really 
“meant business’ and were seeking for what would touch hearts, we instinctively went 
back to the simple elementary truths which some of us had been tempted to think too 
simple and elementary for our intelligent audiences, or too threadbare to be listened to 
with interest. When preachers really and intensely desire to “save souls’—and have 
found that that old-fashioned phrase has a meaning today—they will instinctively grasp 
the only instrument that can effect the purpose, and will find themselves saying: — 
“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into 

the world to save sinners’”—and they will be wise if they add with Paul, “of whom I 


An Old Preacher on Preaching—Maclaren. 463 


am chief,” for the sense of personal need is an indispensable element in the evangelist’s 
work. 

Our message implies that sin is a universal reality, from which there is no deliver- 
ance but through Jesus. Has the fact of sin, its reality and its consequences, its due 
place in modern preaching? I for one very much doubt it. Modern theories of 
eredity and environment, modern laxity of moral fibre, have taken many shades of 
jlackness out of the black thing. Men think less gravely of sin, and so they super- 
icially diagnose the world’s disease and therefore they superficially prescribe the 
remedy. An inadequate conception of sin lies at the root of most theological heresies 
ind Utopian schemes of reformation of society. It is fatal to the earnestness, the 
athos and the power of the preacher’s work. Unless we have our hearts and minds 
aden with the burden of men’s sins our voices will not ring out the vibrating notes of 
he good news of One who saves His people from their sins, because “Himself bare 
ur sins in His own body.” We must all confess that yielding to the “Zeitgeist,” the 
rend of opinion and feeling prevalent around us, and as children of the age, we have 
been tempted to think less severely, less pityingly of sin, and less solemnly of its 
certain result, death, than either our Master or His apostles did. We have too much | 
nk from plain speech on the guilt and the danger of sinners. And, just in exact 


ing out the good news of the Christ, the propitiation for our sins and for the whole 
world. 

The preacher is further spoken of in the New Testament as a herald, and that title 
mplies that his proclamation be plain, clear, assured. He is not to speak timidly, as 
i diverse winds of doctrine had blown back his voice into his trumpet. He is not to 
ng an ambiguous message in cloudy words. “O thou that tellest good tidings to 
fion lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid.” The evangelist needs 
0 deliver his good news with urgency, as if it was of some moment that people should 
now and accept it. Is that note of urgency audible, as it should be, in our preaching? 
Phe evangelist has need of tenderness. “We entreat as though God did beseech by 
s.’ What outgush’ of sympathetic yearning can be too great fitly to bear on its 
irrent the message of a love which died to save? Are we not too little accustomed 
D preach with our hearts? Should we not be foolishly ashamed to say, “I now tell 
ou even weeping?” The evangelist has need of the personal element in his message. 
‘has to be rigidly subordinated, else he is in danger of preaching himself, not Jesus. 
le has not to obtrude his own personality, but he has to speak as one who has felt the 
apture of the joyful news which he proclaims. ‘‘We have found the Messiah,” was 
he first Christian sermon ever preached, and it was so efficacious that it converted the 
hole congregation, for it brought Peter to Jesus. “That which we have seen and 
eard that proclaim we unto you” is the mold into which the most effectual evangel- 
izing work has ever run. The evangelist has need of elasticity in his methods, while 
t preserves uniformity in his theme. Our recent mission has taught us that, if we 
e to get at the outlying masses, whom the Church of today, thank God! is awaken- 
ig to long to reach, we must not be afraid of flinging away some of our old appliances, 
ad shaping new ways of getting at the dense crowds of English heathens. Our 
lereotyped services do not attract them, and never will. Personally I do not believe 
“the masses” will ever be reached, until Christian men and women, in far larger 
umbers and with far more system than hitherto, go among them, and by individual 
fort cast silken chains of sympathy and brotherliness round them which may draw 
em out of the depths. But we must also have changes in methods, and the aban. 
ment of a stiff conservatism which would fossilize our churches. I am not 
sading for anything sensational, still less for importing entertainments either for 
or ear into our evangelistic work. All I wish to emphasize is that we must vary 


464 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


our methods, and take care that the eternal freshness of the ever young Good News 
is not hidden under the mustiness of ancient modes of action, which have proved to 
be ineffectual to reach the mutitudes of “them that are without.” 


THE PREACHER AS TEACHER. 


But the preacher has to be a teacher as well as an evangelist. Whether it is a 
development in accordance with the principles of the New Testament Church that all 
public, oral teaching should he in his hands is a question that does not concern us 
here. We may freely allow that a higher ideal would be: ‘‘When ye come together, 
each one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation,” and yet see that the present - 
order of things is best for the present spiritual state of the Church, and be sure that as 
soon as that changes for the better the old order wiil change with it. When the 
temperature rises, there will be an outburst of spring flowers. 

But the teaching office of the preacher is depreciated, not only in the name of an 
appeal to the primitive condition of the Church, but from the extreme other side of the 
most modern outlook on things, as being superceded by the hundred-voiced press. 
The men and women of this generation, we are told, form their opinions from books, 
not from sermons. I should demur to the word “form,” as expressing the process by | 
which a large proportion of them arrive at what they call their opinions; I should — 
consent to say “get their opinions,” for it is not a process of reasoned formation, but 
of more or less accidental and unreasoned acquisition. The opinions do not grow, are 
aes shaped by patient labor, but are imported into the new owner’s mind ready made, 

“in Germany,” or elsewhere, but certainly not in his own workshop, But granting the 
influence of the press, if it diacaoins the pulpit, it is the fault of the occupant thereof. 
A certain minister once told a shrewd old Scottish lady that he was engaged to deliver _ 
an address on the power of the pulpit, and asked what her views on the subject were. 
She answered: “The power o’ the pulpit! That depends on wha’s in it.’ Which is _ 
a truth to be laid to heart by all preachers. No man is superseded but through his 
own deficiencies. There must be weakness in the wall which the storm blows down. _ 
The living voice has all its old power today, when it is a voice, and not an echo, ora _ 
mumble. Ifa man has anything to say and will say it with all his heart and with al 
his soul and with all his strength he will not lack auditors. Books have their province — 
and preachers have theirs, and neither can efface the other or supply the place of the — 
other. The cry that the pulpit is effete comes mostly from quarters who do not 
despise the pulpit so much as dislike the truths which it teaches only too powertaiiay 
for their liking. 7 

We may, then, turn to consider that aspect of the preacher’s work undisturbed. 
And the first thing that I desire to lay stress on is, that the educational is never to be 
separated from the evangelistic office. True, ‘there are diversities of operations;” and _ 
idiosyncracies and spiritual gifts, which for the most part follow in their line, may mark 
out one man more especially for the one kind of work, and another for the other. We co 
must all rejoice that there are brethren among us who are endowed with remarkable i 
gifts of presenting the Good News, which clearly disclose Christ’s purpose for them. yi 
Still, it remains true and important to keep in view that the truest teaching must be 
evangelistic, and the truest evangelizing must be educational. The web is made up — 
of warp and woof. The evangelism which appeals to emotion only is false to the : | 
Gospel; for God’s way of moving men is to bring truth to their understandings, which 
shall then set their emotions at work, and so pass on to move the will, the directness 
of the man, and thus at last affect the actions. As Whichcote says, “Religion begins 
with knowledge; it proceeds to temper, and ends in practice.” The evangelist who is 
not a teacher will build nothing that will last. And not less one-sided, and therefore - 
transient, will be the work of the teacher who is not an evangelist. He will give husks 
instead of the bread of life, notions that may rattle in skulls like seeds in dried poppy- 


An Old Preacher on Preaching—Maclaren. 465 


ads, but not convictions which burn all the more because they are light as well as 
heat. 

_ The true theologian ever brings his doctrines to bear on the emotions, and then 
on the will, and then on practice. That “theology” suffers under the imputation of 


‘The preacher is not to duplicate his part, like an actor who sustains two characters in 


; For the most advanced instruction that can be given or received does not leave the 
most initial truths behind. It only unfolds them. The teacher’s subject matter is the 
Same as the evangelist’s. The difference lies in the mode of viewing it, and the pur- 
pose for which it is considered. The last book of Euclid rests on the axioms and 


postulates that precede the first. No Christian thought can ever travel beyond the 


bf the Christian life. Bees press themselves down into the flowers from which they 
would drain the honey, “and murmur by the hour” in their bells. Wasps and other 
agrant things flit past them and get none. “Whoever goeth onward’—as John says, 
with a flash of irony as he quotes the advanced thinker’s watchword—‘“and abideth 
fot in the teaching of Christ, hath not God.” The remainder would benefit some 
modern successors of these proud, old incipient Gnostics. To lead minds to see the 
profound and far-reaching truths that underlie the Gospel, what its facts pre-suppose 
of God and Man, of the Father and the Eternal Word, what they reveal of the heart of 
h ings, and of the Heart at the heart of them; to lead to the recognition, and still more 
to the application to individual and social and national life, of the principles that flow 
from the facts, to disclose to the minds and to lay on the hearts of men the Incarnation 
ynd Sacrifice and Reign of Jesus as the world-redeeming power, as the revelation of 
perfect life for men and nations, to find and exhibit in Jesus the answer to all the 
iestions of the intellect, the satisfaction of all the needs of the heart, the source and 


standard of ethics, the fountain of all wisdom, the renovator of humanity, the purifier 


ile he is following out the issues of His work to their remotest consequences—these 
the tasks of the Christian preacher in his capacity of teacher. All knowledge may 
e into his sphere. There is room for the widest culture. The teacher may elab- 
orate his theme with the closest thought, or may adorn it with poetry and imagination. 
‘There is room for all gifts in the building of the great temple. Bezaleel was taught 
by the Spirit of God to execute his works of artistic beauty, and Hiram’s workmen 
d to hew logs in Lebanon. But the wider the teacher sweeps his circle, the stronger 
must be its center. The more he lengthens his cords, the more must he strengthen 
his stakes—and the middle prop that holds up the tent is the Cross with Christ upon 
it. “Him first, Him last, Him midst and without end.” All that the teacher has to 
teach is summed up in one word—Christ. His whole theme is “the truth as it is in 
Jesus.” 
_ As the theme is Christ, so the text-book is the Bible. Whatever the Higher 
criticism has done, it has not touched the main substance of the Gospel which we have 
preach, nor do even its most advanced positions seem to me seriously to affect the 
jomiletic worth of Scripture. The truths of the Bible remain, even if extreme theories 
$ to date and manner of origination of its several parts were much more undeniably 
roven than they are. I venture to use the privilege of age and appeal very earnestly 
y younger brethren especially, beseeching them not to be tempted by either the 
aken notion of increasing the attractiveness of their preaching or by the natural 


466 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


wish of youth to do something original and break away from conventions. Conver 
tional usages were instinct with life and meaning when they were new, and it is best t 
try whether their original significance is worth saving, before we resolve to shake then 
off. The habit of prefacing a sermon with a text is, no doubt, a survival, and i 
sometimes unmeaning enough, but it is a witness that the sermon’s true purpose is te 
explain, confirm and enforce Scripture. Once the text was followed by a serm 
dealing with it. Would that it were always so now! Better to put new life into the 
old form by making a text really what it is meant to be than to break through it in < 
flight after something “fresh and unconventional.” ; a 


It does not follow from the Bible’s being the text-book that preaching is to be | 
expository in the technical sense of that word, though I confess to a belief that if w : 
had more of that we should have a robuster type of Christian, with a firmer grip 0 
his professed creed, than is common today. The days of protracted exposition are 
for good or evil, over. There will be no more courses of sermons like those whicl 
the painful and reverend Mr. Caryll perpetrated on Job, and published in three 
folios—double-columned, if my memory is correct. 


The widest scope is to be given to varieties of mind and ways of assimilatin 
Scripture, but that ministry only is true to its duties, and up to the height of its la 
possibilities which makes its main purpose the drawing out into clear statement, and 
supporting by forceful argument, and the impressing by emotional pleadings, what i 
has pleased God to say to men. If it was worth His while to give us the Book, it is 
worth our while to toil to fathom its depth, to saturate our thinking and feeling with 
its truths, and it is our highest function and office to interpret them to our brethret 
We shall “shine as lights in the world” if we “hold forth the Word of Life.” There 
are nebulae, as well as brilliant stars, in the firmament of the Word. It is for the 
preacher to show men that the stars are suns and the nebulae galaxies of light. Ho 
unworthy it is for him to direct his telescope from the heaven of the Word to the 
levels of current topics! I shall have to speak presently of the place which the la’ 
must hold in the preacher’s work, but they will hold their right place only if he is tr 
to his vocation as being first of all a minister of the Word of God. 

More reasons than can be enumerated, much less here expanded, concur in enfore- 
ing this. In no other profession would the text-books be treated as the Bible some- 
times is. There is no such discipline for the preacher as the careful, minute study of 
Scripture. Patient work with such unspiritual implements as lexicon and concordan ce 
yields rich fruits of spiritual discernment, gives such grasp of great principles 
nothing else will give, opens out endless vistas into the deep things of God, as witnes 
such books as the Bishop of Durham’s priceless commentaries on John and Hebrey 
A preacher who has steeped himself in the Bible will have a clearness of outlook whi 
will illuminate many dark things, and a firmness of touching which will breed confi- 
dence in him among his hearers. He will have the secret of perpetual freshness, for 
he cannot exhaust the Bible. No pulpit teaching will last as long as that which | is 
given honestly and persistenly to the elucidation and enforcement of Biblical truth. 
As the Scotch psalm-book has it: “ 


“In old age, when others fade, 
He fruit still forth shall bring.” 


We have to do the work of Christian teachers under remarkable conditions. “© 
the one hand there is great ignorance of Scripture and of systematized Christian trut 
among our congregations, and we are perpetually in danger of over-estimating th 
amount of knowledge on which we may reckon. Otherwise well-educated men an 
women have but the vaguest notions as to Scripture facts and the most confuse 
apprehensions of Christian ideas. I for one believe that a considerable percentag 


‘ 
/ 


An Old Preacher on Preaching—Maclaren. 467 


ing elementary, and to say as Paul said: “To write the safe things to you to 
e indeed is not grievous and for you it is safe.” On the other hand, we have to 
eak to people who have considerable education, and some who think they have 
gore than they really have, who have been fed on a miscellaneous collection of 
raps, De omnibus rebus—et quibusdam aliis, in magazines and handbooks, and 
is hard to get an entrance for solid Christian truth into such minds. Short sermons, 
is Sunday’s having no connection with last Sunday’s, and based on snippets of 
cripture, the meaning of which is of small consequence, correspond to the week’s 
diet of desultory reading. And withal there is the heaving swell of intellectual unrest, 
which affects all our congregations. How are we to discharge our teaching work in 
he face of all this? 
Mainly by the strong, sympathetic presentation of positive truth. Controversy is 
eedful, but it is seldom efficacious. It convinces the already convinced. Better to 
yund in affirmations than in negations, though they will be branded as dogmatism. 
the truth, as you know it and feel it, and let it work. There are two ways of 
ing rid of weeds—to grub them up, or to sow good seed, which will spring and 
sar the ground. And we must never forget that, what we have to teach is no 
llosophy for the few, no system of doctrine for trained understandings, but the 
spel for the world. When one of Luther’s disciples once asked him for some guid- 
¢ as to how he should preach before the Duke, the Doctor said, “All your sermons 
d be of the simplest. Do not regard the prince, but the simple, stupid, rude and 
unlearned people, who are cut out of the same cloth as the prince. If, in my sermon, 
vere to have Philip Melancthon and the other doctors in my eye, I should produce 
ing good, but I preach the simplest way to the unlearned, and it suits everybody.” 
of our hearers are educated and can follow our highest flights, but many of 
cannot. But all have the one human heart, with its deepest needs identical 
Sad souls are to be comforted, torpid ones to be stung or startled or wooed 
‘sensitiveness and activity, eyes glued to earth to be drawn to look up, the inmost 


needs of a gathered audience might strike the most eloquent dumb, and make 
€ most confident timid. But “our sufficiency is of God,” and God’s sufficiency will 


THE PREACHER AS PROPHET. 

he preacher’s work has a third aspect.. Besides being evangelistic and educa- 
it is also ethical, and, in that aspect especially may rightly be designated as 
phetic. Of course the form of “inspiration” belonging to the prophet in Israel 


y: Thus saith the Lord, and if we wi not speak what we have heard in the ear 
Many a secret “hour of high communion with the living God” we had better be 
nt for evermore. It may be objected that the preacher has neither the inspiration 
the insight into the future which belonged to the prophet. But there are different 
is of inspiration; and that which is secured by hours of communion, by earnest 
t to stretch the narrow tablet of the mind so that it shall be capacious enough 
= the amplitude of God's message, by sedulous suppression of our own 


y by prayer, is no less real than that which touched IJsaiah’s with a live coal, “There 


468 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.” Philip the evangelist’s seven daughter 
or the prophets in the Corinthian Church, had no inspiration which we have r 
What does Paul direct as to the latter? ‘Let them speak by two or three, and 
the others discern,” a function which is very cheerfully and abundantly dischar, 
among us. So the New Testament prophet’s teaching had to submit to criticism, 
It had further to submit sometimes to being cut short; “If a revelation be made f 
another standing by, let the first keep silence.” So a New Testament prophet co | 
be tedious and had to learn to give way. There seems no reason to believe that tl 
inspiration which .endowed these prophets has ceased to be given to us. Much 
rather is it that’the name has become disused, than that the persons who have a 
right to it have failed. Are there not Prophets among us today? Have there not 
always been Prophets in the Church? 

Nor does the lack of the predictive insight damage the claim to the name. 
is a common-place now that that element is not the sole, nor even the princip: 
one in the ideal of the prophet. If we rightly understand what he was to Israel, 
shall rightly understand how he still survives, in modern garb indeed, but the sz 
For his chief function was to be an incarnation of the national conscience. It 
his task to hold aloft the Divine Ideal for Israel, to bring life to the test of 
Divine law, to stand before king and people undismayed, with his face as 
against their faces, to denounce national and individual transgression, to set 
trumpet to his ‘‘mouth and declare to Israel its sin.” He was necessarily a predic 
not only because God gave to some of the order a fore-knowledge of particular 
events, but also because God had graven deep in his mind the sure conviction th at 
righteousness exalts a nation, that all national or individual departure from God is 
bitter as well as evil, that sin is death, and good the sure result in the long run of 
goodness. The prophet supplied the force for the Law, the dynamic by which i it 
got itself obeyed. As one of them says, his word was “as a hammer,” to drive howe 
and fasten in a sure place the nails of the Law. 

And is not this the function of the Christian Church as a whole, and cine 
of its preachers? What are we here for but to bring the principles of the Gospe 
to bear on all life? No doubt the courtiers of an Ahab or a Zedekiah said wh 
they thought clever things about the fastidious prophetic conscience, just as ie 
have heard would-be taunts which Wietie really tributes and turned to a testimony, 
about “the Nonconformist conscience.” It is the Christian conscience, and to be 


on individual sins, especially those prevalent in the class from whom his hea “er 
are drawn. He has to apply the measure of the sanctuary to worldly maxims w ic 
his hearers take for axioms, and to practices which they think legitimate because 
they are popular. He has to witness against the cancerous vices which are eat in e 
out the life of the nation. He has to bring national acts to the standard of Christ's 
teaching, and to insist that politics is but Christian principles applied to national life. 
A church which has ceased to protest against the “world” suits the world’s purpose 
exactly, and is really a bit of the world under another name. The true church must 
always be remonstrant, protestant, a standing rebuke to the world, till the worl 
has accepted and applied the principles of the Gospel to personal and social life. 
And the preacher who does not give voice to the church’s protest fails in one 
his plainest and chiefest duties. 

We need brave men in the pulpit, who shall speak with freedom what they belie 
they have learned from God, of the evils in the land. We need men who ha’ 
heard Him saying to them, “Be not dismayed at them, lest I dismay thee bef 
them.” We need for the prophet’s office much secluded fellowship with God, w. 
“wakens” His servants’ “ear morning by morning,” and gives them ‘the tongue 


An Old Preacher on Preaching—Maclaren. 469 


jem that are taught.” We need to keep clear of popular currents of thought and 
ractice, suspecting always that truth does not dwell with majorities, and that what 
e multitude acclaim, God is likely to condemn. We have to be keenly sensitive 
» the drift of thought, else we shall not wisely make head against it, or know how 
® use or direct it. We have to remember that preaching may be as accurately 
dapted to the times, when it directly contradicts popular dicta, as when it falls in 
ith them, and that the Greeks’ demand for wisdom, and the Jews’ for a sign, were 
by being refused in appearance, even while granted in truth. 

We have need to remember the woes pronounced on two classes of prophets, 


nat sell for ourselves. And on the other hand we have to see that the word, which 
$s in that sense our own, is, in a deeper sense, not our own, but God’s. We have 
) deal at first hand with Him, and to suppress self that He may speak. And no 
man will ever be the Lord’s prophet, however eloquent or learned he may be, unless 
he knows what it is to sit silent before God, and in the silence to hear the still, 
mall, most mighty voice that penetrates the soul, and to the hearing ear is sweet 
harpers harping with their harps, and louder than the noise of many waters. 

But this prophetic or ethical aspect of the preacher’s work can never be rightly 
one, unless it is based upon the evangelistic and the educational. 

We shall rejoice that the pulpit and the Church have recognized more clearly 
lan before the call to make their voice heard on Christ’s side in regard to 
runkenness, gambling, impurity, and other national vices. But it will be no gain 
0 the cause of Christian morality or of national righteousness, if the ethical side of 
feligion is presented exclusively or disproportionately to the other two, which are 
its foundation. Let us have applied Christianity by all means—the more the better, 
at let us make sure first that there is the Christianity to apply. Let us preach 
hrist as the regenerator of society, but let us not omit to preach Him as the 
Savior of the soul from sin. Let us begin where the Gospel begins, with “God so 


s, for society and for the world, which flow from it. It is Christ the Sacrifice 
and the Savior who is Christ the wisdom of God, and the realized ideal of humanity, 
the embodiment of the perfect law for life, the perfect motive to fulfil it, and the 
p erfect giver of the perfect power for obedience. It is Christ, the Sacrifice for men 
and the wisdom of God, who is the King of nations, from whom the peoples will 
learn righteousness, and following whom the tribes of the earth shall enter into the 
nd of peace. We, the preachers of His all-transforming and all-vivifying name, 
to preach Him in all the aspects of His mission, and to present these, so far 
our imperfections will permit, in the order, proportion and harmony in which 
they are revealed to us. The threefold beam may be separated into its parts by a 
rism, but neither of these three is sunshine. The preacher has to try to recombine 
hem into the sweet, all-blessing white ray, which every eye feels to be light. We are 
reachers—that is to say, we are evangelists, teachers, prophets. Let us not limit 
urselyes to either function, but try always to blend the three in that one which 
ould include them all. 

_ Fathers and brethren, I am but too conscious of the imperfection of the concep- 
dns of our office, which I have ventured to lay before you. I am still more con- 
ious of the imperfection of my presentation of these. I am most of all conscious 


470 Puipit Power and Eloquence. 


of the imperfections of my attempts at realizing their ideal, in my day of service o 
which the evening shadows are falling. But, however condemnatory may be the 
of an ideal of our office, the absence or dimness of that light is fatal. The more loftil; 
we think of our work, the more lowly will be our estimate of ourselves, and the mor 
earnest our efforts to reach up to the height of our possibilities, which are therefore 
our duties. The more we feel the burden of the Lord laid on us as evangelists, the 
more shall we have a passion for souls, which will fill our hearts with wistful tome : 


prehension of deep truths is ever garbed, and so will speak with the authority of 
Truth itself and not as the scribes. The more we are constrained by the word of 
Lord given to us as His prophets, the more bold shall we be to weigh popular hab 
and customary sins in the balances of the sanctuary, and the more shall we sometim 


been a prophet among them.” 

Some of us are almost passing from the stage, some of us are pressing on to it, 
eager, hopeful, perhaps thinking that we shall do much better than did the veterans 
who now seem to “lag superfluous.” The modes of thinking change as do the thinkers, 
the wonderful new lamps of one age become the dim twinkling candles of the next. 
Much in our conceptions of the Truth will not long outlive ourselves. That which 
can be shaken will be removed. Be it so; that which cannot be shaken will remain—_ 
and what cannot be shaken is the Gospel of the “Kingdom that cannot be moved,” and 
its King, the same yesterday, today, and forever. ‘All flesh is as grass, and all th 
glory thereof as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower falleth: but 
the word of the Lord abideth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel ; 
preached.” 

[Alexander Maclaren, D. D. born February 11, 1826, was educated at Glaagam 
University and Regent’s Park College; minister of Portland chapel, Southampton, 
1846-58, and of Union chapel, Manchester, over forty years. His literary wo 
consists chiefly of his published sermons, his greatest work probably being his exposi- 
tion of the Psalms in the Expositor’s Bible. Among his other works are: Secrets of 
Power and the Life of David. His comments on the Stnday School lesson in the 
Sunday School Times for so many years, have given him a wide circle of admirers. 
in America. 

This sermon was delivered at the City Temple, London, April 23, 1901, on the 
occasion of the joint meeting of the Baptist and Congregational Unions, of the former 
of which he was president. ] ; 


K 


(471) 


THE SEPARATION OF THE SOUL 
FROM GOD. 


W. F. MALLALIEU. 


“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear 
heavy, that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your 
God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.”—Isaiah 59: 1, 2. 
I ask your serious and prayerful attention to these three thoughts derived from 


1. The separation of the soul from God; 

2. The causes of this separation; and, 

8. The consequences of such separation. 

It is seen at once that it is impossible for the soul to be separate from God, in the 
sense of being remote or distant from Him. God is omnipresent, and wherever the 
may be, still God is there. God is in the heights of heaven, and in the depths of 
; He is in the uttermost parts of the earth, and the most distant island of the sea; 
nd if the soul could flee away forever on the wings of the morning, it could never 


keep the world outside, we may and do sometimes fancy that we can close the 
approaches of the soul to God. 

_ But the real truth is, God is so near to us, and is so watchful of all we do, that 
never perform an action, however slight it may be, without the direct cognizance 
God. And from the first word we ever lisped up to the last utterance of our lips, 
whether those words have been words of love or strife, whether of complaining or 
hanksgiving, whether of cursing or blessing, every word we have ever uttered has 
n heard of God, and they are all remembered. 

The worst part of every one’s life is in his thoughts. No one has ever done as 
wickedly as he has thought. The last thing that any one of us would wish to have 
made known to the world would be the thoughts which have been in our minds since 
first we were conscious of thought. Men cover them up and keep them out of sight, 
and repress them, and to a very great extent conceal them, and they sometimes 
imagine that there is no being in the universe that knows anything about what is going 
on within the innermost soul. Men turn down the lights, or put them out altogether, 
lraw the curtains, and close tight the shutters, and sit down with their thoughts in the 
darkness. They know that no angel can enter and intrude upon their privacy, that 
no human being living or dead can reach them in their seclusion, and they dream that 


472 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


they are alone. But they forgot when they closed the doors, and put out the lig 
and drew the curtains, and closed the shutters, that God was inside with them all t 
time, and they forgot that the darkness and the light are alike to Him; and there 
is in the very secret place of the soul, and He knows every thought, and knows it with 
all the infinite perfection of His omniscience, and knows it to remember it, and knows 
it to approve or to condemn. 

O that this solemn, awful thought might abide with us, that God is absolutely and 
constantly near to every soul, searching our hearts, and knowing us better even than 
we know ourselves. a 

Hence we see that the separation of the soul from God, which is spoken of in the 
text, is not that of distance, but rather a moral separation. The soul that is separate 
from God is unlike God in the very nature and essence of its moral constitution. 4 

God is. a being of infinite purity and holiness. In Him there is not the slightest 
stain of impurity in any respect, there never has been in all the eternity of the past, 
and there never will be in all the eternity that is to come. From everlasting to ever- 
lasting, this freedom from all impurity has been, and will be, the distinguishing char- 
acteristic of God. It is also true of Him that there is no degree of imperfection 
which attaches itself to the divine nature. Purity is possible, and still there may not 
be absolutely no imperfection. Of God alone can it be said that He is absolutely and 
infinitely perfect in all the attributes of His nature. “In Him there can be no malice, 
or envy, or hatred, or revenge, or pride, or cruelty, or injustice, or falsehood, or 
unfaithfulness; and if #here be anything besides which implies sin, and vice, and moral 
imperfection, holiness and purity, as applied to God, signify that the divine nature is at 
an infinite distance from it.” j 

But it is not sufficient to say of God that He is devoid of all impurity, and all 
imperfections, and all unholiness, for this is but a negative statement of the facts in 
the case. It is equally true that God is infinitely pure, and perfect, and holy. In all 
His robtious, in 1 the exercise of His compassion, His mercy, His pity, His goodurss 


attribute of His nature, and in the very essence of His nature, He is infinitely pure, 
and perfect, and holy; and this to such a degree, and in such an absolute sense, that 
we cannot express it in human language, nor fathom the fullness of its significance, 
though we were possessed of the sublimest intellect ever created in earth or heaven. 
Now, then, when we find a s- ul that is unlike God in these respects, we shall find os 
that is separate from Him. ; 

There is no uncreated being but God in the universe, and there can be no othe : 
being that is infinite in all his perfections; in this sense there will always be an 
infinite distance between the created and the uncreated. But in respect to purity and — 
holiness, we may readily perceive that the creature may possess these qualities. li he 7 
does possess them, then he is near to God and God is near to him. But the sad truth 
is that man is fallen and he does not manifest these characteristics. He is impure : 
his thoughts, and perverse in his volitions. His heart is full of envy and malice, 4 
pride and revenge, and cruelty, and lust, and falsehood, and unfaithfulness, and 
every evil passion, propensity and desire, so that the very sources of thought and feel- 
ing and action are thoroughly corrupt and unholy. 

The result is, that the soul in its nature is removed from God almost as far as the 
east is from the west, and it is a wonder of mercy and love and power that ever a 
reunion can be effected. The separation spoken of in the text not only involves this 
unlikeness of nature, but also an equally great dissimilarity in the things that are loved 
by God and the soul. 

God loves everything that is pure and holy and good, and He hates whatever is 
not. He loves righteousness, and goodness, and virtue, and truth, and integrity, an 


The Separation of the Soul from God—Meullalieu. 473 


everything that is excellent, and hates the opposites; while the soul that is separate 
from God hates all those things that God loves, and loves all the things that God hates. 
Jor may we wisely flatter ourselves that these things are not true of fallen human 
nature, for there are the best reasons for supposing that it takes the fear of punishment, 
le restraints of society, and the gracious influences of the Spirit of God to prevent 
turbulent passions of depraved hearts from blasting with the hot breath of hell, 


even to utter destruction, every loving and holy thing that glorifies redeemed 


II. We come now to inquire as to the causes of this separation of the soul from 
od. 

I love to think of every new-born child, of every littfe babe, that it is very near 
to God. I am glad for the faith I have that “heaven lies all about us in our infancy.” 
I believe that it is true that each little child is “a new, sweet blossom of humanity, 
fresh fallen from God’s own home to flower on earth.” 

4 Whatever may have been the ruin of the fall, and the corruption of the race, the 
all-embracing work of Christ for the salvation of mankind has put all children into a 
position where the Savior himself might say of them, ‘Suffer the little children to 
come unto me and forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of God.” 

Our first parents were near to God. They held intimate personal communion 
with Him. He daily revealed Himself to them amid the bowers of Eden. There was 
no sense of separation from God felt by the sinless pair. But the tempter entered that 
abode of purity and love, and in an evil hour temptation was yielded to, and the holy 
and righteous law of God was violated, and sin entered the world. How great the 
change! God was no longer a welcome and desired visitant, but the guilty ones fled 
from His presence and hid themselves in the vain purpose to put themselves where God 
could not find them. In their loves and hates, in their natures, all had changed, and 
sin had caused the change—sin had separated them from God. , 

Now, whatever theory of the effects of the fall one may adopt, the first sin of 
childhood leaves us amid surroundings which, if yielded to, will draw us more and 
more away from God. Every added sin increases the distance, until we find that the 
moral separation between the soul and God is but little short of an impassable gulf, 
and it would be impassable forever had it not been bridged by the infinite grace of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

The effect of sin upon the soul is of the most destructive character, and perhaps 
in no respect is it more clearly seen than in the fact that it separates the soul from 
God. God is the source of all the good that any of His creatures ever enjoy. All 
mercies, gifts and graces come from Him, and every sin indulged in separates us 
further from this inexhaustible source of blessing. Every year, every day, every hour 
become more and more unlike God in all the attributes of our moral nature; we 
gradually lose our sympathy for His plans and purposes, and come at last to despise 
I is law, and then we hate the Lawgiver, and our rebellious wills rise up, and we say 
in our hearts and actions, if not in words, we will not have Him reign over us. 

It is said that a celebrated painter once wished to portray upon canvas the contrast 


After diligent search he found a little child which seemed to him the most beau- 
tiful and perfect embodiment of purity and innocence he had ever seen. Its form was 


Av4 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 

With the greatest care the painter transferred the face to his canvas and hung it 
up in his studio until he should find its opposite. 

For years he sought in all directions for a face that should comprise everything ~ 
hideous and hateful. He went among the poorest and the outcast of great cities; he 
visited the haunts of infamy and vice for a face that should form a perfect contrast — 
to that of the little child. Success at last crowned his efforts, for with true artistic | 
delight he one day discovered in a prison a face which completely met his ideal. It 
was the face of a felon chained to the floor of the dungeon, where, for the most — 
appalling crimes, he was to be confined until his trial. He was young in years and yet 
he looked like an old man, for his form was bowed and tremulous, the result of © 
unbridled debaucheries; his hair and beard were long, and matted, and filthy; his lips 
were purple and swollen, and his mouth was full of cursing; his eyelids were corroded, 


and made himself as hideous to behold as though he had been taken possession of by — q 
a legion of devils. j 
In due time the painter prepared for his work, but strange to tell, ere the task was 
accomplished he learned that the young man before him was the identical person 
whose childish portrait he had kept hanging in his studio for so many years. . 

It was sin that had separated this young man from his pure, sweet, holy childhood; — 
it was sin that had swept him out, away from his mother’s arms, and his home of love, 
and his hopes of life and heaven, out into the storm, and the darkness, and the horrible bi 
tempests of lust and crime, until he was as far from his own cradle-innocence as the 
flame-encircled gates of hell are far away from the glorious pearly portals of the city % 
of God. = 

Just this terrible effect sin will have upon the soul if it be cherished in any heart. r 3 
It obliterates all lines of spiritual beauty; it destroys the moral likeness of the soul to | 
its Creator; it causes the soul to become more and more like the lost and rebellious 
spirits which once shone in brightness and purity before the throne, but.are now sunk Ea 
to the utter depths of hopeless wreck and ruin; it crowds the soul away from light and Fa 
life and joy, away from the Cross and the Crucified, into the outer blackness and mid- y 
night of despair; it separates the soul from God. 

I know the unconverted, surrounded by all the gracious influences of Christian 
society, and still susceptible to the powerful attractions of Calvary, may be inclined to , 
say that the sins they have committed cannot cause such a complete separation from 7 
all good. But why not? All sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. The 
nature of all sin, its real essence, is the same; it is a refusal to do the will of God. 

Suppose we do not swear; suppose you are not dishonest; suppose you have not 
broken the letter of one of the Commandments of.the Decalogue; suppose for the sake : 
of friends, and children, and other relatives, and for your own sake, you have so con- ¢ 
ducted yourself that no blemish has ever rested upon your character, and you have 
gained and now enjoy the confidence of all who know you: it does not therefore follow f 
that you are united to God, and that you dwell in Him, and that He abides in you. 
With all this, in your hearts you may be rejecters of God. You may be neglecters of 
His Word; you may turn away from the inspired volume and deny its claims, without 
ever having given a single week of all your lives to the serious and sober investiga- 
tion of those claims. d 

You may rest assured that such a course as this will separate your souls from God. 
It may not be your deliberate purpose to cut yourselves loose from the divine and 
heavenly attractions, but still I pray you to understand that no surer method of doing 
so can be taken than that you are pursuing. 


8 ° 
The Separation of the Soul from God—Mallalicu. 475 


Perhaps I am appealing to some not guilty of outbreaking sins, who are neverthe- 

ess indulging in some passions, desires, or ambitions, which are opposed to fellowship 
ith God. Each one must know just what the difficulty is, and it is manifest that it is 
the very thing which in time past has kept you from God. You may love riches, 
and are too eager to gain them to be strictly honest; you love worldly pleasures, and 
you know not how you can give them up, and yet you know that you must sacrifice 
hem or you can never come into sweet communion with your Heavenly Father; or 
you ‘eed be cherishing wrong feelings; there may be pride, or wrath, or revenge, or 
, or malice, in your heart, and while this is so you know your prayers even are all 
+ Pia, and yet you refuse to yield to your convictions of right and duty, while all the 
time you are drifting away from God. These evil propensities and passions of the 
unregenerate nature have a terrible affinity with the spirits of darkness and death, and 
they will drag down to perdition any soul who clings to them. 
O, my unconverted readers, why will you not today bring out these idols which 
keep you from God and His love, dnd destroy them. Say to pride, and anger, and 
N ath, and malice, and envy, and revenge, “Ye shall be dethroned, ye shall die;’”’ say 
to the lust for vain and sinful pleasures, and to the greedy desire for gain, “Ye too shall 
die;” say to carelessness, and indifference, and sloth, and every rebellious feeling of 
the heart, “Ye too shall die;’’ and then from the very depths of your souls, cry out— 


ad 


“Nearer, my God, to thee; nearer to thee, 5 Sr I 


E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me.” 


nd I tell you, you shall feel a glorious thrill of joy filling your souls as you realize 
that the sins which separated you from God, and the iniquities that hid His face from 
you, have all been pardoned, and you are resting in the divine love. 

III. What are the consequences of this separation from God? 

First of all, the spiritual life of the soul is extinguished, and insensibility and death 
PT) sue. 

It is not many years since I accompanied a young man to the Boston and Maine 
pot, as he was about to leave the city for his distant home in the country. Coming 
ere when a boy only thirteen or fourteen years of age, one of a large family of 
hildren, and with a very scanty wardrobe, and scarcely more money than enough to 
b ing him to the city, he soon found himself without means, without employment, 
ind without friends. But he would not be discouraged, for he had come from his rural 
home to seek his fortune, and with visions of future wealth as the inspiration of his 
soul. Day after day he spent in looking for a situation, and night after night he slept 
in a hogshead, in which was a little straw, until at length he secured a place as errand 
boy in a retail store. 

_ A more diligent and faithful boy was never known; early and late he toiled, and 
soon gained the good-will of his employers, and was rapidly advanced, until in a few 
fears, he was admitted to the firm, with every prospect that the dreams of his youth 
wo " id be realized. But by improper exposure, he took cold; the cold was fol- 
ed by a cough; then came debility and emaciation. Kind friends warned him of 
danger at every step of the disease, and well do I rermember that many a time, in 
S store and elsewhere, I urged him to leave his business, and take the rest and 
recreation he so much needed, only to be answered, with a pleasant smile, that he was 
young and strong, and that the little cold that was troubling him would soon be gone; 
ie would drive it off, and all would be well. But it was not to be conquered in this 
ay, and so it went steadily on its course. Strength was gone, and appetite was gone, 
ind vigor and elasticity were gone, and with a sad interest I saw him tearfully leave 
he place where, for half his lifetime, he had toiled to win the success he had so 
irdently desired. Only a few days after and I saw him in the cars, and as I left him 


0 
is 
M1 
* 


476 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


him no more on earth, for he was even then a dying man, just able to go home to his 
father and mother, that he might look once more on the familiar scenes of his child- 
hood, and then let the loved ones close his eyes and bury him in the quiet village 
grave-yard. Before he would take rest, or use the proper remedy, or consult the 
skillful physician, he had gone so far that all human hands were too short to reach and 
save him, and however full of sympathy may have been the hearts of his many friends, 
yet all his appeals for help must have been without avail. 

He did, in regard to his bodily health, just what so many are doing in regard to 
their spiritual well-being. In his case, death was the consequence of his neglect; and so 
the soul that separates itself from God by outbreaking sin, or by carelessness and 
indifference, will find, when it is all too late, that the soul must die outside the reach 
of the boundless mercy and love of God. 

Again, the soul that is separate from God will miss forever the eternal revelation 
which God will make of Himself to all who love Him. In all the realms of thought 
and being, there will be to the outcast sinner no manifestation of the divine benignity. 
He may gaze Godward, but never will he see light, never a smile of recognition, never 
an uplifting of the clouds and darkness that hide the awful throne of the majesty 
of God. 

The saved will see Christ, and His glory will be shared by them; they will find in 
Christ the eternal satisfaction of every immortal aspiration; they will walk with Him in 
white, and join with cherubim, and seraphim, and angels, and archangels, in the peans 
of love and victory that all heaven is waiting to hear, and which will be heard through- 
out the universe, even to the depths of the nethermost hell, when all the saints are 
safely gathered to their eternal home. 

The last revelation of Christ to the soul that is separated from God will be that _ 
of the judgment seat, when the crucified Redeemer shall say to those on His left hand: 
“Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” This 
last vision of Christ, and the soul separated from God, turns away from the throne, } 
and sinks into the depths of that fathomless outer darkness from whence there is no 
escape, no return, no deliverance. To be separate from God is to lose all the bliss and a 
glory of heaven; it is to experience the misery of the lost in hell. * 

O that the Divine Spirit might impress upon every soul still separated from God, 
whose eyes shall rest upon this page, that this isa day of hope. The Heavenly Father 
calls His wandering childrén home. Will you come? Will you all come? Will you 
come now? The time is very short in which life’s great work can be done. So much 
of probation has already run to waste, that the greatest diligence and care must be 
employed, or death will find you so far removed from God that hope and mercy can 
never reach you. Every moment’s delay in sin thickens the cloud which now but 
partially obscures the face of God. Every new refusal to accept the offers of divine 
love builds up a thicker wall of separation between your souls and God. Every new ~ 
transgression, every cherished sin, increases the distance between the sinner and the 
Savior. 

O sinner! O precious soul, bought with the blood of Jesus Christ! You are 
building up an impassable barrier, which will shut you out of heaven. Your sins, thee 
they are persisted in, will drive you to that world of joyless sorrow and hopeless 
despair, from whence the ear of the omnipresent God cannot hear your cry for mercy, 
and from whence the arm of the omnipotent Jehovah cannot save you. 


[This sermon is from The Gospel Invitation, a collection published in Boston 
some years since. ] 


(477) 


PARTING WORDS. 


JAMES MARTINEAU. 


- “Peace I leave with you: My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, 
give I unto you.”—John 14: 27. 


This is a strange benediction to proceed from the Man of Sorrows, at the dreariest 
moment of His life; strange at least to those who look only to His outward career, 
His incessant contact with misery and sin, His absolute solitude of purpose, His lot 
stricken with sadness ever new from the temptation to the cross; but not strange per- 
haps to those who heard the deep and quiet tones in which this oracle of promise went 
forth—the divinest music from the center of the darkest fate. He was on the bosom of 
the beloved disciple and in the midst of those who should have cheered Him in that 
hour with such comfort as fidelity can always offer; but who, failing in their duty to 
His griefs, found the sadness creep upon themselves; while He, seeking to give peace 
to them, found it Himself profusely in the gift. It was not till He had finished this inter- 
view and effort of affection, and from the warmth of that evening meal and the flush 
of its deep converse they had issued into the chill and silent midnight air, not till the 
sanctity of moonlight (never to be seen by Him again) had invested Him, and coarse 
fatigue had sunk His disciples into sleep upon the grass, that having none to comfort, 
He found anguish fall upon Himself. Deprived of the embrace of John, He flew to 
the bosom of the Father; and after a momentary strife, recovered in trust the serenity 
He had found in toil; and while His followers lie stretched in earthly slumber, He 
reaches a divine repose; while they, yielding to nature, gain neither strength nor cour- 
age for the morrow, He, through the vigils of agony, rises to that godlike power, on 
which mockery and insult beat in vain, and which has made the cross—then the 
emblem of abjectness and guilt—the everlasting symbol of whatever is holy and 
sublime. 

The peace of Christ, then, was the fruit of combined toil and trust; in the one 
case diffusing itself from the center of His active life, in the other from that of His 
Passive emotions; enabling Him in the one case to do things tranquilly; in the other, 
to see things tranquilly. Two things only can make life go wrong and painfully with 
us; when we suffer or suspect misdirection and feebleness in the energies of love and 
duty within us, or in the providence of the world without us: bringing, in the one 
case, the lassitude of an unsatisfied and discordant nature; in the other, the melancholy 
of hopeless views. For these Christ delivers us by a summons to mingled toil and 
trust. And herein does His peace differ from that which ‘the world giveth’—that its 
prime essential is not ease, but strife; not self-indulgence, but self-sacrifice; not acqui- 
 escence in evil for the sake of quiet, but conflict with it for the sake of God; not, in 
_ short, a prudent accommodation of the mind to the world, but a resolute subjugation 
of the world to the best conceptions of the mind. Amply has the promise to leave 
behind Him such a peace been since fulfilled. It was fulfilled to the apostles who first 
received it; and has been realized again by a succession of faithful men to whom they 

have delivered it. : 

i The word “‘peace”’ denotes the absence of jar and conflict; a condition free from 
the restlessness of fruitful desire, the forebodings of anxiety, the stings of enmity. It 


478 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


may be destroyed by discordance between the lot without and the mind within, where q 
the human being is in an obviously false position—an evil rare and usually self- 
curative; or by a discordance wholly internal, among the desires and affections them- 


selves. The first impulse of “the natural man” is to seek peace by mending his 


external condition; to quiet desire by increase of ease; to banish anxiety by increase 


of wealth; to guard against hostility by making himself too strong for it; to build up 
his life into a fortress of security and a palace of comfort, where he may softly lie, 
though tempests beat and rain descends. The spirit of Christianity casts away at once 
this whole theory of peace; declares it the most chimerical of dreams; and proclaims it 
impossible even to make this kind of reconciliation between the soul and the life 
wherein it acts. As well might the athlete demand a victory without a foe. To the 
noblest faculties of soul rest is disease and torture. The understanding is com- 
missioned to grapple with ignorance, the conscience to confront the powers of moral 
evil, the affections to labor for the wretched and oppressed; nor shall any peace be 
found, till these, which reproach and fret us in our most elaborate ease, put forth an 
incessant and satisfying energy; till instead of conciliating the world, we vanquish it; 
and rather than sit still, in the sickness of luxury, for it to amuse our perceptions, we 
precipitate ourselves upon it to mould it into a new creation. Attempt to make all 
smooth and pleasant without, and you thereby create the most corroding of anxieties, 
and stimulate the most insatiable of appetites within. But let there be harmony 
within, let no clamors of self drown the voice which is entitled to authority there; let 
us set forth on the mission of duty, resolved to live for it alone, to close with every 
resistance that obstructs it, and march through every peril that awaits it; and in the 
consciousness of immortal power, the sense of mortal ill will vanish; and the peace of 
God well nigh extinguish the sufferings of the man. “In the world we may have 
tribulation; in Christ we shall have peace.” _ 


This peace, so remote from torpor—arising, indeed, from the intense action of the 


greatest of all ideas, those of duty, of immortality, of God—fell, according to the — 


promise, on the first disciples. Not in vain did Jesus tell them in their sorrows that 
the Comforter would come; nor falsely did He define this blessed visitant, as “the 
spirit of truth’”—the soul reverentially faithful to its convictions, and expressing clearly 
in action its highest aspirings. Such peace had Stephen, when before the Sanhedrim 
that was striving to hush up the recent story of the Cross, he proclaimed aloud the 
sequel of the Ascension; and priests and elders arose and stopped their ears, and thrust 
him out to death; he had his peace; else how, if heaven of divinest tranquility had 
not opened to him and revealed to him the proximity of Christ to God, how, as the 
stone struck his uncovered and uplifted head, could he have so calmly said, ‘Lord, 
lay not this sin to their charge?” Such peace had Paul—at least when he ceased to 
rebel against his noble nature, and became, instead of the emissary of persecution, the 
ambassador of God. Was there ever a life of less ease and security, yet of more 
buoyant and rejoicing spirit than his? What weight did he not cast aside, to run the 
race that was set before him? What tie of home or nation did he not break, that he 
might join in one the whole family of God? For forty years the scoff of synagogues 
and the outcast of his people, he forgot the privations of the exile in the labors of the 
missionary; flying from charges of sedition he disseminated the principles of peace; 
persecuted from city to city, yet he created in each a center of pure worship and 
‘Christian civilization, and along the coasts of Asia, and colonies of Macedonia, and 
citadels of Greece, dropped link after link of the great chain of truth that shall yet 
embrace the world. Amid the joy of making converts, he had also the affliction of 
making martyrs; to witness the sufferings, perhaps to bear the reproaches, of surviv- 
ors; with weeping heart to rebuke the fears, and sustain the faith of many a doubted; 
and in solitude and bonds to send forth the effusions of his earnest spirit to quicken 


Parting Words—Martineau. 479 


the life, and renovate the gladness, of the confederate churches. Yet when did 
‘speculation at its ease ever speak with vigor so noble and cheerfulness so fresh, as 
his glorious letters; which recount his perils by land and sea, his sorrows with friend 
and foe, and declared that ‘none of these things move” him; which show him pro- 
jecting incessant work, yet ready for instant rest; conscious that already he has fought 
the good fight, and willing to finish his course and resign the field; but prepared, if 
needs be, to grasp again the sword of the spirit, and go forth in quest of wider 
victories. Does any one suppose that it would have been more peaceful to look back 
‘on a life less exposed and adventurous, on a lot sheltered and secure, on soft-bedded 
comfort, and unbroken plenty, and conventional compliance? No! it is only before- 
hand that we mistake these things for peace; in the retrospect we know them better, 
‘and would exchange them all for one vanquished temptation in the desert, for one 
‘patient bearing of the cross! What—when all is over, and we lie upon the last bed— 
what is the worth to us of all our guilty compromises, of all the moments stolen from 
duty to be given to ease? If Paul had cowered before the tribunal of Nero, and 
trembled at his comrade’s blood, and, instead of baring his neck to the imperial 
sword, had purchased by poor evasions another year of life—where would that year 
have been now—a lost drop in the deep waters of time—yet not lost, but rather 
mingled as a poison in the refreshing stream of good men’s goodness by which Provi- 
dence fertilizes the ages. 
} The peace of Christ, thus inherited by His disciples, and growing out of a living 
spirit of duty and of love, contrasts not merely with guilty ease, but with that mere 
mechanical facility in blameless action which habit gives. There is something faithless 
and ignoble in the very reasonings sometimes employed to recommend virtuous 
habits. They are urged upon us, because they smooth the way of right; we are 
invited to them for the sake of ease. Adopted in such a temper, duty after all makes 
its bargain with indulgence, and is not yet pursued for its own sake and with the 
allegiance of a loving heart. Moreover, whoever has a true conscience sees that there 
is a fallacy in this persuasion; for whenever habits become mechanical, they cease to 
Satisfy the requirements of duty; the obligations of which enlarge definitely with our 
powers, demanding an undiminished tension of the will, and an ever-constant life of 
_ the affections. It can never be, that a soul which has a heaven open to its view, which 
_ is stationed here, not simply to accommodate itself to the arrangement of this world, 
but also to school itself for the spirit of another, is intended to rest in mere automatic 
regularities. When the mind is thrown into other scenes, and finds itself in the 
society of the world invisible, suddenly introduced to the heavenly wise and the sainted 
; good—what peace can it expect from mere dry tendencies to acts no longer practicable 
and blameless things now left behind? No; it must have that pure love which is 
| mowhere a stranger, in earth or heaven; that vital goodness of the affections, that 
| adjusts itself at once to every scene where there is truth and holiness to venerate; that 
conscience, wakeful and devout, which enters with instant joy on any career of duty 
and progress opened to its aspirations. And even in “the life that now is,” the mere 
‘mechanist of virtue, who copies precepts with mimetic accuracy, is too frequently at 
fault, to have even the poor peace which custom promises. He is at home only on his 
own beat. An emergency perplexes him, and too often tempts him disgracefully to 
fly. He wants the inventiveness by which a living heart of duty seizes the resources 
of good, and uses them to the last; and the courage by which love, like honor, starts 
to the post of noble danger, and maintains it till, by such fidelity, it becomes a place of 
danger no more. It is a vain attempt to comprise in rules and aphorisms all the 
va ious moral exigencies of life. Hardly does such legality suffice to define the small 
portion of right and wrong contemplated in human jurisprudence. But the true 
astincts of a pure mind, like the creative genius of art, frames rules most perfect in 


480 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the act of obeying them, and throws the materials of life into the fairest attitudes and 
the justest proportions. He whose allegiance is paid to the mere perceptive system, 
shapes and carves his duty into the homeliest of wooden idols; he who has the spirit 
of Christ turns it into an image breathing and divine. Children of God in the noblest 
sense, we are not without something of His creative spirit in our hearts. The power 
is there to separate the light from the darknes within us, and set in the firmament 
of the soul luminaries to guide and gladden us, for seasons and for years; power to 
make the herbage green beneath our feet, and beckon happy creatures into existen 
around our path; power to mould the clay of our earthly nature into the likeness o 
God most high; and thus only have we power to look back in peace upon our work, 
and find a Sabbath rest upon the thought that, morning and evening, all is good. 


of going from us, returns upon us; and the scenes of our existence present themselves 
to us as objects of speculation and emotion. Sometimes we are forced into quietude — 
in pauses of exhaustion or of grief; stretched upon the bed of pain, to hear the grez 


over the vast plain of humanity, and from a height that covers it with silence observe 
its groups shifting and traversing like spirits in a city of the dead. At such times our — 
peace must depend on the view under which our faith or our fears may exhibit this 
mighty “field of the world;” on the forces of evil, of fortuity, or of God, which we — 
suppose to be secretly directing the changes on the scene, and calling up the bri 
apparition of generation after generation. And so great and terrible is the amount | 
of evil, physical and moral, in the great community of men; so vast the numbers sunk 
in barbarism, compared with the few who more nobly represent our nature; so many — 
and piercing (could we but hear them) the cries of unpitied wretchedness, that with 
every beat of the pendulum wander unnoticed into the air; so dense the crowds that 
are thrust together in the deepest recesses of want, and that crawl through the loath- 

some hives of sin; that only two men can look through the world without dismay; he, 
on the one hand, who suffering himself to be bewildered with momentary horror, and — 
in the confusion of his emotions, to mistake what he sees for the moral chaos, turns 7 
his back in the despair of fatalism, crying, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we — 
die;” and he, on the other, who, with the discernment of a deeper wisdom, penetrates ! 
through the shell of evil to the kernel and the seed of good; who perceives in suffering 4 
and temptation the resistance which alone can render virtue manifest, and conscience — 
great, and existence venerable; who recognizes, even in the gigantic growth of guilt, — 
the grasp of infinite desires, and the perseverance of god-like capacities; who sees how 

soon, were God to take up His omnipotence, and snatch from His creature man the 

care of the world and the work of self-perfection, all that deforms might be swept — 
away, and the meanest lifted through the interval that separates them from the noblest; 
and who therefore holds fast to the theory of hope, and the kindred duty of effort; 

takes shelter beneath the universal Providence of God; and seeing time enough in 

His vast cycles for the growth and consummation of every blessing, can be patient — 
as well as trust; can resign the selfish vanity of doing all things himself, and making 
a finish before he dies; and cheerfully give up his life to build up the mighty temple 
of human improvement, though no inscription mark it for glory, and it be as one of 
the hidden stones of the sanctuary, visible only to the eye of God. Such was the spirit 
and the faith which Jesus left, and in which His first disciples found their rest. Within 
the infinitude of the divine mercy trouble did but fold them closer; the perversity of r ' 
man did but provoke them to put forth a more conquering love; and though none — 
were eyer more the sport of the selfish interests and prejudices of mankind, or came _ 


Parting Words—Martineau. 451 


made their little portion of the desert smile, departed in the faith that the green margin 
would spread as the seasons of God came round, till the mantle of heaven covered the 
sarth, and it ended with Eden as it had begun. 

Between these two sources of Christian peace, virtuous toil, and holy trust, there 
is an intimate connection. The desponding are generally the indolent and useless; 
not the tried and struggling, but speculators at a distance from the scene of things, 
and far from destitute of comforts themselves. Barren of the most blessed of human 
sympathies, strangers to the light that best gladdens the heart of man, they are without 
the materials of a bright and hopeful faith. But he who consecrates himself sees at 
once how God may sanctify the world; he whose mind is rich in the memory of moral 
Victories will not easily believe the world a scene of moral defeats; nor was it ever 
known that one who, like Paul, labored for the good of man, despaired of the benevo- 
lence of God. 

Whoever then would have the peace of Christ, let him seek first the spirit of 
Christ. Let him not fret against the conditions which God assigns to his being, but 
reverently conform himself to them, and do and enjoy the good which they allow. 
Let him cast himself freely on the career to which the secret persuasion of duty points, 
without reservation of happiness or self; and in the exercise which its difficulties give 


Story; for it is conscious of its immortality, and hastening to its heaven. And there 
its peace be consummated at length; its griefs transmuted into delicious retro- 


[This sermon is from a volume entitled Endeavors After the Christian Life. It 
was considered by President Bashford one of the ten best sermons of the nineteenth 
p tury. ] J 


482 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. 


JOHN H. MASON, D. D. 


“To the poor the Gospel is preached.”—Luke 7: 22. 


the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite 
earth with a curse.” Accordingly, at the appointed time, came John the Baptist, “in 
the spirit and power of Elias,” saying, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand.” In his great work of “preparing the way for the Lord,” he challenged si 
without respect of persons. The attempt was hazardous; but feeling the majesty of 
his character, he was not to be moved by considerations which divert or intimide 
the ordinary man. Name, sect, station, were alike to him. Not even the imperial 
purple, when it harbored a crime, afforded protection from his rebuke. His fidel 
in this point cost him his life. For having “reproved Herod, for Herodias, his broth 
Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done,” he was thrown into pris 
and at length sacrificed to the most implacable of all resentments, the resentment 
an abandoned woman. ; 

It was in the interval between his arrest and execution that he sent to Jesus the 
message on which my text is grounded. As his office gave him no security agai 
the workings of unbelief in the hour of temptation, it is not strange if, in a dungeon 
and in chains, his mind was invaded by an occasional doubt. The, question by two 
of his disciples, “Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?” has a 
the air of an inquiry for personal satisfaction; and so his Lord’s reply seems to tre: 
it. “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the 
blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, t 
the poor the gospel is preached.” The answer is clear and convincing. It enumera 
the very signs by which the Church was to know her God, “for whom she had waited;” 
and they were enough to remove the suspicions, and confirm the soul, of his se ant 
John. an t 

Admitting that Jesus Christ actually wrought the works here ascribed to ee 4 
every sober man will conclude with Nicodemus, “We know that Thou art a teachel 
come from God; for no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except God be 
with him.” It is not, however, my intention to dwell on the miraculous evidence of 
Christianity. The article, which I select as exhibiting it in a plain but interesting 
view, is “The Preaching of Gospel to the Poor.” 

In Scriptural language, “the poor,” who are most exposed to suffering and leas 
able to encounter it, represent all who are destitute of goods necessary to their per- 
fection and happiness; especially those who feel their want, and are disconsolate 
especially those who are anxiously “waiting for the consolation of Israel.” This i 
Ps, 40:17: “I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me.” Thus in Is. 41:17 
“When the poor and needy seek water and there is none, and their tongue failet 


The Gospel to the Poor—Mason. 483 


for thirst, I, the Lord, will hear them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.” 
Thus, also, chapter 61:1: “The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings to 
the meek;” the same word with that rendered ‘“‘poor;” and so it is translated by Luke, 
chapter 4:18, “to preach the gospel to the poor;” which is connected both in the 
‘prophet and evangelist, with “healing the broken-hearted.” Our Lord, therefore, 
refers John, as He did the Jews in the synagogue of Nazareth, to this very prediction 
as fulfilled in Himself. So that His own definition of His own religion is a system of 
consolation for the wretched. This is so far from excluding the literal poor that the 
“success of the gospel with them is the pledge of its success with all others; for they not 
only form the majority of the human race, but they also bear the chief burden of its 
calamities. Moreover, as the sources of pleasure and pain are substantially the same 
in all men; and as affliction, by suspending the influence of their artificial distinctions, 
‘reduces them to the level of their common nature; whatever, by appealing to the prin- 
ciples of that nature, promotes the happiness of the multitude, must equally promote 
‘the happiness of the residue; and whatever consoles the one must, in like circum- 
stances, console the other also. As we cannot, therefore, maintain the suitableness of 
‘the gospel to the literal poor, who are the mass of mankind, without maintaining its 
iP erogative of comforting the afflicted; nor, on the contrary, its prerogative of com- 
forting separately from its suitableness to the mass of mankind, I shall consider these 
_ two ideas as involving each other. 


_ With this explanation, the first thing which demands your notice is the fact itself— 
Gospel Preached to the Poor. 
From the remotest antiquity there have been, in all civilized nations, men who 
devoted themselves to the increase of knowledge and happiness. Their speculations 
we re subtle, their arguings acute, and many of their maxims respectable. But to 
whom were their instructions addressed? To casual visitors, to selected friends, to 
admiring pupils, to privileged orders. In some countries, and on certain occasions, 
when vanity was to be gratified by the acquisition of fame, their appearances were 
“more public. For example, one read a poem, another a history, and a third a play, 
before the crowds assembled at the Olympic games. To be crowned there was, in 
the proudest period of Greece, the summit of glory and ambition. But what did this, 
What did the mysteries of pagan worship, or what the lectures of pagan philosophy, 
ail the people? Sunk in ignorance, in poverty and crime, they lay neglected. Age 
icceeded to age, and school to school, a thousand sects and systems rose, flourished, 
d fell; but the degradation of the multitude remained. Not a beam of light found 
its way into darkness, nor a drop of consolation into their cup. Indeed a plan for 
Taising them to the dignity of rational enjoyment, and fortifying them against the 
isasters of life, was not to be expected; for as nothing can exceed the contempt in 
y hich they were held by the professors of wisdom, so any human device, however 
captivating in theory, would have been worthless in fact. The most sagacious heathen 
could imagine no better means of improving them than in the precepts of his philoso- 
phy. Now, supposing it to be ever so salutary, its benefits must have been confined 
0 a very few; the notion that the bulk of mankind may become philosophers, being 
Itogether extravagant. They ever have been, and, in the nature of things, ever must 
@, unlearned. Besides, the grovelling superstition and brutal manners of the heathen 
Presented insuperable obstacles. Had the plan of their cultivation been even sug- 
gested, especially if it comprehended the more abject of the species, it would have been 
iMiversally derided, and, would have merited derision, no less than the dreams of 
|) modern folly about the perfectibility of man. 
| Under this incapacity of instructing the poor, how would the pagan sage have 
equitted himself as their comforter? His dogmas, during prosperity and health, 
| might humor his fancy, might flatter his pride, or dupe his understanding; but against 


| 
' 
1 a 
| 
| 


484 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the hour of grief or dissolution he had no solace for himsef, and could have none for 
others. I am not to be persuaded, in contradiction to every principle of my anima 
and rational being, that pain, and misfortune, and death, are no evils and beneath a | 
wise man’s regard. And could I work myself up into so absurd conviction, how would 
it promote my comfort? Comfort is essentially consistent with nature and truth. By 
perverting my judgment, by hardening my heart, by chilling my nobler warmth, and _ 
stifling my best affections, I may grow stupid; but shall be far enough from consola- 
tion. Convert me into a beast, and I shall be without remorse; into a block, and 1 
shall feel no pain. But this was not my request. I asked you for consolation, and © 
you destroy my ability to receive it. I asked you to bear me over death, into the 
fellowship of immortals, and you begin by transforming me into a monster! Here — 
are no glad tidings; nothing to cheer the gloom of outward or inward poverty. And 
the pagan teacher could give no better. From him, therefore, the miserable, even of 
his own country, and class, and kindred, had nothing to hope. But to “lift the needy — 
from the dunghill,” and wipe away the tears from the mourner, to lighten the burdens 
of the heart, to heal its maladies, repair its losses and enlarge its enjoyments; and that 
under every form of penury and sorrow, in all nations, and ages, and circumstances; 
as it is a scheme too vast for the human faculties, so, had it been committed to mere oa 
human execution, it could not have proceeded a single step, and would have been 
remembered only as a frantic revery. 

Yet all this hath Christianity undertaken. Her voice is, without distinction, to 
people of every color, and clime, and condition; to the continent and the isles; to the — 
man of the city, the man of the field, and-the man of the woods; to the Moor, the 
Hindoo, and the Hottentot, to the sick and desperate; to the beggar, the convict, “7 


the slave. She impairs no faculty, interdicts no affection, infringes no relation; but, 
taking men as they are, with all their depravity and woes, she proffers them peace and — 
blessedness. Her boasting is not vain. The course of experiment has lasted through — 
more than fifty generations of men. It is passing every hour before our eyes; and, 
for reasons to be afterwards assigned, has never failed, in a single instance, when it 
has been fairly tried. ‘ 


To design is stupendous; and the least success induces us to inquire, by whom it~ 
was projected and carried into effect. And what is our astonishment, when we learn 
that it was by men of obscure birth, mean education, and feeble resource; by men -, 
from a nation hated for their religion, and proverbial for their moroseness; by carpen-— 
ters, tax-gatherers, and fishermen of Judea! What shall we say of this phenomenon? 
A recurrence to the Jewish scriptures, which had long predicted it, either surrenders — 
the argument or increases the difficulty. If you admit that they reveal futurity, you 
recognize the finger of God, and the controversy is at an end. If you call them mere 
conjectures, you are still to account for their correspondence with the event, and to 
explain how a great system of benevolence, unheard, unthought of by learned — 
antiquity, came to be cherished, to be transmitted for centuries, from father to son, 
and at length attempted among the Jews! And you are also contradicted by the fact, — 
that however clearly such a system is marked out in their scriptures, they were sO — 
for from adopting it that they entirely mistook it; rejected it, nationally, with disdain; — 
persecuted unto death those who embarked in it; and have not embraced it to this day! 
Yet in the midst of this bigoted and obstinate people sprang up the deliverance of the 3 
human race. “Salvation is of the Jews.” Within half a century after the resurrection — 
of Christ His disciples had penetrated to the extremes of the Roman empire and had 
carried the “day-spring from on high” to innumerable tribes who were “sitting in 
the region and shadow of death.” And so exclusively Christian is this plan, so remote 
from the sphere of common effort, that after it has been proposed and executed, men 
revert perpetually to their wonted littleness and carelessness. The whole face of 


\ 


The Gospel to the Poor—Mason. 485 


Christendom is overspread with proofs that, in proportion as they depart from the 
implicity of the gospel, they forget the multitude as before and the doctrines of con- 
solatiom expire. In so far, too, as they adapt to their own notions of propriety the 
general idea, which they have borrowed from the gospel, of meliorating the condition 
of their species, they have produced, and are every day producing, effects the very 
reverse of their professions. Discontent, and confusion, and crimes they propagate 
in abundance. They have smitten the earth with curses, and deluged it with blood; 
but the instance 1s yet to be discovered in which they have “bound up the broken- 
learted.” The fact, therefore, that Christianity is, in the broadest sense of the terms, 
“g ad tidings to the poor,” is perfectly original. It stands without rival or comparison. 
[it has no foundation in the principles of human enterprise; and could never have 
existed without the inspiration of that “Father of lights, from whom cometh down 
ery good and every perfect gift.” 


II. As the Christian fact is original, so the reasons of its efficacy are peculiar. 
Christianity can afford consolation, because it is fitted to our nature and character. I 
specify particulars: 


First, the gospel proceeds upon the principle of immortality. 

That our bodies shall die is indisputable. But that reluctance of nature, that 
panting after life, that horrer of annihilation, of which no man can completely divest 
himself, connect the death of the body with deep solicitude. While neither these, nor 
any other merely rational considerations, ascertain the certainty of future being; much 
less of future bliss. The feeble light which glimmered around this point among the 
heathen flowed not from investigation, but tradition. It was to be seen chiefly among 
the vulgar, who inherited the tales of their fathers; and among the poets, who preferred 
popular fable to philosophic speculation. Reason would have pursued her discovery; 
but the pagans knew not how to apply the notion of immortality, even when they had 
t It governed not their precepts; it established not their hope. When they attempt- 
td to discuss the grounds of it, “they became vain in their imaginations, and their 
polish heart was darkened.” The best arguments of Socrates are unworthy of a child, 
ho has “learned the holy scriptures.”” And it is remarkable enough that the doctrine 
of immortality is as perfectly. detached, and as barren of moral effect, in the hands of 
nodern infidels as it was in the hands of the ancient pagans. They have been so unable 
to assign it to a convenient place in their systems; they have found it to be so much at 
ariance with their habits, and so troublesome in their warfare with the scriptures, that 
he more resolute of the sect have discarded it altogether. With the soberer part of 
them it is no better than an opinion; but it never was, and never will be, a source of 
Tue consolation in any system or any bosom, but the system of Christianity and the 
psom of the Christian. ‘Life and Immortality,” about which some have guessed, for 
hich all have sighed, but of which none could trace the relations, or prove the 
existence, are not merely hinted, they “are brought to light by the gospel.” This is the 
Darting point with every other religion; and yet the very point upon which our 
appiness hangs. That we shall survive the body, and pass from its dissolution to the 
ar of God, and from the bar of God to endless retribution, are truths of infinite 
10ment, and of pure revelation. They demonstrate the incapacity of temporal things 
D content the soul. They explain why grandeur, and pleasure, and fame, leave the 
heart sad. He who pretends to be my comforter without consulting my immortality 
pverlooks my essential want. The gospel supplies it. Immortality is the basis of her 
ubric. She resolves the importance of man into its true reason—the value of his soul. 
he sees under every human form, however rugged or abused, a spirit unalterable by 
xternal change, unassailable by death, and endued with stupendous faculties of 
nowledge and action, of enjoyment and suffering; a spirit, at the same time, depraved 


. 
wD 


486 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and guilty, and therefore liable to irreparable ruin. These are Christian views. They 
elevate us to a height, at which the puny theories of the world stand and gaze. They 
stamp new interest on all my relations and all my acts. They hold up before me objects 
vast as my wishes, terrible as my fears, and permanent as my being. They bind me to 
eternity. 3 


Secondly, having thus unfolded the general doctrine of immortality, the gospel 
advances further, informing us, that although a future life is sure, future blessedness is — 
by no means a matter of course. This receives confirmation from a review of our | ] 
character as sinners. ; ‘ 


None but an atheist, or, which is the same thing, a madman, will deny the existence 
of moral obligation, and the sanction of moral law. In other words, that it is our duty 
to obey God, and that He has annexed penalties to diobedience. As little can it be 
denied that we have actually disobeyed Him. Guilt has taken up its abode in the 
conscience, and indicates, by signs not to be misunderstood, both in presence and 
power. To call this superstitious betrays only that vanity which thinks to confutea 
doctrine by giving it an ill name. Depravity and its consequences meet us, at every 
moment, in a thousand shapes; nor is there an individual breathing who has escaped _ 
its taint. Therefore our relations to our Creator as innocent creatures have ceased; 
and are succeeled by the relation of rebels against His government. In no other ~ 
light can He contemplate us, because His “judgment is according to truth.” A con-— 
viction of this begets alarm and wretchedness. And whatever some may pretend, a 
guilty conscience is the secret worm which preys upon the vitals of human peace; the — 
invisible spell which turns the draught of pleasure into wormwood and gall. To ~ 
laugh at it as an imaginary evil is the mark of a fool: for what can be more rational 
than to tremble at the displeasure of an almighty God. If, then, I ask how I am to 2, 
be delivered? or whether deliverance is possible? human reason is dumb: or if she — 
open her lips it is only to tease me with conjectures, which evince that she knows — 
nothing of the matter. Here the Christian verity interferes; showing me, on the one ~ 
hand, that my alarm is well founded; that my demerit with whom I have to do, “will ~ 
by no means clear the guilty;” but, on the other hand, revealing the provision of His — 
infinite wisdom and grace, for releasing me from guilt. ‘God so loved the world that 
He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, 
but have everlasting life.” The more I ponder this method of salvation, the more I ~ 
am convinced that it displays the divine perfection and exalts the divine government; 
so that, “it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in 
bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect throaea ; 
sufferings.” Now I know where to obtain the first requisite to happiness, pardon of | 
sin, In Christ Jesus, the Lord, is that justifying righteousness, the want of which, 
though I was ignorant of the cause, kept me miserable a this hour. I cling to it, 
and am safe. His precious blood “purges my conscience.” It “extends peace to me as 
a river, and the glory of redemption like a flowing stream.’ My worst fears are dis- _ 
pelled: “the wrath to come” is not for me; I can look with composure at futurity, and 
feel joy springing up with the thought that I am immortal. 


Third, in addition to deliverance from wrath, Christianity provides relief against 
the plague of the heart. 


Rr 


It will not be contested that disorder reigns among the passions of men. The 4 
very attempts to rectify it are a sufficient concession; and their ill success shows their 
authors to have been physicians of no value. That particular ebullitions of passion 
have been repressed, and particular habits of vice overcome, without Christian aid, is ai 


admitted. But if any one shall conclude that these are examples of victory over the Pe 
* 
+ 


The Gospel to the Poor—Mason. 487 


inciple of depravity, he will greatly err. For, not to insist that that experience ot 
ie world is against him, we have complete evidence that all reformations, not evan- 
elical, are merely an exchange of lusts; or rather, the elevation of one evil appetite 
; the depression, of another; the strength of depravity continuing the same: its form 
ly varied. Nor can it be otherwise. Untaught of God, the most comprehensive 
snius is unable either to trace the original of corruption, or to check its force. It has 
its fountain where he least and last believes it to be; but where the omniscient eye 
as searched it out; in the human heart; the heart filled with “enmity against God” — 
he heart “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” “But the discovery being 
nade, His measures, you hope, will take surer effect.’””’ Quite the contrary. It now 
fies His power, as it formerly did His wisdom. How have disciples of the moral 
chool studied and toiled? How have they resolved, and vowed, and fasted, watched, 
nd prayed, travelling through the whole circuit of devout austerities! and set down 
t last, ‘““wearied in the greatness of their way!” But no marvel! the “Ethiopian can- 
change his skin, nor the leopard his spots.” Neither can impurity purify itself. 
dere again, light from the footsteps of the Christian truth breaks in upon the darkness; 
id gospel again flows from her tongue; the gospel of a new heart—the gospel of 
egenerating and sanctifying grace; as the promise, the gift, the work of God. “I will 
rinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean; from all your filthiness, and 
om all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new 
pirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh; 
ind I will give you an heart of flesh; and I will put my spirit within you, and cause you 
0 walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments and do them.” Here all our 
ficulties are resolved at once. The spirit of life in Christ Jesus quickens ‘the dead 
3 trespasses and sins. The Lord, our strength, works in us all the good pleasure of 
lis goodness, and the work of faith with power.” That which was impossible with 
nen, is not so with Him; for “with Him all things are possible; even the subduing our 
liquities;”’ creating us anew, after his own image, “in knowledge, righteousness, and 
ae holiness;” turning our polluted souls into His own habitation through the 
birit;’” and making us “meet for the inheritance of the saints in light.” Verily this is 
spel; worthy to go in company with remission of sin. And shall I conquer at last? 
ull I, indeed, be delivered from the bondage and the torment of corruption? A new 
rnsation passes through my breast. “I lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence 
pmeth my help;” and with the hope of “perfecting holiness in the fear of God,” hail 
ty immortality. 


Fourthly. Having thus removed our guilt and cleansed our affections, the gospel 
bceeds to put us in possession of adequate enjoyment. An irresistible law of our 
ing impels us to seek happiness. Nor will a million of frustrated hopes deter from 
experiments; because despair is infinitely more excruciating than the fear of fresh 
ppointment. But an impulse, always vehement and never successful, multiplies 
€ materials and inlets of pain. The assertion carries with its own proof; and the 
‘inciple it assumes is verified by the history of our species. In every place, and at all 
ingenuity has been racked to meet the ravenous desires. Occupation, wealth, 
gnity, science, amusement, all have been tried; are all tried at this hour; and all in 
ain. The heart still repines: the unappeased cry is give, give. There is a fatal error 
mewhere; and the gospel detects it. Fallen away from God, we have substituted the 
ature in His place. This is the grand mistake: the fraud which sin has committed 
on our nature. The gospel reveals God as the satisfying good, and brings it within 
rreach. It proclaims Him reconciled in Christ Jesus, as our Father, our Friend, our 
rtion. It introduces us into His presence with liberty to ask in the Intercessor’s 
me, and asking, to “receive, that our joy may be full.” It keeps us under His eye; 


488 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


surrounds us with His arm; feeds us upon living bread which He gives from heaven; 
seals us up to an eternal inheritance; and even engages to reclaim our dead bodies 
from the grave, and fashion them in beauty, which shall vie with heaven! It is 
enough! My prayers and desires can go no further: I have got to the “fountain of 
living waters—Return to thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with 
thee!” 


This gospel of immortality, in righteousness, purity, and bliss, would ‘be inesti- 
mable, were it even obscure, and not to be comprehended without painful scrutiny. — 
But I observe again. 


Fifthly. That, unlike the systems of men, and contrary to their anticipations, the + 
gospel is as simple as it is glorious. Its primary doctrines, though capable of exer-— 
cising the most disciplined talent, are adapted to the common understanding. Were 1 
they dark and abstruse, they might gratify a speculative mind, but would be lost upon 
the multitude, and be unprofitable to all, as doctrines of consolation. The mass of 
mankind never can be profound reasoners. To omit other difficulties, they have not 4 
leisure. Instruction, to do them good, must be interesting, solemn, repeated, and 
plain. This is the benign office of the gospel. Her principle topics are few; they are 
constantly recurring in various connections; they come home to every man’s condi- 
tion; they have an interpreter in his bosom: they are enforced by motives which 
honesty can hardly mistake, and conscience will rarely dispute. Unlettered men, whoa 
love their Bible, seldom quarrel about the prominent articles of faith and duty; and as 
seldom do they appear among the proselytes, that meagre refinement which arrogates — 
the title of Philosophical Christianity. 


From its simplicity, moreover, the gospel derives advantages in consolation. Grief, e 
whether in the learned or illiterate, is always simple. A man, bowed down under ‘ 
calamity, has no relish for investigation. His powers relax; he leans upon his com- ~ 
forter; his support must be without toil, or his spirit faints. Conformably to these 
reflections, we see, on the one hand, that the unlearned compose the bulk of Christians; 7 
the life of whose souls is in the substantial doctrines of the cross—and on the other, 
that in the time of affliction even the careless lend their ear to the voice of revelation. 
Precious, at all times, to believers, it is doubly precious in the hour of trial. These 
things prove, not only that the gospel, when understood, gives a peculiar relief in — 
trouble, but that it is readily apprehended; being most acceptable when we are the — 
least inclined to critical research. ae 


hi 


Sixthly. The gospel, so admirable for its simplicity, has also the recommendation — 
of truth. The wretch who dreams of transport feels a new sting in his wretchedness ~ 
when he opens his eyes, and the delusion is fled. No real misery can be removed, nor 
any real benefit conferred, by doctrines which want the seal of certainty. And were 
the gospel of Jesus a human invention; or were it checked by any rational suspicion, 
that it may turn out to be a fable, it might retain its brilliancy, its sublimity, and even 
a portion of its interest; but the charm of its consolation would be gone. Nay, it 
would add gall to bitterness, by fostering a hope which the next hour might laugh to 
scorn. But we may dismiss our anxiety, for there is no hazard of such an issue. Not 
only “grace,” but “truth,” came by Jesus Christ. The gracious words which proceeded 
out of His mouth were words of the Amen, the faithful and the true Witness; and 
those which He has written in His blessed book, are “pure words, as silver tried in the — 
furnace, purified seven times.” His promises no man can deny to be exceeding great; 
yet they derive their value to us from assurances, which, by satisfying the hardest 
conditions of evidence, render doubt not only inexcusable, but even criminal. “By two — 
immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we have a strong consola-_ Zt 


Bi 


/ 


a A ne 


The Gospel to the Poor—Mason. 489 


tion who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before ts.” Now, there- 
fore, the promises of the gospel which are. “exceeding great,” are also “precious.” We 
d not scruple to trust ourselves for this life and the life to come upon that word 


Cc hristianity glad tidings’to the depressed and perishing! No fear of disappointment. 
No hope that shall make ashamed! Under the feet of evangelical faith is a covenant 


col oborated by millions in both worlds, “I know whom I have believed, and I am 
suaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against 


” 


Lastly, the gospel, as a system of consolation, is perfectly by the authority and 
energy which accompany it. The devices of man originate in his fancy, and expire 
with his breath. Destitute of power, they play around depravity, like shadows round 
the mountain top, and vanish without leaving an impression. Their effect would be 
inconsiderable, could he manifest them to be true; because he cannot compel the 
admission of truth itself into the human mind. Indifference, unreasonableness, 
prejudice, petulance, oppose to it an almost incredible resistance. We see this in the 
affairs of every day, and especially in the stronger conflicts of opinion and passion. 
‘Now, besides the opposition which moral truth has always to encounter, there is a 
particular reason why the truth of the gospel, though most salutary, though attested 
by every thing within us and around us; by life and death; by earth and heaven and 
iell; will not succeed unless backed by divine energy. It is this: Sin has perverted the 
inderstanding of man, and poisoned his heart. It persuaded him first to throw away 
his blessedness, and then to hate it. The reign of this hatred, which the Scriptures 
all enmity against God, is most absolute in every unrenewed man. It teaches him 
ver to yield a point unfriendly to one corruption, without stipulating for an 
quivalent in favor of another. Now, as the gospel flatters none of his corruptions in 
y shape, it meets with deadly hostility from all his corruptions in every shape. It 
is to no purpose that you press upon him the “great salvation;”’ that you demonstrate 
lis errors and their corrective; his diseases and their cure. Demonstrate you may, 
but you convert him not. He will occasionally startle and listen; but it is only to 
slapse into his wonted supiness: and you shall as soon call up the dead from their 
st, as awaken him to a sense of his danger, and prevail with him to embrace the sal- 
Vation of God. “Where then,” you will demand, “is the pre-eminence of your gospel?” 
_Tanswer, with the apostle Paul, that “it is the power of God to salvation.” When a 
Sinner is to be converted, that is, when a slave is to be liberated from his chains, and a 
re bel from execution, that same voice which has spoken in the Scriptures speaks by 
them to his heart, and commands an audience. He finds the word of God to be “quick 
and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword.” It sets him before the bar of 
justice; strips him of his self-importance; “sweeps away his refuge of lies;’’ and shows 
im that death which is “the wages of sin.” It then conducts him, all trembling, to 
ne Divine forgiveness; reveals Christ Jesus in his soul, as his righteousness, his peace, 
hope of glory. Amazing transition. But is not the causé equal to the effect? “Hath 
the potter power over the clay?” Shall God draw, and the lame not run? Shall 
zod speak, and the deaf not hear? Shall God breathe, and the slain not live? Shall 
god “lift up the light of His countenance” upon singers reconciled in His dear Son, 
n they not be happy? Glory to His name! These are no fictions. “We speak that 
do know, and testify that we have seen. The record, written not with ink, but the 
Spirit of the living God,—not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart,” is 

os ssed by thousands who have ‘turned from the power of Satan unto God, ” and 


406 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


such prodigies on corruption and death, what shall it not perform in direc 
establishing, and consoling them who have already obtained a “good hope throu 
grace?” He who thunders in the curse, speaks peace in the promise; and none ¢ 
conceive its influence but they who have witnessed it. For proofs you must not go to 
the statesman, the traveller or the historian. You must not go to the gay profession, 
or the splendid ceremonial. You must go to the chamber of unostentatious piety. 
You must go to the family anecdote, to the Christian tradition, to the observation of 
faithful ministers. Of the last there are many who, with literal truth, might address 
you as follows: ‘I have seen this gospel hush into a calm the tempest raised in the 
bosom by conscious guilt. I have seen it melt down the most obdurate into tender- 
ness and contrition. I have seen it cheer up the broken-hearted, and bring 
the tear of gladness into eyes swollen with grief. I have seen it produce and maintai 
serenity under evils which drive the worldling mad. I have seen it reconcile the 
sufferer to his cross, and send the song of praise from lips quivering with agony. t 
have seen it enable the most affectionate relatives to part in death; not without emo- 
tion, but without repining; and with a cordial surrender of all that they held most dear 
to the disposal of their heavenly Father. I have seen the fading eye brighten at the 
promise of Jesus, “Where I am, there shall my servant be also.” I have seen the faith- 
ful spirit released from its clay, now mildly, now triumphantly, to enter into the joy 
of its Lord.” a 


Who, among the children of men, that doubts this representation, would not wish 
it to be correct? Who, that think it only probable, will not welcome the doctrine on 
which it is founded as worthy of all acceptation? And who, that knows it to be true, — 
will not set his seal to that doctrine as being, most emphatically, gospel preached to 
poor? 

In applying to practical purposes the account which has now been given of the 
Christian religion, I remark, i‘ 


1. That it fixes a criterion of Christian ministrations. 


_If He, who spake as never man spake, has declared His own doctrine to abound 
with consolation to the miserable, then, certainly, the instructions of others are — 
evangelical only in proportion as they subserve the same gracious end. A contradiction 
not infrequent among some advocates of revelation is to urge against the infidel its — 
power of comfort, and yet to avoid, in their own discourses, almost every principle , 
from which that power is drawn. Disregarding the mass of mankind, to whom the ~ 
gospel is peculiarly fitted; and omitting those truths which might revive the grieved — 
spirit, or touch the slumbering conscience, they discuss their moral topics in a manner 
unintelligible to the illiterate, uninteresting to the mourner, and without alarm to the 
profane, This is not “preaching Christ.” Elegant dissertations upon virtue and vice, upon 
the evidences of revelation or any other general subject, may entertain the prosperous 
and the gay; but they will not mortify our members which are upon the earth; they 
will not unsting calamity, nor feed the heart with an imperishable hope. When I go to. ; 
the house of God, I do not want amusement. I want the doctrine which is according — 
to godliness. I want to hear of the remedy against the harassings of my guilt, and 
the disorder of my affections. I want to be led from weariness and disappointment to 
that goodness which filleth the hungry soul. I want to have light upon the mystery 
of Providence; to be taught how the “judgments of the Lord are right;”’ how I shall 
be prepared for duty and for trial—how I may “pass the time of my sojourning here 
in fear,’ and close it in peace. Tell me of that Lord Jesus “who His own self bare 
our sins in His own body on the tree.” Tell me of His “intercession for the trans- 
gressors” as their “advocate with the Father.” Tell me of His holy spirit, whom 
“they that believe on Him receive,” to be their preserver, sanctifier, comforter. Tell 


The Gospel to the Poor—Mason. 491 


¢ His grace. Tell me of the glory reflected on His name by the obedience of faith. 
‘ell me of vanquished death, of the purified grave, of a blessed resurrection, of the life 
lasting—and my bosom warms. This is gospel; these are glad tidings to me as a 
uufferer, because glad to me as a sinner. They rectify my mistakes; allay my resent- 
nents; rebuke my discontent; support me under the weight of moral and natural evil. 
[hese attract the poor; steal upon the thoughtless; awe the irreverent; and throw 
over the service of the sanctuary a majesty which some fashionable modes of address 
never fail to dissipate. Where they are habitually neglected or lightly referred to, 
here may be much grandeur, but there is no gospel; and those preachers have infinite 
reason to tremble, who, though admired by the great, and caressed by the vain, are 
eserted by the poor, the sorrowful, and such as “walk humbly with their God.” 


2. We should learn from the gospel lessons of active benevolence. 

_ The Lord Jesus, who “went about doing good, has left us an example, that we 
hould follow in His steps.” Christians, on whom He has bestowed affluence, rank 
yr r talent, should be the last to disdain their fellow men, or to look with indifference 
n indigence and grief. Pride, unseemly in all, is detestable in them who confess 
t “by grace they are saved.’ Their Lord and Redeemer, who humbled himself by 
assuming their nature, came to “deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor also, and 
him that hath no helper.” And surely an object which was not unworthy of the Son 
God, cannot be unworthy of any who are called by His name. Their wealth and 
jpportunities, their talents and time, are not their own, nor to be used according to 
ieir own pleasure; but to be consecrated by their vocation “as fellow-workers with 
sod.” How many hands that hang down would be lifted up, how many feeble knees 
sonfirmed, how many tears wiped away, how many victims of despondency and infamy 
escued by a close imitation of Jesus Christ. Go with your opulence to the house of 
amine and the retreats of disease. Go “deal thy bread to the hungry: when thou 
pest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh.” Go and 
mish means to rear the offspring of the poor; that they may at least have access to 
he word of your God. Go and quicken the flight of the angel, who has “the ever- 
sti ng gospel to preach” unto the nations. If you possess not wealth, employ your 
tion in promoting “good will toward men.” “Judge the fatherless; plead for the 
: Stimulate the exertions of others, who may supply what is “lacking on your 
1 Let the “beauties of holiness” pour their lustre upon your distinctions, and 
ecommend to the unhappy that peace which yourselves have found in the salvation 
God. If you have neither riches nor rank, devote your talents. Ravishing are the 
ccents which dwell on “the tongue of the learned,” when it “speaks a word in season 
him that is weary.” Press your genius and your eloquence into the service of the 
Lord your righteousness,” to magnify His word, and display the riches of His grace. 
ho knoweth whether He may honor you to be the minister of joy to the disconsolate, 
berty to the captive, of life to the dead? If He has denied you wealth, and rank, 
id talent, consecrate your heart. Let us dissolve in sympathy. There is nothing to 
inder yyour “rejoicing with them that do rejoice and your weeping with them that 
eep;” nor to forbid the interchange of kind and soothing offices. “A brother is born 
ir tpersity :” and not only should Christian be to Christian, “a friend that sticketh 
oser than a brother,” but he should exemplify the loveliness of his religion to “them 
at are without.” An action, a word, marked by the sweetness of the gospel, has 
been owned of God for producing the happiest effects. Let no man, therefore, 
to excuse his inaction; for no man is too inconsiderable to augment the triumphs 


492 . Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


? 


with joy out of its wells of salvation!” Assume your own character, O ye children of 
men; present your grievances, and accept the consolation which the gospel tenders. 


which satisfieth not; hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and _ 
let your soul delight itself in fatness!’ Come, ye tribes of ambition, who burn for the _ 
applause of your fellow-worms. The voice of the Son of God to you is, “The friend- 
ship of this world is enmity with God;” but “if any serve me, him will my Father — 
honor.” Come ye avaricious, who “pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the ~ 
poor.” The voice of the Son of God is, Wisdom is ‘‘more precious than rubies; an 
all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her”—but “what shall i 
profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ Come, ye 
profane! The voice of the Son of God is, ‘““Hearken unto me, ye stout-hearted, that 
are far from righteousness; behold, I bring near my righteousness.” Come, ye 

formal and self-sufficient, who say “that ye are rich, and increased with goods, — 


able, and poor, and blind, and naked.” The voice of the Son of God is, 
counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that ye may be rich; 
white raiment, that ye may be clothed; and that the shame of your nakedness do not 
appear; and anoint your eyes with eye-salve, that ye may see.” Come, Se who, oil 
convinced of sin, fear lest the “fierce anger of the Lord fall upon you.” The voice of 
the Son of God is, “Him that cometh unto me I will in nowise cast out. I, even I, am 
He that Pei out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not rememBenin 
thy sins.” Come, ye disconsolate, whose souls are sad, because the Comforter is away. 
The voice of the Son of God is, The Lord “hath sent me to appoint unto them that 
mourn in Zion, beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of 
praise for the spirit of heaviness.” Come, ye tempted, who are borne down with the ; . 
violence of the “law in your members,” and of assaults from the evil one. The voice 
of the Son of God is, “I will be merciful to your unrighteousness; and the God of 
peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.””’ Come, ye children of domestic woe, — 
upon whom the Lord has made a breach, by taking away your counsellors and support. 
The voice of the Son of God is, “Leave thy fatherless children with me; I will preserve — 
them alive, and let thy widows trust in me.” Come ye, from whom mysterious Provi- — 
dence has swept away the acquisitions of long and reputable industry. The voice of 
the Son of God is, “My son, if thou wilt receive my words,” thou shalt have “treasure 
in the heavens that faileth not; and mayst “take joyfully the spoiling of thy goods, 
knowing that thou hast in heaven a better and an enduring substance.” Come, ye 
poor, who, without property to lose, are grappling with distress and exposed to want. 
The Son of God, though the heir of all things, “had not where to lay His head;” and 
His voice to the poor is, ““Be content with such things as ye have, for I will never 
leave thee nor forsake thee; thy bread shall be given thee, and thy water shall be sure.” 
Come, ye reproached, who find ‘“‘cruel mockings” a most bitter persecution. The voice 
of the Son of God is, “If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye, for 
the spirit of God and of glory resteth upon you.’’ Come, in fine, ye dejected, whom 
the fear of death holds in bondage. The voice of the Son of God is, “I will ransom 
them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be — 
thy plague! O grave I will be thy destruction! repentance shall be hid from mings 
eyes!” Blessed Jesus, thy loving kindness shall “be my joy in the house of my 
pilgrimage!” and I will praise thee “while I have any being,” for that gospel which 
thou hast preached to the poor! 


The Gospel to the Poor—Mason. 493 


_ [John M. Mason, D. D., was born in the city of New York, in 1770, graduated at 
olumbia College in 1789, having studied theology with his father. He succeeded his 
ther in the pastorate of the Cedar Street Church, in 1792. In 1812 he became pastor 
a new church in Murray street. He had also accepted the appointment of provost 
olumbia College, which office he filled until compelled to visit Europe in 1816, on 
count of ill health. On his return in 1817, he resumed preaching, but in 1821 took 
sharge of Dickinson College. He died in December, 1829. 


This sermon is the first in a volume of his sermons, and was considered by the 
uthor his best. He committed it to memory, and repeated to large audiences on 
ne or two tours throughout the United States. Kerr Boyce Tupper, A. T. Pierson 
nd W. G. Moorehead, each considered this one of the best ten sermons of the nine- 
teenth century. ] 


| 494 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE NATURAL MAN. 


H. MELVILL. 


{Chaplain in Ordinary to Her Majesty, and Canon Residentiary.) 


“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are ‘ , 
foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually dis- — 
cerned.”—I Cor. 2: 14. 


Here is a severe and grave accusation. The natural man—man in his natural — 
state—and this must be what we all are, or all haye been—is accused of positive incapa-— 
city to know or discern the things of the Spirit of God; those things which God’s — 
Spirit, as on this day, descended to propound, apply and enforce, It will be our F, 
business to weigh this accusation, to examine its extent, and to vindicate its justice. 
The Church now commemorates a great event—the descent of the Holy Ghost at 
Pentecost—as our promised Comforter and Guide. Whit-Sunday may be said to bear 
much the same relation to the third person in the ever-blessed Trinity that Christmas 
Day bears to the second person, being the day of public entrance on the office 
belonging to Him in the work of redemption. As on Christmas Day the second 
Person specially descended to earth, that He might commence the payment of the 
ransom which He had from all eternity undertaken, so on Whit-Sunday the third - 
person specially uescended that He might commence that renewal of our fallen nature, 
which from all eternity He had undertaken to effect. But there was very great differ- 
ence in the circumstances of the descent. The second person came with every token 
of weakness and indigence; for Christ was born a helpless infant, and laid in a manger; 
the third person came with every token of greatness and supremacy. “A rushing 
mighty wind” gave signal of the Spirit, and “cloven tongues as of fire’ were symbols 
of His presence. And in the after residences of these divine persons upon earth there 
is just as wide a separation as in the circumstances of the original descent. The 
second person, having assumed human nature, had to bear all the possible indignities 
which could be heaped upon Him by a sinful and adulterous generation; the third — 
person, veiling Himself always in the majestic obscurities of His own divine nature, 
may indeed have been often reviled and blasphemed, but there has been none of that 
sensible putting off of His glories, which is so conspicuous in the case of the Redeemer. 

He remains ever the same awful, sublime, inscrutable being which, like wind, may be 
traced in its effects, but of which, like the wind, “thou canst not tell whence it cometh, } 
nor whither it goeth.” And thus in the third person of the Trinity we have a person 
of the Godhead dwelling upon earth, perpetually busied in the work of our redemption, f 
and yet preserving all the dignity of an essential divinity, “having His way in the 
whirlwind, and in the storm, and the clouds being the dust of His feet.” E 


* 


mm 
+ th 


SSR vl eae pina 


But is it practically found, that human pride is less offended at the third person &: 
than at the second? What difference does it make, that, in operating for our good, _ 
the third person has retained all His majesty, whereas the second laid it all aside? 
What difference, we mean, does it make in the readiness wherewith His office is 
acknowledged, and the thankfulness wherewith the benefits are received? Practically 
no difference whatsoever. It is no exaggeration to affirm, that human pride revolts to 


The Natural Man—Melvill. 495 


the full as much from the work of the third person, carried on with the solemn secrecy 
of deity, as from that of the second, performed with all the appearances of indignity 
and shame. Men are quite as averse to the doctrine of being renewed by Him who 
works as the invisible God, as to that of being redeemed by one who died the igno- 
minious death of a malefactor. So that, however men may make the humiliations 
of Christ their pretext for rejecting Him, the real object of dislike is the doctrine 
established by the cross, rather than the cross itself upon which it is graven. For 
_ wherefore is it that there is so much of haughty opposition to the Holy Spirit, so 
much of reluctance to confess His influence, and submit to His guidance, if the chief 
 stumbling-block to our pride be the poverty and contempt with which a divine person 
“may have appeared, whereas this third person has put off none of His essential glory, 
but accomplishes His work by that majestic mysteriousness which as much publishes 
‘as conceals the absolute Godhead? There is no parrying with the conclusion, that 
-men dislike Christianity, not because of anything revolting to their pride in the 
apparatus, so to speak, through which they were redeemed, but because of the 
humiliating truths which the very fact of redemption would force upon their belief. 


us, and taken up graciously His abode in the midst of the church—that, with a 
_ gloriousness at least as wondrous as His condescension, He appears amidst the ruin 
and corruption of humanity, and yet surrenders not, even in appearance, one jot 
of the splendors of divinity. Very cordial might be our welcome, and very warm 
our admiration of the person and office of this divine agent, were there nothing that 
flected on ourselyes—nothing that implied truths which go to prove us degraded 


d honor Him, were there that in His office which passed, so to speak, a compli- 
ent on the human intellect, and represented it as adequate to heavenly truth; but 
e entertain a dislike which is little short of disgust, when taught in the language of 
ur text, that ‘the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they 


scerned.” 


_ Now, in these words of St. Paul, there is undoubtedly a very express statement as 
to the incompetence of the human understanding, for the discovery and appreciation 
of spiritual things; and forasmucn as that descent of the Holy Ghost which we now 
_ commemorate may be said to take for granted this incompetence—for the need of 
“supernatural influence follows only from the insufficiency of our own powers—we 


cannot better keep the present festival than by examining the justice of the charge 


might, perhaps, admit of various significations; but as this term is derived from one 
which often denotes the rational soul, the probability would seem to be that by the 
natural man is intended man with those powers of intellect and mind which he 
possesses from nature—man, as naturally born into the world, distinguished from man 
us supernatural, born again of God’s Spirit. And then the thing affirmed by St. Paul 
s that our native powers of mind are not sufficient in religion; that whatever our 
hrewdness, correctness, and grasp of understanding on any other subject, yet that 
left to ourselves, without the aids of divine grace, we cannot form correct notions of 
he gospel, apprehend the mysteries, nor appreciate the blessings of redemption. 
his is virtually the charge laid, and that too in most sweeping terms, against the 


496 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


natural man—a charge of actual incapacity for the very matter in which he has con 
fessedly the closest possible interest, and which may not perhaps seem to him to 
transcend in its difficulties many others to which he applies a. successful investigation. 


understanding, and rejecting what.it cannot force to submit itself to reason. 

There is here, therefore, evidently great room for an important inquiry, and one, 
moreover, peculiarly appropriate to Whit-Sunday. Is it a true charge, and whence 5. 
does. it arise, that divine grace is indispensable to the acquaintance and the closing 
that we launch out into declarations against the human understanding, endeavoring 
by God’s help, to answer this inquiry, desiring to employ only such reasoning as may _ 
commend itself to every simple and unprejudiced mind. Give us, then, your patient — 
attention, whilst, by a few successive arguments, we strive to show you why it must 
be, and wherefore it comes to pass, that “the natural man receiveth not the things — 
of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him’’—nay, that he “cannot know 
them, because they are spiritually discerned.” 


Now, in order to the making good these assertions of the apostle, there is no need 
that we launch out into declarations against the human understanding, endeavoring 


to the high matters of religion. The human understanding is not the crippled and 
impotent thing which it is often described, and the natural man has something like 
fair ground of complaint, if, after vigorous expatiations over broad tracts of know- 
ledge, successful searchings into the secrets of nature, and luminous deductions from 
repeated experiments, he finds himself told that it is simply because his natural 
powers are feeble and inadequate, that he must not think to make way in inyesti- 
gating spiritual truth. The province of the understanding is to distinguish between ~ 
falsehood and truth, between evil and good; and though, undoubtedly, the under- — 
standing was greatly injured by the fall, nevertheless, in the main, it still faithfully — 
executes its part, and forms a right decision upon points referred to its tribunal. 
But—and to this we ask your special attention—the understanding can only judge — 
of things according to the representations laid before it, whether by the senses or the — 
affections; and if those representations be incorrect, the understanding may deliver 
a wrong judgment, and yet be no way in fault. ; 


“4 


Now, just observe, for a moment, how the understanding is dependent on the 
senses, and how it may be deceived by the senses; for this will greatly assist you in — 
observing how it may be deceived by the affections, which is exactly what establishes 
the need we have of divine grace. You must all be aware that you can form no idea ~ 
of the objects of the external creation, unless by the agency of the senses. The eye, 
the ear, the touch, must be your informants, otherwise, what notion can you have of 
their different substances and properties? We might illustrate this by the well-known 
instance of the blind man, who, when asked his idea of the color of scarlet, likened it 
to the sound of a trumpet—an evidence, as we all must confess, that, where any of the 
senses are wanting, the understanding, though without any fault of its own, will form 
absurd and erroneous conclusions. Let us suppose, then, a man born with impaired 
or insufficient senses, but a clear and vigorous understanding. Suppose that his eye 
distorts everything, so as to make the straight appear crooked, and the crooked appear — 
straight; suppose him unable to discriminate colors, so that now the green is red, and 
now the red is green; suppose his touch is so imperfect, that in handling the round it — 
represents it as the square, and passing over the smooth it classes it with the rough; — 
suppose his ear so faulty, that it confounds the musical notes, and even finds discord 
in harmony, and harmony in discord, I do not say that the senses are often, if ever, 


pres eas 


The Natural Man—Melvill. 497 


us radically vitiated, for, in general, they perform their different functions with 
sufficient fidelity; but there is no difficulty in imagining a man with this defection of 
‘senses, and what I ask you is, what would the man’s understanding avail him when 
such erroneous representations were laid before it by those organs whose business it 
is to fetch in notices from the external creation of its every occurrence; and what 
could you form but most inaccurate notions of the gorgeous and beautiful things that 
are scattered through the visible universe? Would not the supposed man, with the 
“distorted and insufficient faculties, require to be made the subject of a rectifying 
process, either obtaining an entirely new set of senses, or receiving into his system 
- some corrective power, which should be mending constant errors, ere he could form 
to himself any fitting conception of that world in which he is placed, and those 
wonders by which he is surrounded? We cannot doubt that you will go with us in 
this reasoning and conclusion; so that, if by a ‘natural man” in our text were meant 
aman deficient in bodily senses, and if the things he is declared capable of compre- 
hending were the objects of the external creation, there is not one of you who would 
not immediately, and that, too, without supposing that the assertion threw any blame 
on the man’s understanding, assent to the proposition, that “the natural man receiveth 
- not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he 
_ know them, because they are discerned” through a perverted set of faculties and 
_ organs. 
i Now, of course we do not for a moment attempt to imply that the foregoing sup- 
~ posed case of a natural man answers to that which is referred to by the apostle, 
though it may very well serve as a help or illustration. The senses are not the 
channels through which spiritual things are submitted to the understanding, and 
_ therefore their distortion or derangement would not cause these things to seem foolish- 
"ness to the man. The eye might have no discrimination of colors, and the ear none of 
; ‘sounds; but, whilst such imperfections would cause a misrepresentation of the 
_ external universe, they would not necessarily at all interfere with correct views of 
the invisible world. But, now, observe that not only is the understanding dependent 
On the senses in the manner which we have endeavored to describe; it is dependent 
also on the affections, and this we have yet to strive to exhibit. There is in all of us 
a faculty by which we love certain things, and there is in all of us a faculty by which 
we hate certain things. The former faculty is in right order if it fix on nothing but 
what is worthy of our love, and the latter is in right order if it fix on nothing but 
what is worthy of our hatred; but if there be any bias on these faculties—if, like a 
‘diseased eye or ear, they misrepresent objects, what will the understanding be able to 
do, seeing that the impressions transmitted to it of evil may make it seem good, and 
of good may make it seem evil? Without necessarily laying any blame on the under- 
Standing itself, what is there to prevent that understanding from deciding in pre- 
ference of present things over future, perishable over eternal, if the affections, through 
whose representations it must judge the desirable and the undesirable, give a false 
Picture, and thus lead it into error? The case of a man with depraved affections is 
Virtually the same, in regard of the things which it is the business of the affections to 
Tepresent, as that of a man with vitiated senses, in regard of the things which it is the 
wisiness of the senses to represent; and is not the natural man a being with depraved 
ffections, though he may not be a being with vitiated senses? Every one of us by 
ature regards as worthy of his best love what God would have him despise, and gives 
lis aversion to that which God would have him value. Every one of us by nature is 
isposed to seek happiness where God declares that it cannot be found, and to deny 
at it exists where alone God would place it. Take the scriptural representations of 
ven, and they have in them little or nothing attractive to the natural man, because 
distorted affections would find their chief good in the sensual and the earthly. 


—— 


498 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Take the scriptural representations of hell, and though, beyond doubt, they are t rr 
fying to the natural man, because he can appreciate a threatening of pain, 
forasmuch as the threatened pain may be distant, whilst the promised pleasure is n 
the affections will generally decide for the desirableness of the present enjoym 
as balanced against the evil of the future infliction. In short, the task demand 

from the understanding by religion is, that it determine that in God is man’s ch ief 
good, and in obedience to God man’s only true happiness; but whilst his affections 
in their natural state, give preference to some finite good, and shrink from God’ 
service as from hardship and bondage, how can the understanding deliver the verdic 
required by religion, any more than it could form a correct notion of a tree, if 
senses represented it as lying on the ground, in place of springing from it—as cov 
with pestilential ashes, in place of crowded with odoriferous leaves? Ah! you n 
see why we asked you to imagine the case of a man whose senses should give hi 
distorted representations of the natural creation, and told you that it would serve t 
illustrate that of the natural man, whom St. Paul asserts incompetent to compre 
the things of the Spirit of God. It is not that the senses have to do with religi 

truth, but it is that the affections have to do with them, and in precisely the sam 
manner as the senses with natural things. In examining whether a tree be round or 
square, the understanding must depend on the eye or the touch. If there be suc 
defect in these senses that they convey an impression of square, when the substane 
is round, the understanding will form a wrong conception, and yet not be to bla 
In like manner, in determining whether thi$ or that course is the best adapted t 


thing as fo be loved, and another as to be hated. If there be such a bias on 
affections—if they be so perverted that they put evil for good, and good for e 
bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter—what can the understanding do? Will it 
almost necessarily give a wrong decision, and yet without any impeachment of the 
high powers and prerogatives which are claimed for it with so much jealousy by 
natural man? And is there not this bias on the affections? Oh! ye can kni 
nothing of what man is by nature, if ye know not this. What! do not God and mai 
make happiness consist in opposite things? Do we love what God would have us” 
love? Do we hate what God would have us hate? The objects which attract us m 
by their aspect of desirableness, are they objects on which the Bible bids us 
fix our affections? Rather, are they not objects from which the Bible exhorts us to 
withdraw our affections? And what play is there for the understanding, ye admirers 
and worshippers of intellect—what play is there for the understanding, whilst 
feelers, so to speak, are radically out of order, and misrepresent the thing which 
gathers to its bar? No matter, then, if the senses were radically out of order, maki 
square things of round, and white things of black, and sweet things, of bitter: 
the grand defect of man is in the heart, and not in the head. The head may have 
been comparatively uninjured by the fall; but the heart was turned upside down; an 
there must be a corrective process applied to the heart; divine grace must work 
there, removing the corrupt bias from the affections and purifying them, so that they 
shall find their chief good in God, ere the head can apprehend the great things of the 
gospel, confess their force, and bow to their authority. 4 
And thus we say nothing that shall offend the most strenuous upholder of the 
power of the human intellect, when in the words of the text we declare that “the 
natural man’—man unaided by divine grace—is utterly incompetent to discern the 
things of the Spirit of God. Ye had nothing to say when we supposed the natural 
man a man wanting in the bodily senses, or having those senses diseased or distorted, 
and then plied you with the almost self-evident fact, that, notwithsanding the p 
session of a clear and mighty intellect, such a man would remain without any correc 


The Natural Man—Melvill. 499 


notion of the stars, the mountains, and the forests of the visible creation. What have 
you to urge when we do not suppose but prove the natural man a man depraved 
in the affections—the affections which, if they perform not the same parts as the 
senses, which, if they be not informants upon size, and shape, and color, are, upon 
and good, desirable and undesirable? What have you to urge, when we decide 
of such a man, that let his reason be as vigorous as it may be, it is impossible for 
him of himself to apprehend the excellence and the preciousness of the gospel of 
Christ? Oh! we should not care if we had to admit, that the human understanding 
was just as strong now as it was in Adam, ere he rebelled against God; there is a 
thoroughly depraved heart, where there is ever so clear a head; and this will be 
ways enough to explain why “the natural man receiveth not the things of the 
Spirit of God,” yea, to prove that, ‘he cannot know them, because they are spiritually 
discerned.” 
Here is the point to which we have all Ape been desirous to bring you—the 
Bepensable need of divine grace, in order to our apprehending and applying the 
great truths of revelation. Men often profess to count it very strange that we should 
Bake them out incapable of understanding spiritual things, when they have con- 
fessedly so much power of grappling with what is intricate, and investigating what 
is lofty in other departments of knowledge; and the illustration which we have kept 
up through so much of our discourse is a perfect answer to this. The affections are, 
to spiritual things, what the senses are to natural things. If, then, the affections 
misrepresent the object of which they have to give impressions to the understanding, 
he result will be of the same kind as if the work were done by the senses. But the 
affections do thus misrepresent objects; they make the worse appear the preferable; 
“they pass off the shadow for the substance; and,. therefore, a man of the very 
‘strongest intellect is no more able to make way in religion of himself, than he would 
be in natural science, were he born without senses, or with those which give none but 
false representations. And, as on this day, the Holy Ghost came down in his power, 
) apply the necessary corrective to our diseased affections, and thus to enable us to 
iscern spiritual things. He did not come to give a new understanding, for there was 
Es ength enough left in the head; he came to set in order those affections, through 
which the understanding is necessarily influenced; for the root of the moral mischief 
les in the heart. We are more anxious than we can tell you, that you should be 
Possessed of this, which we believe the true view of the case. “The natural man” 
S up against such a text as that on which we have discoursed. It seems to him to 
depreciate his whole intellectual equipment. He can understand the truths of the 
| Profoundest philosophy—why should he be unable to understand the truths of a 
rofound theology? By his own intellect he can make way with the volume of science 
apty is he stopped outside, and told that he cannot make way with the volume of 
yelation? Nay, nay, we are not undervaluing his mental strength; but we tell him 
he t his heart will give his head no chance. Whilst his heart is in its natural state, 
will mystify, misrepresent, distort, discolor the truths of the gospel; so that, in 
le strong language of the text, they are actually foolishness unto him. There is 
0 form, no comeliness in Christ; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we 
Should desire Him. “The preaching of the cross is, to them that perish, foolishness,” 
ough “unto them that are saved it is the power of God.” : 
How earnestly, then, should we pray the prayer of David, “Create in me a clean 
, O God, and renew a right spirit within me!” To this it is, as we have already 
said that we are most anxious to bring you, even to a sense of your need of divine 
Brace, that you may understand religious truths, and perform religious duties. And 
| this grace is ready to be bestowed, if we will only ask it in sincerity, and seek it 
| through the instituted channels, Alas! that we should have so often grieved 


: 


f 
. 


ee F 


500 ' Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and resisted God’s Spirit, walking by our own light, and by the sparks w ic] 
ourselves have kindled. Alas! that we should have so often opened the Scripture 
without prayer for His illumination, and undertaken tasks without dependence oO 
His guidance. No wonder if there be still so much of darkness over the page ®) 
revelation, if half-performed duties stare us in the face, when we do no 
accustom ourselves to the habitual recognition of that agency through which alone 
the things of Christ are shown to the soul, and “‘our hands are taught to war, so that é 
bow of steel is broken by our arms.” Let us strive that this Whit-Sunday may be to us 
the commencement of a new era in practical acknowledgment of the office of the Holy 
Spirit. Not in vain let us have once more listened to the “sound as of a mighty, rush 
ing wind” and seen “‘cloven tongues as of fire,” sitting upon each of the first preacher 
of the gospel. Be it our resolve, for now our endeavor, that to that wind will bi 
given our own devices as chaff, and to that fire all objects of sinful passion as fuel 
As natural men we cannot, as we have seen, make progress in religion; but God has 
in and through baptism, brought us out of a state of nature, and placed us under a | 
covenant of grace; and now it is only needed that we will not put from us assistamc 
largely vouchsafed, and obstinately withstand a divine guardian, who may be said to 
have taken us in charge, and we shall be led from one stage to another of Christian 
attainment, till at length we appear before God in Zion. ‘‘Led of the Spirit.” ii 
is the spiritual definition of a true Christian. “As many as are led of the Spirit of} 
God, they are the sons of God.” We cannot put one foot before another in religion 
except as we are led; and if there be danger of a more than common order, it is : 


t 


salvation of his soul. Would that we could prevail on you to take heed that 
resist not, that you grieve not God’s Spirit! Helpless and hopeless is man’s natul 
estate; he is born in sin and cradled in sorrow; but the Spirit of the living God 
ready to enter into his alienated nature, lift him from the dust, nerve to vigor, 
introduce him into the circles of the heavenly family. Whom else, then, shall I 
as my guide? Shall I be led by reason? Meteor of the day! I cannot trust 
Shall I be led by philosophy? Device of man! thou canst not bring me to G 
No; Spirit of Life! Spirit of Truth! enter Thou into our souls: yea, go Thou before us, 
as went the fiery and cloudy pillar before Israel of old, and we will follow Thee, and 
we will obey Thee, making it our confidence that, led of Thee, we are indeed children 
of the Most High, and heirs of immortality. God grant unto all of us to know and to 
feel that, though we can do nothing without His grace, we can do all things through 
(Christ that strengtheneth us! ‘ 


[Henry Melvill, B. D., was born at Pendennis Castle, Cornwall, on the 14th of 
September, 1798; his father, Philip Melvill, was a captain in the army, and Lieu 
ant-governor of Pendennis Castle, a very pious man, whose memoirs have had a wide 
circulation. 

He was educated at the University of Cambridge, and took the degree of Second. 
Wrangler in 1821. In the year 1824, he was ordained as Fellow of St. Peter’s College, 
Cambridge. From the years 1829 to 1848, he was minister of Camden Chapel, Camber- 
well. He was then made Principal of the East India College, and in 1846 appointe 
by the Duke of Wellington, Chaplain to the Tower of London. In 1853 he was ma 
one of the Queen’s Chaplains, and in 1856 appointed, by Lord Palmerston, Canor 
Residentiary. of St. Paul’s, London. © P 

This sermon is from The Preacher, and does not belie his reputation, that is the 
“golden mouthed Melvill.” It was preached May 27, 1860, at St. Paul’s Cathedral.] _ 


¢ (501) 


SPIRITUAL LIFE AND GROWTH. 


REV. F. B. MEYER, B. A.. LONDON, ENGLAND 
CHANNELS, NOT CHALICES. 


“Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, 
f any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink. He that believeth on Me as the 
ipture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. But this spake 
ie of the Spirit, which they that believed on Him were to receive: for the Spirit was 
bt yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”—John 7: 37. 

_ Jesus spoke these words at the Feast of Tabernacles. On the last day, the great 
lay of the feast, the priests, accompanied by a festal'throng of people, descended the 
emple steps to the Siloam brook, filled a pitcher with water, and brought it amid 
uch joy into the temple area, and there poured forth its contents, splashing and 
shing in the sunlight, upon the pavement. That pitcher so filled, and the water so 
pilt, were emblematic of the river which had followed the host of Israel in their 
esert wanderings. And as our Lord saw this water poured out, it seems to have 
aggested to Him the thought that, instead of being a pitcher whose contents would 
2 soon exhausted, He was Himself the river of God, which was full of water, fed 
rom the everlasting hills of the divine nature, and pouring down to make glad the 
ity of God. 

Jesus “cried.” I think that there is the great urgency of Christ. After the same 
anner, in every gathering, He stands and cries. There is no indistinct articulation; 
lere is no doubt or hesitancy; but to thee, O soul of man, Jesus Christ stands and 
ies. This humblest and meekest of men not only professes that His bosom is broad 
nough for every weary soul to rest upon—‘Come unto me, and I will give you rest” 
-but He claims to be able, out of His nature, to take away all thirst. 

Is your heart thirsty? If your thirst is for love, for companionship, for all that 
needed for life and godliness, though you have a thirst which no thing or person in 
ne world can quench, if you will come to Jesus Christ He will satisfy you. 

_ You do not try to feel that water satisfies you: you drink, and pursue your way, 
ind you are satisfied. Similarly, in dealing with Christ, open your nature to Him, 
ind say, I take Thee to fill this void, to quench this desire. Wait before Him, and 
en go forth and dare to reckon that Jesus Christ has done what He promised. As 
ou dare to trust Him, according to your faith it shall be done. 

“Jesus stood and cried.” He said in effect, “I am a river.” In a river, you have 
D stoop to drink. The river is an exquisite emblem of humility; for if there is one 
lace lower than another, the river will seek it and lie in deep pools there, so that the 
firm, the aged, the children, the cattle may go thither’and drink. Jesus Christ 
omes into the low level of your life, and if you are at your lowest He is nearest to 
yu. He stood and cried, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” I 
ink that as Jesus looked down the ages He saw His children, and He said: ‘What is 
ue of my power to meet the need of men shall be true also of all who belong to 
. They shall not drink for their own supply only, but through them I will pour 
fers which shall meet the thirst of the world.” So that Christ first contemplates 
imself as the river at which we drink, and then transforms our lives into rivers from . 
h others may drink. Therefore we may pass on to others what we receive from 


503 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Him, as He received from God the Father. Just as a river, springing from the 
'melting snows of the uplands, pours itself into some great lagoon from which | 
rivers emanate that carry to the lowland valleys all the glorious force of water which 
had descended from the hills—so Jesus Christ is the great lake into which the Godhead 
pours itself, and out of which we may drain His stores without exhausting them. 
Through us God may do for others what Jesus Christ has done for ourselves. Drink 
at this fountain-head, and out of you “‘shall flow rivers.” 
Thus far you have been content with being a pitcher, a chalice, dipped into a 
river, and poured out and soon exhausted. Attending a yearly convention has, perhaps, 
been your dip into the river; and thence you have been carried, dripping a drop here | 
and there on the way, to India, or China, or Africa, or England, or America; and 
you have been put on end and poured out and you have said presently, “I must go 
back to the old spot to get filled again.’ You have been a pitcher, but from today 
you may be a channel-bed through which not one river, but half a dozen, may flow; 
and you will not need, therefore, to be replenished at certain intervals, because you 
will be in constant communication with the fullness of Christ. 
Now notice these points about the river: The first is its effortlessness. You sit 
beside a river, and it flows, and will flow on in its inexhaustible abundance. There 
is no thud, no pulse, no engine, no black column of smoke. It is effortless. What 
strain there is in the lives of most of us! We are always pumping up from unknown 
depths our information for others—pumping out from commentaries—and there is af 
a strain. You say, ‘I have got three sermons to make, lessons to prepare, letters to” 
write to inquirers; I am so tired, my head and heart are overstrained, I can never get 
through it.” Strain! But Christ says, “My life is effortless, and your life may be 
effortless; for through you may flow the power of the living God, without strain to 
yourself, and without the sense of strain that worries other people.” . 
Then, second, abundance. I am told that the Kongo river pours out from its 4 
mighty mouth a million tons of water a minute, and that its influence is seen in dis- 
coloring the ocean two hundred miles from its mouth. Such is the abundance of 
its waters. My friend in a little village church or in some obscure city parish, do you — 
realize that if you could link yourself in a certain manner with Christ there might 
pour out of you day by day an influence upon that church, that neighborhood, which 
would be comparable to the Kongo pouring out a million tons of water a minute? If. 
God can do that in a river, what can He not do through you? I like that word rivers, ” 
as though the Kongo, and the Mississippi, and the Amazon, and the Ganges, and a 
dozen other huge rivers would alone satisfy the thought of Jesus for every one “ 
His beloved. 
Then there is the constancy of the river. The man near whose house it flows a 
hears its murmur night and day, in the drought of summer and in the frost of winter, i] 
always, unintermittently pouring forth. :. | 
It is good to know, also, that it deepens in its flow. “As the Scripture hath 
said.” Our Lord was, without doubt, referring to Ezekiel 27, where the water became 
deeper at every fresh measurement of a thousand cubits. You may be getting gray. 
Old- men everywhere in the world are having a hard time of it just now; they are : 
pushed out of every thing, and begin to think they deserve it. They lose heart. But 
let such a man dare to take God’s Word, and remember that the river grows deeper, i 
and broader, and intensified in life-giving power. There is no reason why your 4 
power of blessing men should get less as the body gets weaker; rather, because the 
veil becomes thinner, the eternal light may pour forth with more effulgence. a 
Then, the river is life giving. Wherever the waters come there is life. Is your — 
life like that? “Jordan overfloweth its banks at time of harvest!’’ When there is not — 
much water you see plenty of bank, and when there is plenty of water you cannot see — 


Seared 


Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. 503 


e banks at all. So when there is not much of God’s life in us, men see many of our 
nitations and many bare patches in the midst of the stream. But when a man is 
ght with God, God overflows him and you do not think about the man; you think 
bout the river. 

_ It may seem hyperbolical to speak thus. You may say, “It is very well for men 
ho have been specially called out for God’s work, but it is not for me.” But our 
Lord says, “He that believeth on me, out of him.” That makes it refer to each one 
those life is united to the life of Christ by faith and who is being drawn into more 
nd more intimate fellowship with Him. 

Belief is not so much intellectual as spiritual. It is receiving. He that believeth 
jhe that receiveth. He that receiveth from Christ, out of him shall flow rivers. There 
ust be nothing between; there must be perfect openness between you and Jesus; 
ere must be the quiet waiting on Him in prayer until He shall pour through you 
lis life. That is where you may have made the mistake. You have been doing things 
or Him. Now let Jesus do His things through you. Receive His fullness. 

_ Will you not open your heart to this fullness today? 

— It does not matter whether your faith is small or great. It is not the amount of 
faith, but the object of your faith that helps you. A man says, My faith is so 
yeak. My friend, if you will give a river time encugh it will find its way through 
he tlarrowest passage possible; and, though your faith be a very narrow channel 
day, if you give God time enough He will pour His whole nature through you. 
is not the faith; it is the object of the faith. r 

“But this spake He of the Spirit.” We should hear more of Him. “The Spirit 
“Was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” Before His death Christ 
could receive the Spirit for Himself, but it was not until He was glorified in His 
cension that He sent the fullness of the Holy Spirit upon His disciples. 

_ What is true in God’s dispensational dealing is true in His dealing with the in- 
dividual. There must be an ascension of Christ in your heart before there can be a 
mtecost. Have you glorified Jesus Christ? Have you made Him the King of your 
ife? Fave you put Him where God the Father has put Him—as Monarch, the only 


every thought, and emotion, and purpose, and desire of your soul. When Jesus is 
fied, and when you have opened your whole nature to Him, then He will shed 
Holy Spirit through you, and rivers of water will flow through your life. 


THE WAY TO THE THRONE. 


The throne stands for two things; victory and influence. It is laudable to want 
influence and power, if you are disposed to use power to save and help others. 
_ At the beginning of His life, the devil came to Christ (Matthew 4:8) and said, 
T will give you a throne if you will pay me my price.” Christ said, “Never.” But 
t the close of His earthly life (Matthew 28: 18), Jesus was able to say, ‘All power is 
iven to me.” The power He would receive from the devil He received in another 
“Way. Between the two mountains of Temptation and Ascension, lay the grave, and 
shrist came to teach men the true way to the throne. 
Mark 10:35: “There came near to Jesus, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, 
ying, Master, we would that Thou shouldst do for us whatsoever we shall ask. He — 
id, What would ye that I should do?” You pastors and Sunday-school teachers 


you want?” James and John said, “Let us sit by Thy side on Thy throne.” That is 
lat you want. You are not ambitious, perhaps, for a high salary, or for position, but 
u do want to live a useful life, to have power that you may save and help. Jesus 
id, “Ye know not what ye ask. You know not the price. Are you able to drink the 
p that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Men and 


504 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


women are quite prepared to secure a throne by listening to an address, by feelis g 
the waft of heaven’s breezes by being uplifted by a song. Ah, you will never get wha 
you want that way; no, not unless you are prepared to pay Christ’s price. But you can 
all have thrones if you will pay for them. 7 
Hebrews 12:2. “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking 
unto Jesus, the author—or leader—and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set 
before Him, endured the cross, despising shame.” The meaning is “instead of the 
joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising shame,’—here is God’s 
way of reaching the throne—‘‘and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of 
God.” Even Christ Himself paid the price. When? Suppose that man had not 
sinned, how would he have passed from earth to heaven when the discipline of earth 
was done? I suppose that he would have passed as Enoch did, translated; as Elijah 
did, swept up; as the saints will be when they art caught up and changed in a 
moment. Christ was a sinless man, ‘and on the Mount of Transfiguration, He doub 
less might, if He had chosen, have stepped back to God. The door of heaven stood 
open, and the joy beckoned Him. He might still have been the great moral teacher, 
the miracle worker, the example of men, but not man’s Savior; and so, because His a 
Father’s will pointed that way, and because His heart was one with His Father, instead 
of entering the beckoning glory, He turned away and went down the slope of the 
Transfiguration mountain, to where the devil possessed the boy; and all along the — 
shadowed path of the next six months, Jesus went willingly to His death. There is 
nothing in history greater than Luke 9: 51, where we read, “And it came to pass, whe ie 
the time was come that He should be Peeoed up, He steadfastly set His face to go 
to Jerusalem.” : 
When I was visiting Canterbury Cathedral I saw where Thomas a Becket fell, 
and then visited the crypt, the hidden place. I went down a very winding staircase, 
so dark that I could not see where to put my foot; and the smell of the decay of the - 
vault came to my face, cold and loathsome. When I reached the level of the crypt 7 
could see through an open door the garden where the spring flowers were blooming 
in their beauty, and the blue sky. It made me think of Jesus Christ going down ad 


staircase of His Father’s will, as it led deeper and deeper down into the crypt of death; 
but through death He saw the breaking of the spring flowers of a new creation. 
When a man has gone by way of the cross to reach the right hand of power it will not _ 
intoxicate him or injure him. ; 
I believe that the turning point in Jesus’ earthly life was reached in the mountain 
village where He spent a week of rest before His transfiguration. He was with His” 
disciples a part of the time, but a good deal of the time, I think, He was alone with 
the Father. Matthew 16:21: ‘From that time forth ess Jesus to show unto His 
disciples how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders 
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised again the third day. Then 
Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him, saying, Spare thyself, Lord. This shall 
not be unto Thee. But He . . . said, Get thee behind me.—In thy words I hear 
Satan’s voice. He is all the time trying to stop my going the way of the cross. Thou 
advisest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” God is unselfish- — 
ness; man is selfishness. God saves people, but does not save Himself. Man saves — 
himself, and if he can he saves a few others, too. Then Jesus said, “If any man will 
come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ My 
friend, go alone with God and say, “My God, can I pay that price?” Satan will say; 
_ “Good man, spare thyself. Thou must travel first-class through the world; thou must 
be merciful to thyself.” ; 4 
Will you look at John 12: 24-26? When the Greeks came and said, “We would 
see Jesus.” Then Jesus answered, “The hour is come that the Son of Man should be 


Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. 505 


glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat (Himself) fall into 
the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” You 
ask why there are no converts in your church. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the 
‘ground and die, it abideth alone.” You have not dared to die, You will not die to your 
ambition for a great reputation as a preacher. You will not die to your 
desire for a large salary, which you seek by saying pleasant things to. people who 
_ ought to be dealt with as sinners in God’s sight. You will not die to the love of cul- 

tured surroundings and companions, with whom you seek to fill your church, at the 
price of keeping back the truth. You will not die, but lie on your shelf, a very pretty 
corn of wheat; but you abide alone, and you always will. But if a man die he bears 


God’s way with men is always life through death. Nature lies in her winter 
| shroud before the spring life bursts forth. Joseph was buried in the pit and in the 
prison before he was the bread giver to his people. Moses spent forty years in the 
_ wilderness before he led Israel forth. History is full of men who have committed 
_ what men said was suicide. What they said of Jesus is perfectly true. “He saved 
_ others; ‘Himself He cannot save.’’ Of course not. The mistake of your life has been 
at you have tried to save others and save yourself, too. You cannot do it. 

I Peter 4:1, 2: “Forasmuch, then, as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm 
_ yourselves likewise with the same mind.’’ Put on Christ’s mind as armor. This is 
| the sum and substance of everything. Arm yourself with the same mind; put on 
Christ's thought as your panoply and meet the solicitation of the world, the flesh, and 
the devil, by saying: “Never! I am going to do as Jesus did.” “Arm yourselves 
with the same mind; for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that 
he should no longer live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the 
will of God.” 
“4 Look at Hebrews 10:5: “Wherefore, when He cometh into the world He saith 

'. . . Lo, I come to do Thy will, O, God.” When I went down that spiral staircase 
in Canterbury Cathedral, and the cold blast came in my face, I kept my hand on an 
iron rail, which was fixed into the wall, and as far as that rail went I went. When 
an came to the world He kept His hand upon the rail of His Father’s will, and He 
_ went down, down. When He came to the Transfiguration Mountain He saw a 

ivergent way into heaven, but the Father’s way was down still. In Gethsemane there 
, ak another divergent way; but the Father’s rail led down, and He said, “Not my 
will, but Thine be done. He went down deeper, saying, ‘‘The cup that my Father 
Bhath given me, shall I not drink it?” Later we read that He was “declared to be the 
_ Son of God, with power according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from 
the dead.” Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name 
which is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow 
x, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 
The Father’s will leads from the grave up to the glory. 
__ Men want to skip the grave and to leap right up to the throne. It would ruin 
you if you got there that way; you would lose your head. You must go by way of 
e grave; there is no other. Can you pay that price? Do you ask, Is God’s will 
always so dreadful? God’s will makes heaven; but man’s will desires so many things 
which are contrary to God’s will, and which are foreign to your true bliss, that out 
f very love for you God’s will must lead you into death. It is not that God’s will is 
inkind, but that the corrupt heart of man needs the pruning knife. If you really wish 
reach the throne, you must be ready to cast aside every weight as well as every sin, 
d to take the will of God from start to finish. If you are not willing, then ask to be 
ade willing. If you are in doubt about a thing, then ask God to show you His will 
d give it up until He shows you that it is right for you. Give yourself to Him 


506 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


today, absolutely and truly. Take the cross as He sends it and bear it patiently and 
gladly. Be brave and do no talk about it to other people. Jesus says from the glory — 
today, that he that overcometh shall sit with Him upon His throne, as He overcame 
and sat down with the Father upon the Father’s throne. 


RESURRECTION LIFE IN CHRIST. 


“Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.’’—Heb. 1: 5. 

The Apostle Paul teaches in Acts 13:33 that Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son 
of God in eternal generation, was begotten: again in the resurrection; from the dark 
tomb He emerged into the ressurection life. To the risen Son God said, ‘“Thy throne, 
O God.” (Heb. 1:8.) When Jesus emerged from the sepulchre it was as though the 
angel that rolled away the stone accosted Him in the highest sense as the Messianic ~ 
King. {In 1:12 His supremacy over creation is again reiterated, in 1:13 the angels 
are said to be beneath His power, and in 11:5 “the world to come,” that is, the world 
in which we now live, is subject to Him. Thus Jesus Christ, as the representative of — 
His church, stepped out as the King of the coming age, the Lord of angels, and of 
creation also. ‘ 

Now in Hebrews 4:14 Christ has passed through the heavens, in 7:26 He has 
been made higher than the heavens, and in 8:1 He is seated at the right hand of the © 
Majesty in the heavens—three positions. We understand what that means by turning __ 
to Ephesians 1:21, where we learn that God raised Christ far above all rule, and © 
authority, and power; and these principalities and powers in the heavenlies are spoken ~ 
of in Ephesians 6: 12 as “‘the rulers of the darkness of this world.” 


Now, if Jesus Christ had gone back to heaven as God, the devil couldn’t have said 
a word against Him. But He.ascended as having taken to Himself our human nature, 
and this roused the whole antagonism of hell. Jesus overcame and rose above it, 
however, and now our race, made in the image of God, but ruined by Satan, has never- 
theless, through the work of Christ been restored to its supremacy, so that you and I 
belong to the supreme race of the universe. Whatever angels there be, or demons, or 
inhabitants of the other worlds, our race is the royal, the triumphant race, through 
union with the Son of God. Therefore, in Hebrews 2:8 we read that we see not yet - 
all things subjected to man, but we see Jesus crowned with glory and honor because ~ 
of His suffering and death. 

It is a great deal to see Jesus there, but how is that going to help us? Turn to 
Hebrews 2:11: “He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one.” — 
That is, as Jesus was the only begotten Son of the Father, we are begotten, born again 4 

3 
£ 
R 


as children of God. Therefore we are all hrethren. The very relationship therefore 

’ that existed between Joseph on the throne of Pharaoh and his brothers that were in 
Caanan or stood trembling before him, is the same relationship which exists between 
Jesus, our brother, crowned with glory and honor, and ourselves. 

Now, it often happens that one member of a family rises above his surroundings 
and then is able to help the other brothers and sisters to follow. Heb. 2:14: “That 
through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, 
and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” 
Inasmuch as our brother Christ has overcome death and the devil, and is seated in 
heaven, every one of us may take courage. If a man is one with the living, risen 
Christ, he has death behind him; he may fall asleep, but cannot die in the sense in 
which the unconverted sinner will die. He has passed into the resurrection life. The 
devil is beneath him. But the mischief is that we treat the devil either as an equal or 
superior, instead of treating him as being under our feet, as he is under the feet of 
Christ. 

Let us never forget to distinguish between our position and our condition; 


Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. ° 507 


ween our standing and our experience; between the objective and the subjective; 
tween what we are in the purpose oi God, and what we are in our feelings. Many 
re wretched and live an up and down life because they suppose that their standing 
efore God is indicated by their sensations. Your feelings may be affected by indiges- 
on, by a cloudy morning, or by lack of sleep. Elijah prayed, we don’t know how 
ng, for the rain; he ran before Ahab’s chariot about thirty miles; then Jezebel spoiled 
is sleep; he traveled the same night another fifty miles south; and do you wonder the 
ext morning he wanted to die? God Almighty understood that and gave him sleep 
nd food and drink. Now you have been so foolish as to think that your nervous 
emperament in its subtle influence over your soul indicates a change in your standing 
efore God. Nothing of the sort! If we are one with the risen Christ, we have passed 
hrough the grave and have already risen and ascended, so that we have before us the 
verlasting ages—eternal life. We are to the windward of the storm. In Christ Jesus 
paid the penalty of sin; I met the demand of God’s law; I died; I lay in the grave; 
| arose; I ascended; and I am living, so far as the purpose of God is concerned, in the 
leavenly places in Christ. Now, mark it. The need of our life is that our condition 
e lifted day by day nearer to our position; that our experience come nearer to the 
evel of our standing; and that the subjective be brought into closer conformity to the 
bjective, which is God’s ideal. 

_ Turn to Hebrews 5:11: “Melchizedek, of whom we have many things to say and 
ard of interpretation, seeing ye are become dull of hearing. For when, by reason of 
le time, ye ought to be teachers ye have need again that some one teach you the 
udiments of the first principles of the oracles of God, and are become such as have 
eed of milk, and not of solid food.’ A man is able to digest solid food at first hand, 
ut the babe must have that food first passed through the digestion of another. So 
bme can go to the Bible and digest the solid food that God gives us there, while 
thers have to’ take the Bible truth through the little books that other men write. If 
ou find yourself always reading men’s books instead of reading the Word of God, 
our digestion is not strong enough to take the Bible straight. ‘For every one that 
aketh of milk is without experience of the word of righteousness; for he is a babe. 


ercised to discern good and evil.” You will never understand the deep things of 
od’s Word until your senses are exercised. The bodily senses may become keen by 
ercise. It is so with the senses of the soul. 

_ Now, the writer to the Hebrews seeks to show the difference between Aaron and 
Melchizedek. Turn to 7:11: “If there was perfection through the Levitical priest- 
, what further need was there that another Christ should arise?” Aaron is the 
of Christ; why, then, do we need another? Perhaps you have lived on the Aaron 
ide of Christ’s priesthood, and have never advanced to the Melchizedek side. That 
lay be the gist of your difficulty. 

_ What is the difference between Aaron and Melchizedek? Read those glorious 
words in Hebrews 7:16: Christ “hath been made [a priest], not after the law of a 
arnz "mechanical and transitory—‘‘commandment, but after the power of an 
ndless’”—indissoluble—‘‘life.” Death tried to dissolve it, and could not; the devil 
ied and could not; all hell tried and could not. Aaron performed the sacrifice of the 
onement, and left it there. Jesus Christ did more; He went in within the veil, and 
e abides there in the power of an indissoluble life. 

_ Let us turn to Hebrews 2: 14, “Since, then the children are sharers in flesh and 
90d, He also in Himself in like manner partook of the same.” Hebrews 3: 14, “We 
become partakers of Christ.” He partook of our nature, and we partake of His 
ture and of His indissoluble life. Now, that life, a new unit which overcame death, 
t devil and hell, and rose to the right hand of God, is in the heart of Jesus; so that 


508 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


you and I may partake of it day by day. He is a king, that in our hearts there mig’ ; 
be the kingly life; a priest, that in our hearts we might experience the eternal salvation 
at the right hand of God, that we might live in perfect peace, expecting God to make 
our enemies the footstool of our feet. , ‘ 
Now in Heb. 10:19 we have the conclusion of the whole arugument: “Having 
therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the ~ 
way which He consecrated for us, a new and living way, through the veil”—into the ~ 
resurrection world, where we live—‘‘and having an high priest over the house of God,” 
which house we are. The way is open into the eternal through the risen Christ; but 
you have received the risen Christ and the Holy Ghost in your heart, having a great 
priest over the house of God. For what purpose is the house of God except God live 
in it? Pray to be tenanted, that God may live in your heart by the Holy Ghost, so 
that you may be kept all day in fellowship with Him. What is prayer but the motion 
of a tidal wave which has swept over the heart of Christ and which breaks upon the 
shores of my inner consciousness? What is love for souls but a passion which swept 
over the heart of Jesus and of which a wavelet is brought by the Holy Ghost to me? { 
That is Christian living. Look at 10:22: “Let us draw near’—never to go out 
again—‘‘with a true heart’”—put away insincerity—‘‘in fullness of faith’ —dare to step 
out on God’s promises—“having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our 
body washed with pure water’—all impurity is hateful to God. Ask God to cleanse 
your soul by helping you to put away anything which is inconsistent with perfect 

holiness. 
SELF-LIFE VS. SPIRIT-LIFE. 


“T myself with the mind serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.”—_ 
Rom. 7: 25. : 

The definition of flesh is given in verse 18: “In Me (that is in My flesh.)” Flesh 
1s meism, egotism. Spell flesh backwards, dropping the “h,” and you have “self.” | 
Flesh is self. The central letter in sin is “i,” and the center, the root principle of sin, — 
is the “I’’ life, the self-life. 

Now, there are some who say that the self-life is, or can be eradicated from our 
nature, and that there comes a time in our life when self is dead. When a man begins 
to brag that his self-life is eradicated, that is a pretty sure evidence that it is not. 
“Moses wist not that his face shone.”” We do not believe that the self-life is dead, or 7 
that by our own efforts we can make ourselves dead to self; our own resolution and . 
effort will not suffice. The Word of God teaches us that in Jesus Christ when He 
died on the cross, we died with Him in the purpose of God. When therefore, the self- # 
life rises, we are to count that in Jesus Christ we have already died to it. We are 
perpetually resting and depending upon Jesus’ death on Calvary to enable us, hour by 
hour, to reckon ourselves dead to the workings of the self-life. The flesh is not 
eradicated, but in union with Jesus Christ we have entered into a new life where self ‘ 
no longer reigns. Not-self is the principle of the eternal, the resurrection life in which 
we are living. The desire for self-glorification, the constant obtrusion of self, will be 
yours to the very end of your experience. There will always be a looking sideways 
into the looking-glass to see how you look. But to this tendency we must reckon 
ourselves to be dead. If your shadow troubles you, the best way is to turn towards 
the sun; then your shadow will be behind you, and if you stand under the sun at noon 
your shadow is beneath your feet. Live in communion with Jesus, and the self-life 
will be under your feet. 

Now, let us go forward. “There is therefore, now, no condemnation to them that — 
are in Christ Jesus.’ I do not think the condemnation here referred to is the con- 
demnation of God’s law, because Paul is dealing here with sanctification, but this” 
condemnation is the condemnation of your own heart, the perpetual living beneath 


Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. 509 


_ your ideal, and scourging yourself because you do. There is no longer this perpetual 
agony of conflict to them that are in Christ Jesus. ‘For the law of the Spirit of life in 
Christ’”—the indissoluble life of the risen Christ which we need to receive constantly 
through the Holy Spirit in order to make real our ideal and to lift our experience to 
_ the level of our standing. Many people are worrying because they have not more 
_ consciousness of the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit never witnesses to Himself, but to 
_ Jesus Christ, and the man who has most of the Holy Spirit will probably think least 
_ about the Holy Spirit and most about Jesus Christ whom He glorifies. The Holy 
_ Spirit works according to a law. I used to think that the filling with the Spirit 
depended upon a man whipping himself into excitement. Law is so precise, so 
unemotional, so permanent and unvarying in its action. It was a profound comfort 
to find that God’s Holy Spirit wrought as a calm, quiet, inexorable law, and if I obey 
_ the conditions of law, the Holy Spirit’s power is at my command. Obey a law of a 
. force, and the force must obey you. If I wish to use electricity, the more excited I 
_ am the less I can use it successfully. I must study the law upon which electricity 
_ works, and obey that law, then it will be my servant. So, however unemotional you 
are, if by faith you obey the Holy Spirit, you will find that He waits to fulfill in and 
: _ through you His own blessed functions. 
y Now Paul says that the Holy Spirit, who brought the life of Jesus into his heart, 
made him free; and if it made him free it will make us free. Paul was not a degraded 
sinner like those in the jail or penitentiary. He was a “respectable sinner” in whom 
there were many of the traits of true religion. These are the hardest men to reach. 
But he was freed, and we may be. From today we may be free from the law of sin 
and death through the working of the law of Christ’s life. Did you ever notice how 
law cancels law? What makes a bird fly? Is it because the bird is lighter than the 
air? No; but because as the air is struck by the bird’s wings the compressed air is 
elastic and rebounds. The law of gravitation is constantly drawing the bird down- 
ward, but the law of the spirit of life in the bird makes the bird free from the pull of 
_ the other law dragging it down. Even so the life of Jesus in your heart will make you 
free from the law of sin and death which pulls you downward. The higher we rise 
the weaker becomes the power.of the earth pull, and there is a point in space beyond at 
which the upward pull of the sun entirely counteracts the force of the earth and draws 
us more and more powerfully to itself. 
‘ But that is not all. ‘What the law could not do in that it was weak through the 
flesh.” The law of God could deal with sins, but not with sin. The law of Sinai could 
tell a man what he must and must not do, but could not deal with the self-principle 
that is the source of all our trouble. The law was good, but it was weakened through 
the flesh; so God did something else; He sent “His own Son in the likeness of sinful 
flesh.” Jesus Christ was sinless, but bore the likeness of our sinful flesh. He was 
perfect and yet refused to follow His own will. If He followed the will of God. 
implicitly at any cost to His own will, even though it meant the cross, how much 
more absolutely must you and I deny our sinful self, our corrupt personality. Jesus 
Christ, Himself sinless, as the representative Man bore the curse due to Adam’s race, 
} and was nailed to the cross. ‘‘God hath made Him who-knew no sin, to be sin.” 
; There comes at conversion a blessed montent when we see Jesus dying as our 
atonement. Then there comes a time when we come again to the cross; possibly the 
_ two visits might take place at the same moment. But in our second look we see that 
God has nailed the self-principle to the cross, and we know that it must be an accursed 
thing if Jesus wore it on the cross. Then we can no longer let that cursed thing 
which God has put on the cross be the center of our life. Instead of the self-life I 
must take the Christ-life, of which He shall be the center, and around which my life 
shall reyolve. 


510 Pulpit Power and Eloquence: 


When you begin to live near God, you become very quick to detect the mo 
ments of the self-life; but, whenever it asserts itself, you at once reckon that the ; 


say, “You are aosuestal and no longer the law and central object of my existent ” 
Thus in the body of Christ you reckon yourself dead to it, and the life of Jesus as 
yours. 


life, running away from it, dreading and cursing it. That would be an awful condition 
to be in. You would be so morbid, so self-conscious, so self-centered that you woul 
hardly preach a sermon because you would think that it had more self ir it than t 
ought to have. You would never live naturally. But let us take a step id a 


positive nid negative pole. That bar represents the work of the Holy Spirit in ¢ 
man’s heart. It is double—positive and negative. Positively, He glorifies Jesus and 
is always enabling us to receive Christ’s life into the soul. Negatively, He is antago- 
nizing the self-life, “lusting against the flesh.” He deals with the self-life so that you 
may be occupied with Jesus, and walk in the Spirit. Thus sanctification is not a 7 
effort on your part to keep holy, but a trusting in the Holy Spirit to keep Jesus alway S 
in the front, whilst the I-life becomes more and more minimized, ineffective, and weak ‘4 


through us as we “walk, not after the flesh, but see the Spirit?” 
GOD’S WORKMANSHIP. 


How are our untoward characters to be transformed so as to manifest the charac- 
teristics of Christ? Paul tells us (Eph. 2:10) not to worry about sanctification as 
though it were to be attained by our own effort. Throw upon God the responsibility 
and be content to work out what God works in. God will first suggest to you what 


which He has taught you to yearn. First, He. (gives us the new conception He desires 
us to execute; then He leads us to will it; and, finally, He works through its accom- 
plishment. Remember, that as His grace sought you first, so His grace will achieve © 
His eternal purpose if only you do not thwart and frustrate it. “We are His work- — 
manship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” We work not up to the a a 
but down from it; not to obtain salvation, but because we have it. 


But the point I desire specially to note is this: “Created in Christ Jesus.” Thi 
means three things. In Ephesians 1:15 we read that Christ abolished in His flesh 
the enmity between Jew and Gentile that He might create in Himself one new man, — 
And in 4: 15 we are told that we grow into a full-grown man in Christ. In the death © 
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has constituted one ideal man of whom Christ 
is the head, and in whom we have been created as members. 7 

Second: Read in II Corinthians 5:17: If any man is in Christ, there is a new 
creation.” In Jesus the divine and the human perfectly blended, aad this new unit of — 
existence, a new thing in the history of the universe, which had passed through 
death into resurrection life, is by the Holy Ghost imparted into the nature of the 
believer. Thus there is an absolutely new creation, something which is not in man by — 
natural birth, but something which is akin to the eternal life, and which has in itself 
the principles of victory over the power of the grave and of the devil. When a man ; 
receives this new creation it makes him, as Peter says, a “partaker of the divine 
nature.” 

Third: Eph. 4: 22, 24: ‘Ye put away as concerning your former manner of life, 
the old man, which waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that ye be renewed 


Spiritual Life.and Growth—Meye . 511 


jn the spirit of your mind, and after God put on the new man, which hath been created 
in righteousness and holiness of truth.” 
What is the ‘old man?” It is your former manner of life, the habits and practices 
which went to make you the individual as you were known to your fellows. The new 
“man is, therefore, a collection of those characters, habits and practices which we 
receive from the living, the exalted Christ. The old man is somewhat distinct from 
the flesh, that being the root principle, and the old man being rather the habits and 
practices through which this root principle expresses itself. 
' Now notice that the apostle here refers to a distinct past act, when old habits and 
practices were abandoned and other habits were accepted. Col. 3:9: “Lie not one 
to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings and have put on 
the new man, which is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that 
_ created him.” Now when did these Ephesian and Colossian Christians definitely 
abandon the characteristics of the old life and appropriate those of the new? Evi- 
dently there is a connection between Col. 3:9 and 11, 12. “In whom ye were also 
‘circumcised with the circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off the body 
of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, 
_wherein ye were also raised with Him through faith in the working of God.” Let us 
_ corroborate that from Gal. 3:27: ‘“‘As many of you as were baptized into Christ did 
put on Christ.” It is quite clear that in the history of these early Christians the act 
of baptism was a much more important and definite point of demarcation than it is 
- with most Christians today; and the apostle is constantly saying to these Christians, 
who had been heathen, that at baptism there was a definite putting off of the practices 
and habits of the old corrupt life and the putting on of the characteristics of Christ. 
When coming up the Red Sea I preached on the text, ‘They were all baptized 

unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” I said: “We are crossing the greatest 
“baptistry in the world. There, slavery; here, freedom. There, the leeks and garlic 
_ of Egypt; and here, the manna and water. Here was the line of demarcation.” Have 

you gone through your Red Sea? Oh, that at this moment God may lead you to 
that position in which you say: “There has been the selfish indulgence; it is the leeks 
and garlic of Egypt. There has been the selfish spendthrift way of using time; there is 
the living for money, or fame, or popularity, or eloquence; but here and now, through 
the solemn act of faith, we pass into that other land where the fare is simpler, where 
_ God waits to be all in all, where my soul shall find henceforth in Jesus its Alpha and 
Omega.” 
Compare Col. 3:9, “Ye have put off,” and the eighth verse, “Put off,” with the 
_ tenth verse, “Ye have put on,” and the twelfth verse, “Put on.” Once, as a definite 
act, a man puts off but all the time after he is applying that one definite act to the 
‘sins, the practices and the habits that assail him, and he does for these perpetually 
what he did once for all in his holy purpose. So in one moment a man puts on Christ, 
but that one act of his is repeated thousands of times as he keeps putting on Christ. 
ou did put off—put off; you did put on—put on. 

But you say, “This is going to be a heavy piece of work for me.” Probably we 
will find help in Rom, 13: 11-14. You put on the better and the worse drops off; you 
put on Christ. See the picture. There is an army encamped, and in the tents and 


But yonder the sentinel, who catches the glimpse of dawn, cries, “The night is far 
spent, the day is at hand; put off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of 
light.” What is the result? The soldiers spring from their couches, cast away the 
arments of the night, and every man dons the shining silver, glistening armor with 
vhich he fronts the dawn. Emerging from their tents they stand a long array, clad 
the morning light as the sunbeams beat upon their glistening armor. That is what 


512 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


God says to you today: ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” It is one of the me 
wonderful things I know, that ‘Christ has created a new man, the new man which a 
God is created, and all day long all the qualities that I need, the characteristics of th 
risen man are ready for my use. As the Holy Spirit works in my soul, He makes 
aware when I am coming within the reach of some temptation; and He says, “ 
you are going into that dense tropical forest, where the poisonous miasma lurks; arn 
yourself.” Then one, so to speak, puts on Christ, and goes to meet the temptatior 
encased in Him. As impurity comes, one meets it by putting on Jesus as purity, an 


ness. Thus all the time, spiritually, one is putting on Jesus Christ. 
I used to wonder why God let temptation come; I think I understand it now. 
Temptation does not mean that I-shall sin. There is no sin in temptation. Chris 


it reveals us and shows where we are weakest; and when the devil makes us kno 
where we are weak, we go to Christ for a new cargo of the opposite grace. You n 


a greater curse to ministers than jealousy. Many a man’s ministry is rendered mut 
because he is jealous of another man. But if the devil tempts you-to say mean things 
and you say kind ones slap him in the face. The Holy Ghost cannot use a man whd 
harbors jealous thoughts, and you must keep in close touch with the Holy Ghost i 
you are going to be used by Him. You will find that this is true, not only of jealousy 


up from the books, novels, papers. It isn’t enough simply to resist them, but to mee 
them with all the burning purity of Christ. Has not the time past sufficed to hay 
wrought your own evil desire? Will you not henceforth put off the old and put on 
the new? Let us from henceforth stand arrayed in the shining armor of Christ. 


THE LARGER OUTLOOK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 


The church at Jerusalem was too centralized; the apostles there were nursif 
their own converts, keeping within their own precincts, and making no attempt 
reach the great world that lay on the heart of God. Some feeling of this sort mi 
have been brought home to the church at Antioch when Barnabas and Paul 
back from Jerusalem, where the Church was very much divided by what Peter h 
done in the house of Cornelius. Now the church at Antioch was met by two though 
on the one hand, Jesus had said, “Go into all the world, and preach the gospel;” on 
the other hand, the mother church at Jerusalem would make no advance. Therefore 
since the Antioch church had seen a wonderful work of God in its own neighborhood, 
there seems to have gathered together a little group of men very like-minded, w 
“ministered to the Lord.” 

Dr. A. J. Gordon said that when a young man he was wearing his life out n 
promoting the machinery of his church, and his physician told him that he would kill 
himself if he went on thus. He had a périod of illness, and away in the hills hi 
resolved that henceforth he would keep his church in fellowship with the risen Christ, 
believing that when He was the center of the church the Holy Ghost would see to the 
outworking of the church in various mission branches and agencies. Do not spen 
all your time and strength doing pastoral work, or in looking after the machinery. 
Keep your heart and the heart of your church in touch with the living Christ, for whe 
you and the church minister to the Lord the Holy Ghost will direct your energies and 
your life. If you centralize on Christ the circumference will take care of itself. 

Now whilst Jerusalem was thinking of itself, and these men at Antioch were wai 
mg on God for direction, the Holy Ghost’s heart was set on something else. T 


Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. 513 


Joly Ghost is not content with a self-centered church, He yearns for something better. 
I feel as if He can hardly restrain the vehement passion of His soul for the vast popu- 
itions outside our churches, and for the great world. The Spirit was sent to bear 
witness of Christ and to glorify Him in us and in the great regions beyond. 


At Antioch He said: ‘Separate Me Barnabas and Saul, for the work whereunto 
I have called them.” Is He not saying that to us? Who amongst us are to be the 
chosen men and women for this work? It consisted in three things: witnessing for 
Christ by the voice, witnessing for Christ by suffering, and witnessing for Christ in 
the home life. Before us lie sermons waiting to be pyzeached, persecutions and trials 
‘0 be suffered, there are also quiet, uneventful, and monotonous home lives to be lived. 
When you are selected you will be sent each to his or her own work; some to preach 
and some to suffer, some to live amid lonely mountains or in the heart of the great 
Cities. Only as you advance will the veil part and reveal what lies just before you in 
he mind of the Holy Spirit. 

_ Now what kind of people does the Holy Ghost want? Acts 11:24. Barnabas 
was “full of the Holy Ghost.” Are.you able to meet this test? All through this book 
of Acts the word “‘filling’”’ is used of the Pentecostal gift. Have you been “filled with 
the Spirit?” (Ephesians 5:18.) It matters not whether a well is filled by turning a 
‘iver into it suddenly, or whether the water percolates into it a drop at a time, so long 
as the well is filled. Let it be as God likes, by the rush of the river or drop by drop. 
Phe question is, are you “filled?” I believe that we receive the Spirit in regeneration, 
and that as we open the different departments of our life to Him He fills one after 
nother until, our whole character being yielded and the walls being broken down, 
are infilled by Him. But I believe also that in every man’s life, especially in regard 
) Our ministry, that there are what I like to call freshets. If there is the welling up 
om within there is certain to be the pouring down from above. Have you ever 
xperienced that? ‘Be filled.” God will use largely only Spirit-filled men. He 
jould rather leave the work untouched than have unsanctified, unfilled men to under- 
take it. That is why many have been so little used. Until you learn the one condition 
bon which He wiil use you the great stream of God’s power will flow past you, and 
Maybe someone who is utterly uncouth and unlettered will be called by God to be the 
annel of blessing and salvation, whilst you, with all your education, will be left high 
nd dry upon your pulpit. 

“Be filled.” “Receive the promise of the Spirit by faith.” The same law that 
ates for justification and sanctification operates for the infilling of the Holy Ghost. 
eive. Andrew Murray used to say: first, there is such a blessing; second, it is for 
me; third, I haven’t got it; fourth, I will make any sacrifice necessary to get it; fifth, 
‘Now receive it by faith. The devil may say: ‘You have got nothing. You don’t 
el anything.” Then we may say, “No, but God never would dissappoint His child 
With a stone when he has asked for bread. I have received because God is faithful, 
nd I reckon on the faithfulness of God.” If we knew by emotion that we are filled 
With the Spirit we might think the filling of the Holy Ghost Jasted only as long as the 


Jesus. The Spirit does not keep us thinking about Himself, but He is ever reveal- 
g and glorifying Jesus. 

Let me give you these closing texts. Acts 13, “Separate.” Put against that Num- 
ts 8:7, 11-14, the separation of the Levites unto God. “Separate.” That’is the key. 
n Acts 13:9, “Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost.” In Cyprus, Elymas, the sorcerer, 
hstood them. When you begin to work in the power of the Spirit I expect that 
1 will meet some tremendous difficulty that will almost stagger you. Paul was a 
rit-filled man before, but instantaneously at the time of need he was filled for this 


514 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


emergency. In verse fifty-two we read that the “disciples were filled’”—being filled 4 
all the time, the Greek signifies. Paul and Barnabas were not only Spirit-filled men 
themselves, but they were the means of creating Spirit-filled churches. a 


My last text is Acts 14: 26, “The work which they had fulfilled.” If Paul hadn’t 
preached at Antioch, and been stoned at Iconium, he would not have fulfilled the 
work, but he filled the chalice of opportunity up to the brim. Men and women, are _ 
your lives full? Ministers, if you were to die now, after having preached at that fash- 
ionable church with so little effect, and having winked at so many things which you > 
know to be against God’s will, could it be said of you that you had fulfilled your work? 
Have you lived as a Holy Ghost man? have you preached as a Holy Ghost man? have 4 
you been a straightforward servant of Jesus Christ? Is the chalice of your oppor- 
tunity and your talents filled to the full? God comes to fill you and then to send you — | 


to fill up the measure of your opportunity. 
THE SECRET OF FRUIT-BEARING. 


“T am the vine, ye are the branches; he that abideth in Me and I in him, the same ~ 
beareth much fruit; for apart from Me ye can do nothing.”’—John 15: 5. a 
You will easily understand why the vine so obviously sets forth our Savior’s char- _ 
acter and relationship; for, of all the trees that grow from the soil of earth, none 
suffers so much as the vine. In the spring the knife is seldom far from it, as the vine 
dresser is perpetually pruning off the superfluous growth. In the summer and autumn — 
(in Southern Europe) all the beautiful clusters are ruthlessly torn from the trembling 
vine and trampled beneath the feet of those that press the grapes. To their very 
knees they are stained with the blood of the suffering vine, as all its rich and luscious ~ 
juice is crushed out to give pleasure to the world. Then in winter, when men are glad — 
with the result of the vintage, the vine itself is stunted and bare, standing neglected 
and desolate. Thus spring, summer, autumn, and winter alike bring their meed of 
pain to the vine. When Jesus Christ says that He and those who belong to Him 
make one suffering vine, He teaches that none of us will ever be able to live long with-— : 
out the knife, without the pressure of the foot, or without lowliness and desolation, — 
and that only through these can He and His own give the fruit for which the world — 
waits. If you truly abide in Jesus Christ you must have your meed of suffering, for in Es 
every pore and twig the vine bleeds. . e 
Then I suppose there is no plant so pliable as the vine. The gardener binds the by 
vines to any place he chooses, bending the branches hither and thither. Here is — 
another exquisite thought. The whole point and pith of the crucifixion of Christ, sO 
far as His own character was concerned, is contained in the two words, submission — 
and surrender. If you and I are to enter into Christ’s purpose for us in this world we © 
will find that His providence, like the gardener’s hand, is perpetually fixing us to 
untoward circumstances. Notice John 15:16, “Ye did not choose Me, but I chose 
you, and appointed you.’ Perhaps, by the hand of God, the husbandman, you have 
been fastened in a position which you would not choose. You must stop there since © 
He has placed you that you might bear fruit at that very point. Be pliant, submit, f 
surrender, and as your Master, the true vine, was nailed to the cross, be thou also © 
nailed to thy cross and cover it with thy festoons of leaves; then from its arms will F 
drop the clusters of grapes. 3 
Notice also that the vine has very long, far-reaching arms. ‘I have seen large — 
hothouses covered by the produce of one vine. It is extremely interesting to think — 
that Jesus Christ and His apostles, and all saints, martyrs, confessors, and believers | 
of all ages make one vine, the boughs of which spread throughout the whole world. 
From that crave in Joseph’s garden, where they buried the root, the far-spreading 


Spiritual Life and Growth—Meyer. 515 


anches of the Church of Christ reach to the remotest extremities of the world, and 
everywhere they are bearing fruit. 

Now notice that God’s great object is fruit. “Every branch in Me that beareth 
not fruit, He taketh it away.” “If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch 
and is withered.” Here Jesus speaks of burning only as a part of the drapery of the 
parable. How many ministers have dabbled in the higher criticism, or something 
else that has led them further and further from the truth, and ultimately have been 
taken right away from active ministerial work. As fruit bearers they have been put 
a ide, and Jesus Christ selected some other man through whom to accomplish His 
; york. Thank God, many are grafted in again, and bear much fruit. 


_ The whole secret of fruit bearing lies in Christ’s indwelling. “I in you,” ave 
MI in Him,” . .. . “My words in you.” He said also (14:23), “We will 
‘come and make our abode with him.” In regeneration the Holy Spirit brings Christ 
into our hearts, but He may be in us as the shekinah was in the midst of the holy 
place, before which a heavy veil hung. Man’s nature may be likened to the ancient 
tabernacle; spirit, soul, body; holy of holies, holy place, outer court. I do not believe 
“we are born with the devil in us, but that the spirit is a dark untenanted chamber. 
e soul, of course, standing for volition, intelligence, emotion, etc., is lighted up, 
Huminated, quick, and vivid, and keen, and therefore with the unconverted man, the 
tural man, the soul life is his chief life. He has the capacity of God, but as yet his 
irit-realm is untenanted. As the shekinah entered the most holy place, a dark 
amber, and shone, so in regeneration Christ, the true light, the shekinah, enters our 
pirit and illuminates it with life, and light, and love. Every regenerated person there- 
fore is different from what he was and from others. But Jesus Christ is too often 
relegated to the spirit and not permitted to dominate the soul and the body; the heavy 
veil hangs there. When Jesus died the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and the 
whole was cast into one apartment, so that the shekinah could shine right through the 
whole. This is the simple teaching of God’s Word. So when a man enters into a 


Justification is when you turn your back to your own effort to get right with God 
and accept Jesus Christ’s righteousness as your own. Sanctification is when you turn 
your back upon your own e‘forts to be good, and accept Jesus Christ as your indwell- 
ig goodness. Fruit bearing is when you turn your back upon your own efforts and 


trivings to do good in the world, and turn to Jesus Christ, who is in you, and say, 
“Lord, work through me.” 


_ The branch that abides deep in the heart of the vine has no anxiety about pro- 
‘ducing fruit, for the responsibility is not with it but with the root. I asked a man 

who was worrying which end of the branch was the more necessary; and he said, 
"Oh, of course, the end of the branch that bears the grapes.” I said, “Think again, 
n. The grapes are the care of the root; the important part is to have the branches 
clean and joined well to the trunk, and the root is responsible for the fruit.’ Why 
hould we go on holding these conventions when everything is so simple? Christ 
s. “I am with you; I will bear the fruit; the only thing for you to do is to abide in 
” If we always had to prick and scourge ourselves to keep abiding it would be as 
cult to abide as it is to justify or sanctify ourselves, and there would be no longer 
but works. Directly you give scope or sphere to the self-life you hinder the life 
; aith, You are in Christ! Then stop where you are. You will abide where you 
fé unless you go out of one of three doors. 


516 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


First. Known and permitted sin. If you yield there you immediately get ov 
abiding union with Christ. 

Second. Permitted worry. Worrying about your children, your maintena 
your home, your church. 

Third. Intermitted fellowship. Broken communion with Christ through 
Bible, prayer, the use of ordinances. ; ‘ 

Keep from these three things and you abide in Him. You may not always t 
about Him, but you may always abide in Him as a woman abides in her husband’ 
love, though she is busy with many things and does not think directly of him. A: 
the Holy Ghost to keep your heart always turned toward Jesus. We have deep uni 
with the Son of God when He abides in the soul.. “Abide in Me, and I in you.” 


[F. B. Meyer was born April 8, 1847, receiving his education at Brighton an 
Regent’s Park Baptist colleges. In 1870 became assistant pastor in Liverpool a 
pastor from 1872 to 1878 in York and Leicester. In 1888 went to Regent's P 
Chapel, London, and since 1892, minister Christ Church, Westminster. He 
written a number of volumes, The Bells of Is, detailing his personal experience 
mission and rescue work. His other books consist largely of sermons and addresse 
Through his addresses at Northfield and also in principal cities of the United Sta 
he has done a great deal to awaken large numbers spiritually. He and Dwight L, 
Moody were close friends and co-workers. 

This sermon consists of addresses delivered at three sessions of the Nort 
Conference, as reported for the Northfield Echoes, and reproduced by the publish 


permission. ] 


617) 


Perea NO DIFPERENCE. 


D. Lb. MOODY. 


“There is no difference.’—Rom., 3: 22. 


That is one of the hardest truths man has to learn. We are apt to think that we 
are just a little better than our neighbors; and if we find they are a little better than 
ourselves, we go to work and try to pull them down to our level. If you want to find 
out who and what man is, go to the third chapter of Romans, and there the whole 
story is told. “There is none righteous; no, not one.” “All have sinned and come 
short.” All. Some men like to have their lives written before they die; if you would 
like to read your biography, turn to this chapter, and you will find it already written. 

I can imagine some one saying, “I wonder if he really pretends to say that ‘there 
is no difference.’”’ The teetotaler says, ‘““Am I no better than the drunkard?” Well, 
I want to say right here that it is a good deal better to be temperate than intemperate; 
a good deal better to be honest than dishonest; it is better for a man to be upright in 
all his transactions than to cheat right and left, even in this life. But when it comes to 
the great question of salvation, these things do not touch the point at all, because “all 
have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”’ Men are all bad by nature. The 
old Adam-stock is bad, and we can not bring forth good fruit until we are grafted into 
the one True Vine. If I have an orchard, and two apple trees in it, both of which bear 
some bitter apples, perfectly worthless, does it make any difference to me that the 
one tree has got perhaps five hundred apples, all bad, and the other only two, both 
bad? There is no difference; only one tree has more fruit than the other. But it is 
all bad. So it is with man. One thinks that he has only one or two very little sins— 
that God will not notice those; while that other man has broken every one of the ten 
commandments. No matter, there is no difference; they are both guilty; they have 
both broken the law. 

The law demands a complete and perfect fulfillment; and if you can not render 
that, you are lost, as far as the law is concerned. ‘“Whosover shall keep the whole 
law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” Suppose you were to hang up a 
‘man to the roof with a chain of ten links; if one were to break, does it matter that the 
_ other nine are all sound and whole? Not the least. One link breaks, and down comes 

the man. But is it not rather hard that he should fall when the other nine are perfect, 
when only one is broken? Why, of course not; if one is broken, it is just the same to 
e man as if all had been broken; he falls. So the man who breaks one command: 
ment is guilty of all. He is a criminal in God’s sight. Look at yonder prison with its 
‘thousand prisoners. Some are there for murder; some fof stealing; some for forgery; 
some for one thing, and some for another. You may classify the men; but every one 
is acriminal. They have all broken the law; and they are all paying the penalty. So 
‘the law” has declared every man a criminal in the sight of God. 

If a man should advertise that he could take a correct photograph of people’s 
hearts, do you believe he would find a customer? There is not a man among us whom 
ou could persuade to have his portrait taken, if you could photograph the real man, 
We go to have our likenesses taken, and carefully arrange our toilet, and if the artist 
latters us, we say, “Oh, yes, that is a first-class portrait,” as we pass it round among 


518 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


our friends. But let the real man be brought out, the photograph of the heart, asi 
see if a man will pass that round among his neighbors. Why, you would not want 
your own wife to see it! You would be frightened even to look at it yourself. 
Nobody knows what is in that heart but Christ. We are told that “the heart is” 
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?” We do not 
know our own hearts; none of us have any idea how bad they are. Some bitter things 
are written against me; but I know very many more things about myself that are bad 
than any other man can know. There is nothing good in the old Adam nature. We 
have by nature a heart in rebellion against God, and we do not even love God unless” 
we are born of the Spirit. i 

I can understand why men do not like this third chapter of Romans—it is too 
strong for them. It speaks the truth too plainly. But just because we do not like it, we { 
shall be all the better for having a look at it; very likely we shall find that it is exactly _ 
what we want after all. It is truth that men do not at all like. But I have noticed 
that the medicine we do not like is the medicine that will do us most good. If we do 
not think we are as bad as the description, we must just take a closer look at ourselves, 
Here is a man who thinks he is not just so bad as it makes him out to be. He is sure 
he is a little better than his neighbor next door; why, he goes to church regularly, and 
his neighbor never goes to church at all! ‘Of course,” he congratulates himself, “I 
shall certainly get saved easier.’”’ But there is no use trying to evade the Scripture. — 
God has given us the law to measure ourselves by; and by this most perfect rule “we | 
have all sinned and come short;” and “there is no difference.” \ 

Paul brings in the law to show that he is lost and ruined. God, being a perfect q 
God, had to give a perfect law; and the law was given not to save men, but to measure © 
them by. I want you to understand this clearly; because I believe hundreds and \ 
thousands stumble there. They try to save themselves by trying to keep the law; but — 


man since the world began. Men have been trying to keep it; but they have never — 
succeeded and never will. Ask Paul what it was given for. Here is his answer: — 
“That every mouth might be stopped, and the whole world become guilty before God.” 
In this third chapter of Romans the world has been put on its trial, and found guilty. | 
The verdict has been brought in against us all—ministers, and elders, and church - 

members—just as much as against the prodigal and the drunkard; “All have sinned g 
and come short.” i 

The law stops every man’s mouth. God will have a man humble himself down onl 
his face before Him, with not a word to say for himself. Then, when he owns that he | 
is a sinner, and gets rid of all his own righteousness, God will speak to him. I can 
always tell a man who has got near the Kingdom of God; his mouth is stopped. If 
you will allow me the expression, God always shuts up a man’s lips before He saves — 
him. 

Job was not saved until he stopped talking about himself. Just see how God dealt 
with him. First of all, He afflicts him, and Job begins to talk about his own goodness. 
“T delivered the poor,” he says, “and the fatherless, and him that had none to help ~ 
him. I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a father to the poor!” — 
Why, they would have made Job an elder, if there had been elders in those days! He — 
had been a wonderfully good man. But now God says, “I will put a few questions to — 
you. Gird up now thy loins like a man, for I will demand of thee, and answer thou 
Me.” And Job is down directly; he is ashamed of himself, he can not speak of his — 
works any more. “Behold,” he cries, “I am vile; what shall I answer Thee? I will — 
lay mine hand upon my mouth.” y 

But he is not low enough yet, perhaps; and God puts a few more questions. “Ah,” 
says Job, “I never understood these things before—I never saw it in that light.” He ; 


There Is No Difference—Moody. 510 


is thoroughly humbled now; he can not help confessing it. ‘I have heard of Thee by 
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefor I abhor myseli, and 
_ repent in dust and ashes.’’ Now he has found his right position before God; and now 


of all that he had before. The clouds, and the mist, and the darkness round his path, 
‘are driven away; and the light from eternity bursts into his soul when he sees his 
‘nothingness in the sight of a pure and holy God. 

This, then, is what God gives us the “law” for—to show ourselves in our true 
colors. 

I said to my family one morning, a few weeks before the Chicago fire, “I am 
coming home this afternoon to give you a ride.’ My little boy clapped his hands. 
“Oh, papa, will you take me to see the bears in Lincoln Park?” ‘Yes.” You know 
boys are very fond of seeing bears. I had not been gone long when my little boy said, 
“Mamma, I wish you would get me ready.” “Oh,” she said, ‘‘it will be a long time 
before papa comes.” “But I want to get ready, mamma.” At last he was ready to 
have the ride, face washed, and clothes all nice and clean. ‘“‘Now, you must take good 
care and not get yourself dirty again,” said mamma. Oh, of course he was going to 
take care; he was not going to get dirty. So off he ran to watch for me. However, 
it was a long time yet until the afternoon, and after a little while he began to play. 
When I reached home, I found him outside with his face all covered with dirt. “I 
can not take you to the park in that state, Willie.” “‘‘Why, papa, you said you would 
‘take me.” “Ah, but I can not; you are all over mud. I could not be seen with such 
a dirty little boy.” ‘Why, I’se clean, papa; mamma washed me!” “Well, you have 
got dirty since!’ He began to cry; and I could not convince him that he was dirty. 
-“T’se clean; mamma washed me!” he cried. Do you think I argued with him? No. 
_ I just took him up in my arms, and carried him into the house, and showed him his 
face in the looking-glass. He had not a word to say. He could not take my word, 
but one look at the glass was enough; he saw for himself. He did not say he was not 
dirty after that. 

: Now the looking-glass showed him that his face was dirty—but I did not take the 
looking-glass to wash it with; of course not. Yet that is just what thousands of people 
‘do. The law is the looking-glass to see ourselves in, to show us how vile and worth- 
less we are in the sight of God; but they take the law, and try to wash themselves with 
_ it! Man has been trying that for six thousand years, and has miserably failed. “By 
the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight!’ Only one Man 
ever lived on the earth who could say He had kept the law; and that was the Lord 
Jesus Christ. If He had committed one sin, and come short in the smallest degree, 
His offering Himself for us would have been useless. But men have tried to do what 
He did, and have failed. Instead of sheltering under His righteousness, they have 
offered God their own. And God knew what a miserable failure it would be. ‘There 
‘is none righteous; no, not one.” 

I do not care where you put man; everywhere he has been tried he has proved 
a total failure. He was put in Eden on trial; and some men say they wished they had 
Adam’s chance. If you had, you would go down as quickly as he did. You put five 
undred children into a large hall, and give them ten thousand toys; tell them they 
an run all over the hall, and that they can have anything they want except one thing, 
placed, let us say, in one of the corners of the organ. You go out for a little while. 
Do you not think that the spot which is forbidden to them will be the first place to 
Which they will go? Why, nothing else in the room would have any attraction for 
hem, but just the thing they were told not to touch. And so let us not think Adam 
as any worse than ourselves. Adam was put on trial; and Satan walks into Eden. 
I do not know how long he was there; but I should think he had not been there 


520 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


twenty minutes before he stripped Adam of everything he had. There he is, fre a 
from the hands of his Creator; Satan comes upon the scene, and presents a tempta 
tion; and down Adam goes. He was a failure. 
Then God took man into covenant with Him. He said to Abraham, “Look 
yonder at the stars in the heavens, and at the sand upon the seashore; I will make 
your seed like that. I will bless thee and multiply thee upon the earth.” But what 
a stupendous failure was man under the covenant! Look back, and read about it. 
_The children of Israel are brought out of Egypt, see many signs and wonders; 
and stand at last at the foot of Mount Sinai. Then God’s holy law is given them. 
Did they not promise to keep it? “Oh yes,” they cry, ‘‘we will keep the law; cer- 
tainly.’ To hear them talk you might think it was going to be all right now. But 
just wait till Moses and Joshua have turned their backs! No sooner have their leaders 
gone up the mountain to have an interview with God than they begin saying, “Wo 
der what’s become of this man Moses? We don’t know where he’s got to. Come, 
us make unto us another god. Aaron! make us a golden calf. Here are the golden 
ornaments we had from the Egyptians; come and make us another god.’”’ So when 
it is made, the people raise a great shout, and fall down and worship it. “Hark! 
listen; what shout is that I hear?’ says Moses, as he comes down the mountain-side. 
“Alas,” says Joshua, “there is war in the camp: it is the shout of the victor!” “Aho 
no,” says Moses, “it is not the shout of victory or of war, Joshua; it is the cry of 
the idolaters. They have forgotten the God who delivered them from the Egyptians; 
who led them through the Red Sea; who fed them with bread from heaven—angels’ 
food. They have forgotten their promises to keep the commandments. - Already th 2 
first two of them are broken: ‘no other gods,’ ‘no graven image.’ They have made 
them another god—a-golden god!” And that is what men have been doing ever 
since. a 
There are more men in this land worshipping the golden calf than the God of 
heaven. Look around you. They lay before it health, and happiness, and peate. 
“Give me thirty pieces of silver, and I will sell you Christ,” is the world’s cry to-day 
“Give me fashion, and I will sell you Christ.” ‘I will sacrifice my wife, my children 
my life, my all, for a little drink. I will sell my soul for drink!” It is easy to blan e 
these men for worshipping the golden calf; but what are we doing ourselves? Ah, . 
man was a failure then; and he has been a failure ever since. wa 
Then God put man under the judges; and wonderful judges they were; bu! 
once more, what a failure he was! After that came the prophets; and what a failur 
man was under them! Then came the Son from heaven Himself, right out of 
bosom of the Father. He left the throne and came down here, to teach us how t 
live. We took Him and murdered Him on Calvary! Man was a failure in Christ’ 


day. 


And now we are living under the dispensation of grace—a wonderful dispensa- 
tion. God is showering down blessings from above. But what is man under grace? 
A stupendous failure. Look at that man reeling on his way to a drunkard’s grave, “f 
with his soul traveling to a drunkard’s hell. Look at the wretched harlots on your 
streets. Look at the profligacy, and the pauperism, and the loathsome sickness. y 
Look at the vice and crime that fester everywhere; and tell me, Is it not true that 
man is a failure under grace? 

Yes, man is a failure. I look forward right down the other side of the milena 
Christ has swayed His sceptre over the earth for a thousand years; but man is a 
failure still. For “when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out 
of his prison; and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters 
of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle; . . . and they 
compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city; and fire came down 


There Is No Difference—Moody. 521 


from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” ' What man wants is another nature; 
he must be born again. What a foolish saying it is, that, “Experience teaches.” Man 
has been a long time at that school, and has never learned his lesson yet—his own 
weakness and inability. He still thinks great things of his own strength. “I am 
‘going to stand after this,’ he says; “I have hit upon the right plan this time. I am 
able to keep the law now.” But the first temptation comes; and he is down. Man 
will not believe in God’s strength. Man will not acknowledge himself a failure, and 
surrender to Christ to save him from his sins. 

But is it not better to find out in this world that we are a failure, and to go 
to Christ for deliverance. than to sleep on, and go down to hell without knowing we 
are sinners? 

I know that this doctrine—that we have all failed, that we have all sinned, and 
come short—is exceedingly objectionable to the natural man. If I had tried to find 
out the most disagreeable verse in the whole Bible, perhaps I could not have fastened 
upon one more universally disliked than “There is no difference.” 

I can imagine—and I think I have a right to imagine it—--Noah, leaving his ark 
and going off preaching for once in awhile’ As the passers-by stop to listen, there 
is no sound of the hammer or the plane. Noah has stopped work. He has gone 
off on a preaching tour, to warn his countrymen. Perhaps he is telling them that 
there is a zreat deluge coming to sweep away all the workers of iniquity; perhaps 
he is warning them that every man who is not in the ark must perish; that there 
would be no difference. I can imagine one man saying, ‘““You had better go back 
and finish your work, Noah, rather than come here preaching. You do not think 
‘we are going to believe in such nonsense as that. You tell us all are going to 
perish alike! Do you really expect us to believe that the kings and governors, the 


going to be alike lost?” ‘Yes,’ says Noah; ‘the deluge that is coming by and by 
will take you all away. Every man that is not in the ark must die. There will be 
no difference.” Doubtless they thought Noah had gone raving mad. But did not 
he flood come and take them all away? Princes and paupers, and knaves and kings 
was there any difference? No difference. 
} When the destroying angel was about to pass through Egypt, no doubt the 
haughty Egyptian laughed at the poor Israelite putting the blood on his door-post 
“and lintel. “What a foolish notion,” he would say, derisively; “the very idea of 
sprinkling blood on a door-post! If there were anything’ coming, that would never 
_ keep it away. I do not believe there is any death coming at all; and if there were, 
it might touch these poor people, but it would certainly never come near us.” But 
when the night came, there was no difference. The king in his palace, the captive 
in his prison, the beggar by the wayside—they were all alike. Into every house the 


In the home of the poor and the lowly, in the home of the prince and the noble, in 
the home of the governor and ruler, the eldest son lay dead. Only the poor Israelite 
sscaped—he who had the blood on the door-post and lintel. And when God comes 
© us in judgment, if we are not in Christ, all will be alike. Learned or unlearned, 
igh or low, priest or scribe—there will be no difference. 

God never utters any opinion; what He says is truth. “All have sinned and 
ome short,” He cries; “and there is no difference.” 

I read of a deluge of fire that is going to roll over this earth; and when God 
; es to deal in judgment, there will be no difference—every man who is out of 
| Christ must perish. 

It was my sad lot to be in the Chicago fire. As the flames rolled down our 
ets, destroying everything in their onward march, I saw the great and the hon- 


522 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the thief, and the harlot. All were alike. As the flames swept through the city i 
was like the Judgment-day. Neither the Mayor, nor the mighty men, nor the y 
men, could stop these flames. They were all on a level then; and many who 


worth more than all else in the world put together. And when the Day of Judgment 
comes, Christ will be worth more than all this world, more than ten thousand worlds. 


far more terrible for us to go down in our sins to a Christless grave. 

Now I hope that you have seen what I have been trying to prove—that we ar 
all sinners alike. If I have failed to prove that, then what I have said has been a 
failure. I should like to use another illustration or two. I should like to make this 
truth so plain that a child might know it. In the olden times in England, we are 
told, they used to have a game of firing arrows through a ring on the top of a pole. 
The man who failed to get all his arrows through the ring was called a “sinner.” 

Now I should like for a moment to take up that illustration. Suppose our pole 
to be put up in the gallery, and on the top of it the ring. I have ten arrows, let 
us say; and Mr. Sankey has other ten. I pick up the first arrow, and take a good 
aim. Alas! I miss the mark. Therefore | am a ‘‘sinner.” “But,” I say, “I wili do 
the best I can with the other nine; I have only missed one.” Like some men who 
try to keep all the commandments but one. I fire again, and miss the mark a secor | 
time. ‘Ah, but,” I say, “I have eight arrows still;’’ and away goes another arrow: 
miss! I fire all the ten arrows, and do not get one through the ring. Well, I wa 


Mr. Sankey comes with his ten arrows. He fires and gets his first arrow through, 
“Do you see that?” he cries. “Well,” I reply, “go on; don’t boast until you g 
them all through.” He takes the second arrow, and gets that through. “Ha! 
you see that?” “Don’t boast,’ I repeat, “until all ten are through;”’ if a man has 
not broken the law at all, then he has something to boast of! Away goes the thi 
and it goes through. Then another, and another, all right; and another, until n 
are through. “Now,” he says, ‘‘“one more arrow; and I am not a sinner.” He ta 
up the last arrow, and his hand trembles a little; he just misses the mark. And 
is a “sinner” as much as I am. My friend have you never missed the mark? Have — 
you not come short? I should like to see the man who never missed the mark. He 
has never lived. 4 

Let me give you just one more illustration. When Chicago was a small town, 


it was incorporated and made a city. When we got our charter for the city, there was a 
one clause in the constitution that allowed the Mayor to appoint all the police. It — 
worked very well when it was a small city; but when it had three or four hundred — 
thousand inhabitants, it put too much power in the hands of one man. So our — 
leading citizens got a new bill passed that took the power out of the hands of the ~ 
Mayor, and put it into the hands of Commissioners appointed by the Governor. 
There was one clause in the new law that no man should be a policeman who © 
was not a certain height—5 feet 6 inches, let us say. When the Commissioners go 4 
into power, they advertised for men as candidates; and in the advertisement they® 
stated that no man need apply who could not bring good credentials to recommend — 
him. I remember going past the office one day, and there was a crowd of candidates 
waiting to get in. They quite blocked up the side of the street; and they were com- 


There Is No Difference—Moody. 523 


paring notes as to their chances of success. One says to another, “I have a good 
tter of recommendation from the Mayor, and one from the supreme judge.” An- 
other says, ‘“And I have a good letter from Senator So-and-so. I am sure to get in.” 
The two men come on together, and lay their letters down on the Commissioners’ 
desk. ‘Well,’ say the officials, “you have certainly a good many letters, but we will 
not read them until we have measured you.” Ah! they forgot all about that. So 
the first man is measured, and he is only five feet. “No chance for you, sir; the 
law says the men must be 5 feet 6 inches, and you do not come up to the standard.” 
The other says, “Well, my chance is a good deal better than his; I am a good bit 
aller than he is.’”’ He begins to measure himself by the other man. 

That is what people are always doing—measuring themselves by others. Measure 
yourselves by the law of God, or by the Son of God Himself; and if you do that, | 
you will find you have come short. He goes up to the officers, and they measure 
him; he is 5 feet 5 inches and nine-tenths of an inch. “No good,” they tell him; 
“you are not up to the standard.” “But I am only one-tenth of an inch short,” he 
Temonstrates. ‘It is no matter,” they say; “there is no difference.” He goes with 
he man who was five feet high. One comes short by six inches, and the other by 
‘only one-tenth of an inch; but the law can not be changed. And the law of God 
is that no man shall go into the Kingdom of Heaven with one sin on him. He 
that has broken the least law is guilfy of all. 

_ “Then, is there any hope for me?” you say. “What star is there to relieve the 
Midnight darkness and gloom? What is to become of mz? If all this is true, I am 
a poor lost soul. I have committed sin from my earliest childhood.” Thank God, 
my friends, this is just where the Gospel comes in. “He was made sin for us who 
knew no sin.” “He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our 
imiquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we 
are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his 
pwn way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” 

You ask me what my hope is. It is, that Christ died for my sins, in my stead, 
in my place; and that tucrefore I can enter into life eternal. You ask Paul what his 
hope was. ‘Christ died for our sins according .o the Scriptures.” This is the hope 
n which died all the glorious martyrs of old—in which all who have entered heaven’s 
gates have found their only comfort, Take that doctrine of substitution out of the 
Bible; and my hope is lost. With the law, without Christ, we are all undone. The 
law we have broken; and it can only hang over our head the sharp sword of justice. 
Even if we could keep it froin this moment, there remains the unforgiven past. ‘“With- 
out shedding of blood there is no remission.” 

He only is safe for eternity who is sheltered behind the finished work of Christ. 
at the law could not do for us, He does. He obeyed it to the very letter; and 
under His obedience we can take our stand. For us He has suffered all its penal- 
ties, and paid all that the law demands. ‘His own self bare our sins in His own 
body on the tree.” He saw the awful end from the beginning; He knew what death, 
what ruin, what misery, lay before us if we were left to ourselves. And He came 
irom heaven to teach us the new and living way by which “all that believe are justi- 
ied from all things, from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses.” 
There is a well-known story told of the time of Napoleon the First. In one of 
he conscriptions, during one of his many wars, a man was balloted as a conscript 
ho did not want to go; but he had a friend who offered to go in his place. His 
iend jcined the regiment in his name, and was sent off to the war. By and by 
battle came on, in which he was killed, and they buried him on the battle-field. 
ome time afterward the Emperor wanted more men, and by some mistake the first 
an was balloted a second time. They went to take him, but he remonstrated. 


524 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


“You can not take me.” “Why not?” “I am dead,” was the reply. 
not dead; you are alive and well.” “But I am dead,” he said. “Why, mz 
must be mad. Where did you die?” “At such a battle, and you left me t 
such a battle-field.”’ “You talk like a madman,” they cried; but the man 
his point that he had been dead and buried some months. “You look up your 
he said; “and see if it is not so.” They looked and found that he was right. 
found the man’s name entered as drafted, sent to the war, and marked off as 
“Look here,” they said, “you did not die; you must have got some one to 
you; it must have been your substitute who died.” “I know that,” he said 
died in my stead. You can not touch me; I died in that man, and I go free K. 
law has no claim against me.” They aie not recognize the doctrine of subs 
tion, and the case was carried to the Emperor. But he said that the man was 
that he was dead and buried in the eyes of the law; and that France had no 
against him. 

The story may be true, or it may not be; but one thing I know to be true— 
the Emperor of Heaven recognizes the doctrine of substitution. Christ died 
that is my hope of eternal life. “There is no condemnation to them which 
Christ Jesus.” If you ask me what you must do to share this blessing, I ar 
and deal personally with Christ about it. Take the sinner’s place at the foot of 
Cross. Strip yourself of all your own righteousness; and put on Christs. W 
yourself up in His perfect robe, and receive Him by simple trust as your own Savi 
Thus you inherit the priceless treasures that Christ hath purchased with His 
“As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of 
Yes, sons of God. With power to overcome the world, the flesh, and the ¢ 
power to crucify every besetting sin, passion, ]ust; power to shout in triumph ¢ 
every trouble and temptabon of your life, “I can do all things pep Christ 
strengtheneth me.’ 

I have been trying to tell you the old, old tale that men are sinners. Sonali 
perhaps, is reading this who thinks it a waste of time. “God knows I am a si 
he cries; “you do not need to prove it. Since I could speak, I have done nothi 
but break every law of earth and heaven.” Well, my iriend, I have good ne r 
you. It is just as easy for God to save you, who have broken the whole decz 
as the man who has only broken one of the commandments. Both are deac 
in sins. It is no matter how dead you are, or how long you have been de 
Christ can bring you to life just the same. There is no difference. When Chi 
met that poor widow coming out of Nain, following the body of her darling be 
to the grave—he was just newly dead—His loving heart could not pass her;~ 
stopped the funeral, and bade the dead arise. He was obeyed at once, and the mot 
was clasped once more in the living embrace of her son. And when Jesus 
by the grave of Lazarus, who had been dead four days, was it not just as easy 
Him to say—“Lazarus, come forth?” Was it not as easy for Him to bring 
from his tomb, who had been dead four days, as the son of the widow, who & 
been dead but one? Yes, it was just as easy; there was no difference. They w 
both alike dead, and Christ saved the one just as easily, and as willingly, 
lovingly, as the other. And therefore, my friend, you need not complain that 
can not save you. Why, Christ died for the ungodly. And if you turn to Him 
this moment with an honest heart, and receive Him simply as your Savior and 
God, I have the authority of His Word for telling you that He will in no wise 
you out. 

And you who have never felt the burden of your sin—you who think there is: 
great deal of difference—you who thank God that you are not as other men—beware 
God has nothing to say to the self-righteous. And unless you humble yourself 


There Is No Difference—M ody. 525 


im in the dust, and confess before Him your iniquities and sins, the gate of heaven, 
ich is open only to sinners saved by grace, must be shut against you forever. 


1,000. He did valuable work in connection with the Christian commission 
1 ing the war. Later he organized the Young Men’s Christian Association of 
thicago. The fire of 1871 destroyed the church which had been built as the result 
i his efforts. His tour of the world with Ira D. Sankey was the greatest evangelistic 
iterprise of the century. He carried on religious campaigns in all the cities of the 
nited States. His death in 1900 was a heartfelt loss to the Christians of the world. 
fe left three monuments to his indefatigable zeal, the Northfield schools and the - 
ynference and extension work, and the Chicago Bible Institute.] 


526 Pulpit Power and Eloguence. 


ECCLESIASTES: OR UNDER THE SUN. _ 
W. G. MOOREHEAD, D.D. | 


We are to look for a little while into the Book of Ecclesiastes. 


The word Ecclesiastes means preacher or teacher, and we have here in this book | 
a sermon of this ancient preacher. The first verse of the first chapter reads as follows: 
“The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” In the twelfth - 
verse also we have this language: ‘“‘I, the preacher, was king over Israel, in Jerusa- 
lem.” Now, if these two statements are accepted as historical and historically trust- 
worthy, it follows that the book must have been written by Solomon. No other son 
of David, of whom we have any knowledge whatever, was competent to write a book — 
like Ecclesiastes. That Solomon by human gifts was perfectly able to write such a 
book appears from First Kings fourth chapter and thirty-second and thirty-third 
verses, where we have a description of the natural gifts and acquirements of this man. 
We are told that he spoke three thousand proverbs, and his songs were one thousand 
and five, and he spoke of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the 
hyssop that springeth out of the wall, and he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of 
creeping things, and of fishes. : 

Now, according to this description of his gifts, Solomon was first of all a philoso 
pher, and second, a poet, and third, a botanist, and fourth, zoologist, and fifth, an 
architect, and sixth, a statesman, and seventh, a leader of men. He was a great man. ~ 
He anticipated, so it is now believed, not a few of the discoveries and the conclusions 
of science of our own time, both in botany and zoology. James Hamilton said of 
him, his is a mind that is to be taken by furlongs, not by feet. He was a great man ¥ 
in very truth, and, accordingly, as he had a very wide experience of men and things — : 
in this world, he was able to write a book like Ecclesiastes, which deals almost exclu- _ 
sively in things under the sun. 


The tone of this book is a very remarkable one. It is a very sorrowful tone, q 
almost a sceptical one. If one were asked if there be a book in the Bible that has 7 
something of the sceptical, even of the agnostic, in it, the reply would undoubtedly al 
be that Ecclesiastes apparently is such a book. , 

Now listen for a little while to certain expressions of unbelief that this writer gives 
utterance to. In the third chapter and nineenth verse we read as follows: “For a 4 
that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; — 
as one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no . 
preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the 
dust, and all turn to dust again.” That is, death ends all for the beast and for man 
alike. 

In the seventh chapter and fifteenth verse, notice his remark about the inequality 
of things in this world, and the apparent failure of the divine government to sustain 
the righteous, and punish the wicked. “All things have I seen in the days of my 
vanity; there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked, 
man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.” That is the problem. How to 
account for it is the question. 


In the eighth chapter and fourteenth verse, there is another utterance of unbelief. 


Ecclesiastes; or Under the Ss un—M oorehead. 527 


Bicappeneth according to the work of the wit: again there be wicked men to 
whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous. I said that this also is 


va . ry?" 

Now it is not surprising that sceptical men in all ages have admired this book of 
lesiastes, reading no deeper than the surface. “We can readily perceive how Fred- 
rick the Great, and his companion, Voltaire, before the two men quarreled, delighted 
n Ecclesiastes. It suited exactly their unbelief, and it is somewhat singular that 
ignostics and unbelievers of all time will quote more frequently from the book of 
Scclesiastes than from any other portion, probably, of the entire Bible. 

Is the book sceptical? That is the question we are now to discuss. Well, of 
sourse, it is not, we will all agree. It is an inspired book. What does it mean? 
From what point of view does the writer look upon all things in this world? The 
ey to Ecclesiastes is the expression ‘under the sun,”’ an expression found no where 
Ise in the entire Bible. It occurs twenty-eight times in this book, and eight or ten 
imes are also found the other expressions “under the surface,” and “upon the whole 
f the earth.” So that something like thirty-nine or forty times we are bidden to 
emember, by the words that are used, that everything is looked at in Ecclesiastes in 
connection with this earth beneath the sun, and the writer never rises above the sun at 
all until you get to the last two verses of the last chapter, when everything is set right; 
jot until then. 

The key to Ecclesiastes, let me repeat, is the expression “under the sun.” He is 
iewing things under the sun. Now, let us begin. In the first chapter he views every- 
hing here under the sun as trivial, and a stiffened monotony. All is a weary go 
ound. Listen to the language in the fourth verse of the first chapter: ‘‘One genera- 
ion passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.” 
Humanity living under the sun is a procession; only a procession, just a kind of a 
uneral procession; one generation succeeding the other, and the earth alone remain- 
ig—a go round—monotony. 

_ And the next verse, “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth 
(0 his place where he arose.” The succession of day and night by the revolution, 
parently, of the sun around the earth; the language that we use to the present day. 
Here is a very remarkable verse, the sixth verse of the first chapter: ‘The wind 
h toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continu- 
ally, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.” The signal service of 
Our country is only about thirty-five years old, and yet it has lived long enough to 
discover there are great master currents of air that flow from towards the north pole 
lown to the equator, where the atmosphere is rarefied by the heat, and ascends to the 
ipper strata of air, and flows back again to the north. The last chart of the signal 
ervice of our country had those great master currents flowing from the north to the 
outh, and then back again to the north. That has been discovered within the lifetime 
if most of us here. Now, listen to Solomon. He wrote that thing down, that scien- 
fic fact, about nine hundred years before the Christian era.. “The wind goeth toward 
é south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the 
ind returneth again according to its circuits.” 

Here is another scientific fact even more striking than that. The seventh verse: 
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the 
s come, thither they return again.” He was speaking of the Mediterranean. 
at sea, as you know, drains in part three continents. Asia. Africa and Europe. The 
ers of those three continents in part flow into the Mediterranean. The Black Sea 
hes into it by one mouth: the Atlantic Ocean rushes into it by another mouth; yet 
sea level of the Mediterranean has not varied probably over an inch in twenty-five 


528 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


hundred years. What becomes of the surplus water that is poured into the 
Mediterranean day by day for centuries? That was a question that puzzled geogra- 
phers in Europe tor three centuries. At last the fact that it keeps the same level for 
century after century is accounted for by evaporation. The sun carries up the mist or 
surplus water into the air, into the higher strata, where it is recondensed, and poured 
back on the earth in the form of rains, dews, vapors and snows. That is a discove : 
of about two centuries ago. Listen, now, to the discovery of a man who lived about 
twenty-seven hundred years ago: “All the rivers run into the sea;”—surely the 
Mediterranean—three continents of water; “yet the sea is not full; unto the place from 
‘whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Circulation of the waters by | 
evaporation, and not otherwise. Solomon knew that, my brethren. 


Let me pause to make a remark here. This is a wonderfully boastful age in which | 
we live. The wisdom of the human mind in our day is something colossal, but it is 
altogether likely that all the wisdom of the races is not concentrated in the present | 
generation of men, nor will it perish when this generation of men has given place to” 
another. Those old fellows of the ancient time knew something. Let me give an 
example or two. 


In 1894 or 1895, when they were excavating the ruins of Pompeii in Southern Italy, | 
where it was my privilege to spend a little while, I went one day to the Museum of | 
Naples, where the objects discovered up to that time were preserved, and are to this 
day. The Italian custodian said, “Come here to me; I want to show you something.” 
He opened a little glass case, and took out a gold fish, an ornament that had been 
worn on the person, a little gold fish about the length of an inch and a quarter, or 
even an inch and a half. He held it in his hand, and as I looked at that fish he said, | 
“I do not know a jeweler in all Europe that can duplicate that fish.” I said that 
seemed very remarkable; it seemed not to be very hard. I noticed little gold scales — 
cut on its sides, and there were two brilliants for its eyes, but I thought most jewelers | 
could make that certainly. He said, ‘Take it by the head and tail, with the back 
towards the zenith; gently bend it toward yourself, and then bend it away from — 
yourself, and see what it will do.” I did so, and bending it towards me all the little 
gold scales on the sides, not as large as a pin’s head, stood out from the body of that 
gold fish as in life; and when I bent it away from me the gold scales became absolutely 
invisible. ‘‘Now,” he says, ‘‘what the mechanism is in that fish we do not know, and — 
we cannot open it to see, for that would destroy it. There is not a jeweler in Europe 
that can make a gold fish like that.” And with a queer expression on his face he said, _ 
“those old Pompeiians knew something that we do not.” Very likely! Solomon 
knew also about the evaporation of water. 


Do you remember reading lately one of the boaks of one of the great archeolo-— 4 
gists, who was engaged in excavating in Egypt for some thirty years, by the name of i 
Petrie, where he says he found a chest of tools of an Egyptian mason, probably thirty-_ ns 
two hundred years old. And among the rest he found a drill that was spiral, so that 
in drilling into granite the drill ran down in the granite at the depth the workman z 
wanted, leaving the core entire, and at the bottom of it there was some kind of a _ 
contrivance whereby he severed that core from the body of the granite and lifted it 
out. Petrie found both the drill and three of these granite cores that were cut out, 
and he says you can see the line of the spiral running from the top down to the ~ 
bottom. “Is there any drill that is made by the mechanics of Europe in this day that 
can do the work like that?” And the answer is in the negative. Another proof that 
there was something known by those ancients that even we do not know. 


Solomon knew a good many things. He was a botanist. and a zoologist, and an | 
architect, and a poet, and a philosopher, and this first chapter proves it. That first 


Ecclesiastes; or Under the Sun—Moorehead. 529 


_ chapter has as its undertone the monotony of the world under the sun. Everything 
here at last stiffens into a dreadful monotony when it is viewed only under the sun. 
Then in the second and third chapter he gives us the results of his experiments’ 
_in everything that the world offers of happiness and blessedness, and we read that the 
first test that he made was with mirth and delight. The second chapter and first verse: 
“I said in mine heart, go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy 
_ pleasure; and behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter, it is mad; and of mirth, 
what doeth it? I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting my 
heart with wisdom;” not going to great length in the use of wine; “‘and to lay hold on 
folly, until I might see what was that good for the sons of men which they should do 
under the heaven all the days of their life.” 
As a young man he devoted himself to pleasure, amusement, wine and intoxica- 
' tion, and he writes down as the result of that first test: “It is vanity and vexation of 
spirit.” It never can gratify the true longings of the human soul. 
The next experiment he made was in reference to wealth. “I made me great 
works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, 
and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits; I made me pools of water.” He 
gathered together the peculiar treasures of kings, riches, silver and gold in abundance. 
He is a business man now. He was a thoughtless and reckless youth at first, when 
he made the experiment’ of pleasure and wine. Now he goes into the accumulation of 
property and wealth. He was gathering together the accumulations that make for 
happiness according to the judgment of the men of this world; and after gathering all 
_ this wealth the verdict the second time is, “It is vanity and vexation of spirit.” 
_ And then he rises still higher, into what are known as esthetics, the life of music, 
poetry, art and so on, and this is as modern as it can be. -It is up to date. “I gath- 
ered me also silver and gold; I got me men singers and women singers, and the 
_ delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts.” He had 
his prima donna and his basse and his tenore, and his orchestra, and he lay on his 
‘silken couch, no doubt, in the palace of Jerusalem, while his bands were playing down 
below, and the men and women were singing, and the fountains were plashing. It is 
cultured refinement now. What is the result? Vanity and vexation of spirit once 
“again. No doubt. 

Then he reaches higher still, namely, to the attainment of wisdom, knowledge and 
earning, and he wrote books. He tells us about all his efforts to accumulate knowl- 
_ edge and understanding. And the result of this fourth effort was, as in all the other 
cases, “It is vanity and vexation of spirit.” And having gone the entire round, he 

finally declares that he hateth his life. He came to the end of all that the world had 
_ to offer, and the outcome is that he is almost ready to commit suicide. I hate my life; 
I do not know the difference between the life of a man and the life of a brute. Live 
below the sun, and never rise above the sun, and that will be the outcome sooner or 
later, invariably. 
Then we turn to the observation of the third to the eighth chapters inclusive, and 
over this I must pass rapidly. According to his observation, he declares that there is 
inexorable natural law governing everything in this world. There is a time to 
lant, and a time to reap there is a time to laugh, and a time to weep; there is a time 
o be born, and a time to die. What does he mean by that long list of times to do this, 
d times to do that? What is apprehended is that natural law is unchangeable and 
nvariable and exorable, It always reaches its end. It never can be arrested. It can 
Mever be turned aside. The great wheels roll on; if you get in their way they crush 
you. They go on; they go on. After pointing out this natural law and its operation, 
declares we are tied up by forces that we cannot master, and we are the sport of 
the powers of nature, It is vanity and vexation of spirit, 


530 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Then he goes on in the next place to observe the inequalities of-the divine govern- 
ment, as we name them; inequalities of the righteous going the way of the wicked; | 
everything going on in peace and quietness and prosperity. You may need to account 
for the inequalities observable in the divine government. Some one, a lady, said to me 
yesterday, I think, or possibly it was Saturday, how comes it to pass that in a certain 
family, which she mentioned, there is trouble and sickness, and loss of property and 
death, and yet the most devoted people that are to be found anywhere, and on the 
other side, a family absolutely without God, or hope in the world, prosperous and 
nothing adverse in their life. How do you account for it? Under the sun it is abso- 
lutely inexplicable. So Solomon goes on in his perplexity, and you only see what it~ 
all means when you come to the last chapter, when he is above the sun, and every- — 
thing comes straight. Twenty-eight times he has declared under the sun—under the 
sun—nothing is right. Above the sun, he at last cries out, everything is right. 

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter; fear God, and keep His com-_ 
“mandments; for this is the whole of man.” The twelfth chapter, and last two verses. — 
Notice that I drop out purposely this word printed in italics in the authorized version. — 
Duty; it is not the duty; it is the whole of man. That is what Solomon wrote. Fear | 
God: the Old Testament for reverence, for love, for obedience, for trust, for fear in 
the evangelical sense, as it is called. Fear God; love God; trust God; wait on God; 
obey God; follow God; take God into all the hours of the day, and then what? This — 
is the whole of man. Everything centers in that; everything is made whole;*every-— 
thing is made right. He is above the sun. 5 q 

Let me repeat to you a little fable that was written by a naturalist in this country, 
of which I am very fond. Do not forget it is simply a fable, but it illustrates exactly 
the book of Ecclesiastes. This naturalist writes as follows: q 

One beautiful spring morning there came a songster, and perched himself on the 
branch of a tree, and swung himself backward and forward, and poured out his heart © 
in a glad song. There was a mole working under the sod just below, and he heard the 
song of this bird, and pushing his nose up through the turf he called out: “Oh, bird, 
why are you making such a noise?” And the bird made answer: “Oh, Mr. Mole, the } 
sunlight is so beautiful, and the air is so refreshing, and the world is so lovely that my — 
heart is filled with gladness, and I cannot but sing.” “The world full of beauty,” said 
the mole, “there is no beauty in it at all. Everything in the earth is absolutely worth- — 
less. I have lived under its sod all my life; I have dug holes in it, and tunneled it in 
every direction, and I know the earth thoroughly, and know there are only two things 
in the earth—grass roots, and fish worms; nothing more.” Said the bird, ‘Come up, 
Mr. Mole, out from under the sod into the light, into the presence of the sun, and you 
will find that you must sing; you cannot do otherwise.’ That is Ecclesiastes—live 
under the sun, with the face always towards the earth; live beneath the sod, like tha’ 
mole, and there is nothing in it. It is vanity and vexation of spirit. Come up above 
the sun into the light, and the presence of God, and all will be well, and your mouth 
will be filled with a song. 

Brethren, have you read the autobiography of Charles Darwin, the great evolu- 
tionary authority of the world today? If you have not, let me advise you to do it. 
When he was a young man, almost a child, he, first of all, tells us, gave himself to — 
prayer, and often when he was on his way to school a little late, he would lift up his 
heart to the Lord that He would help him to run, that he might reach the school before 
the last bell was rung, and he was always helped. It was the purpose of his father, at 
that time, that he should enter the ministry of the established Church of England, but 
he got turned aside to science. He says further in his autobiography that he was, — 
when he was young, fond of poetry, and exceedingly fond of music, but by his giving — 
himself up to the investigation of science, with his face always turned to the ground — 


Ecclesiastes; or Under the. Sun—Moorehead. 531 


nd seeking things in connection with this planet alone, he, to use his own scientific 


ious emotions of early times were atrophied and died. He said there was nothing 
hat harassed him more than the sound of musical instruments, and there was nothing 
hat had such an unspeakable annoyance in it as the reading of poetry. As for prayer, 
he never prayed during all those closing years of his life. At 8 o’clock every morning, 
even days in the week, he began his investigations, and worked down until 2 in the 
fternoon, and then rested the rest of the day, and he had no hope, absolutely none, 
when he went away from the earth. 

- Live under the sun, with the face toward the ground, and you will never have any- 
hing but vanity and vexation of spirit. 

_ Come up above the sun, come out into God's presence, live with God, spend the 
days with God, and all will be well. That is Ecclesiastes. 


4 


532 Pulpit Power and Eloquence- 


I AM WITH YOU ALL THE DAYS: 


G. CAMPBELL MORGAN. 


“Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the completion of the age.”—Mat- © 
thew 28: 20, 

Think for a moment of the position and experience of these men to whom our 
Lord was speaking. Their personal acquaintance with Him had extended over only 
about three years. He had found them in the midst of their daily avocations, had 
called them to follow Him, and they had discovered even in those years of His © 
sojourn amongst them a new relationship superior to anything that they had ever 
known. At His bidding they had followed Him, turning their backs upon their 
chosen occupation, and upon the very dearest relationships of the earth. In response — 
to His love their love had gone out to Him, and a close bond of union had come 
to exist between the Master and His disciples. Then they had followed Him from 
place to place, ministering to Him; sometimes sent away to tell of the things which © 
He had been revealing to them, and coming back to Him again to report all that 
they had seen and done in His name. Then they had suddenly and tragically lost 
Him to all human seeming. They had hoped such great things from Him, and — 
through Him, but at the moment all those hopes were put out in the darkness of a 
tragic and awful death. Put yourself, for a moment, in the place of these men and ~ 
you will see how perfectly natural it was that every hope went out when they saw 
Him nailed to the cross. Oh, the dark, dark days that set upon them then! Then ~ 
there came the sudden shining of a new light, a message so strange and weird, and 
yet so full of hope, that it is said of them that they went from the sepulchre filled 
with fear and great joy. There was a battle, as it were, between night and morning 
in their hearts. Then they had found Him again—Mary, Peter, the two on the way 
to Emmaus, and the eleven gathered together saw Him, and discovered that He 
was not dead, but living. 


But now a new shadow is on them. Their Lord is going away again, and He 
gives them, as His parting word, a commission that must have filled their hearts with 
fear if it had not been immediately followed by the words of which I want to speak. % | 
Here is a handffal of men—poor men; men of no position; men who had massed — 
against them all the great powers, and Jesus says to them: “Go ye therefore and 
teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and — 
of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
manded you.” That is the commission which He gives to them, and the future is full 
of responsibility. What are they to do? It is to these men in this condition that 
the Master breathes the words, “Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the 
completion of the age.” 


Beloved, we have been in the place of great privilege. New visions of the glory 
of the Master have been granted to many souls here, and every new vision has brought - 
a corresponding duty and responsibility. We have a new sense of the magnitude 
of the work to be done. How are we going to do it? We are to leave the mount 
of vision and return to the valley where lies the ordinary sphere of life and of service, 


I Am With You All the Days—Morgan. 533 


- What are we to do? Oh, take this word with you: “Lo, I am with you all the 
days, even unto the completion of the age.” The material is passing away, but the 
spiritual abides. The symbolical gives place to that which underlies it. This is the 
_ method of Christ. He said to His disciples, “It is expedient for you that I go 
away”—speaking of Himself as the localized and limited one. But why was it ex- 
pedient that He should go away? In order that He might abide forever as a 
spiritual omnipresent verity in the lives of men. 
You remember how, on the walk to Emmaus, He unfolded to those disciples 
the Scriptures, and then He was made known to them in the breaking of bread, and 
then He vanished. He led them by teaching and symbol up to the point of a new 
spiritual recognition, and then He passed out of their sight, in order that their 
spiritual senses might be developed and strengthened by a living and perpetual com- 
munion with the spiritual fact of His abiding presence. 
Jesus said to Mary and to Thomas two very different things, because in His 
grace He has separate ways of dealing with each separate individuality. He said 
to Mary, “Touch me not;’”’ but to Thomas He said, ‘‘Reach hither thy hand and 
touch me.” Where was the difference between these two people? Mary’s concep- 
tion of the Master needed strengthening in the realm of the spiritual, and therefore 
Jesus would not allow her to touch the material. Thomas’s consciousness of the 
Master needed strengthening in the actual verity of a risen Christ, and therefore 
Jesus invited him to touch Him. But in every case the Master passed away in 
_ visible form and symbol, in order that His children might eventually come to know 
Him as an abiding spiritual presence. 
One of the most blessed things about these conferences for the deepening of 
Spiritual life is that they come to a close. It is so easy in the midst of these symbols 
and sacraments to live in the power of spiritual truth and fellowship. We thank 
_ God for this sacred spot upon His beautiful earth, and for all that helps to make it 
what it is, but we cannot abide here always. By the grace of God we must leave 
the opportunities of grace that we have here enjoyed, and there are trembling hearts 
_ that are saying, What is left to us? This is left: “I am with you all the days, even 
unto the completion of the age.” 


THE MAN CHRIST JESUS. 


Now, may I fix your attention, first, upon the One who speaks these words, 
and then upon the fact which He declares. Who is it that utters these words? The 
Man Christ Jesus. He was known of them and had already proved to them that 
He was not a spectre, merely. The Man whom they had learned to love and henor, 
the companion of their life for three years, said to them: “I am with you all the 
_ days.” 

What was true of them is true of us, even at this moment. The Master has 
not altered; He has not lost His human sympathies; He has not forgotten the tears 
_ He shed by the grave of Lazarus, dead; He has not forgotten the conflict through 
which He passed in life for the winning of His own daily bread. It is this Man of 
human sympathy, with all the supernatural miracle of His life, and death, and resur- 
rection, who is able to say to us, “I am with you all the days, even unto the com- 
pletion of the age.’’ It has been a blessed thing for us to meet together in Christian 
fellowship and to help one another, but the time comes when we must separate from 
these fellow disciples. Who will be with us? The Man Christ Jesus. We may tell 
Him just what we have said to others, and we may have His answer as definitely 
as we have the answer of any human teacher. He is with us all the days the Man, 
Christ Jesus. 

Remember also that He who stood upon that mountain side and said this to the 


534 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


‘ 


disciples was the Savior. Do you remember the first time, when by faith, you look 
into the face of the Son of God, and said to Him, “My Savior?” That same O 
faces you now and says, “Lo, I, your Savior, with these wound prints in hands, and 
feet, and side; I am with you all the days.” The old thrill which you first experi-— 
enced may be an ever-present reality. The first gleam of light that fell upon your 
soul as you saw the Master as a Savior ought to flood your soul always, and it will 
if you live in the power of this, “I am with you all the days.” He is the living 4 
Savior, the risen Lord, victorious over all the enemies, and Master of all the forces 
that remake men. It was He who said, ‘I am with you,” and the words spoken to 
the eleven upon that mountain side are the words spoken to you. We may be sep- 
arated from one another, but there is One from whom we shall never be separated. 
The Man Christ Jesus, the Savior, the risen Lord, is saying, “I am with you all 
the days, even unto the completion of the age.” 


JESUS, THE I AM. 


But, beloved, there is something infinitely more in it than that. “I am.” The 
more I have thought upon those words, the more I have come to understand that 
the manhood of the Christ and the fact of His presence with me as the Savior only 
becomes real as I enter into the larger fact that is suggested by this word which 
the Master uses when He said: “I am.” Go back to the Old Testament and you 
find that when God was about to bring His people out of bondage, and He called 
Moses from the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed, and gave him 
directions for the deliverance of Israel, when Moses asked, “Whom shall I say hath » 
sent me unto them?” then came that most marvelous word of God: “I am that I~ 
am.” It is as though there was to be an unfolding of glory. God said, “I am,” and 
then as though the glory were too great, infinitely beyond the possibility of mortal 
man’s understanding, God refrained and said, “That I am.” This man in the presence d 
of the burning bush could bear no more: existence, self-existence, inherent exist-— 
ence, nothing else, and all that the man had was the bush burning but not con-_ 
sumed, and the voice that took human speech and uttered divine and eternal verities, 
“I am that I am.” In the power of that revelation, which was necessarily partial E 
and incomplete, Israel was delivered from the bondage of Egypt and led through 4 
forty years in the wilderness; led through all subsequent history until the Master cam J 


Go through the teaching of the Christ and see how He takes up the revelation o 
the burning bush and unfolds it to men. Take that little word, “I am,” and see how 
it runs through the teaching of the Master. I am not going to suggest them to you 
in their chronological order. Begin with that word which He spoke to those who > 
asked Him, “Art thou greater than our father Abraham?” He answered at last, 
“Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad.” Then 
said they unto Him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” | 
Then it was that the Man who is to be with us all the days looked into the faces of 
His questioners, and said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” It is the divine word, 
and the Master claims it for Himself. Man has his past tense; God has no past 
tense: “Abraham was; I am.” There is the great claim. 


Now listen to the teaching of Jesus. “I am the good shepherd.” What is that? L 
Christ’s picture of the pity and compassion of the divine heart; God looking for a 
wandering soul. “I am the door.’ “I am the way, the truth, the life.” “I am the 
bread of life.’ Gather them up; they are the Master’s teachings about God. Hes. 
was unveiling in His own person and character, and His own teaching, all the verities 
of the divine nature that it was possible for man to understand. All through His” 
teachings the great music runs on, until in symbol and metaphor we are conducted © 
into the presence of God, and in the Man Christ Jesus we have a revelation infinitely 


. 
q 
. 


I Am With You All the Days—Morgan. 535 


beyond the revelation of the burning bush. : The Master has told us in little words 


from His human lips is concerned, and once again He takes hold of the divine name 
and links it. no longer to the burning bush, no longer to symbol, and metaphor, ea 
figure, but He links it to every man and woman. He says, “Henceforth, I am with; 
_ you.” Immanuel, God with us. That is the great word which He left His church. 
_ That is the great word to us: “I am with you.” What wonders that partial revela- 
tion to Moses wrought! With a high hand and an outstretched arm I am delivered 
His people from bondage and led them across the wilderness, and finally established 
_ them in the land. The Master gives us this self-same word, and says, “I am with 
_ you always.” It is the word of comfort; it is the word of strength by which you 
and I will go back to do wonders and win victories, and have triumph all the way. 
- Lose every other thought if you must, but don’t lose this, “I am with you.” Human 
in sympathy; divine in power. When will He be with you? “All the days’—dull 
and bright, foggy and sunshiny, cold and heat—‘all the days.” 


JESUS’ LOVE FOR HIS PEOPLE. 


Now, what does this statement mean? First of all, it implies His untiring love 
- for His people. It is as though He had said to those eleven men: “I am going 
away from your earthly vision for a little while, but I shall find none in whom I take 
_ a deeper interest than I do in you.” He went back—I love to think of it; the 
moment came when everything was finished and old Mother Earth recognized the 
_ will of the Creator, and gravitation ceased to operate when He so willed it, and He 
ascended and a cloud received Him out of their sight. 

Shall we follow Him for a moment?. Leave those men standing there, or join 
_ them, only look beyond what they saw. The cloud received Him, and He went on 
and on; and methinks, if earth’s songs are sung in heaven, the angels sang that day, 
“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; that the 
King of glory may come in.” Then you have the antiphonal chanting of heaven, 
and other choirs sing, ‘‘Who is this King of glory?’ And the answer comes thunder- 
_ ing through the everlasting temple, “The Lord of hosts, He is the King of glory.” 
_ Thus, Jesus went again into Heaven. What was the first ‘thing He did there? I am 
bold to say that He first called two bright messengers from those of the heavenly 
host who have never sinned, and those angels come swift as the lightning at the 
_ bidding of the King. Then says the King to them in heavenly language—perhaps, 
in the language of music—‘*Down there upon the earth some men are standing 
looking up towards the clouds. Go and comfort them.” And down came the bright 
messengers, and as the men looked at the clouds, the clouds were lit with the glory 
_ of the coming angels, and the sweet voices of the heavenly messengers took human 
speech and said to them: ‘Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? 
This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like 
“manner as ye have seen Him go.’’ Do you think the angel did that of his own 
bidding? Never; the angels are God’s ministers and they do His bidding. I be- 
lieve that the first thing our risen and ascended Lord did was to send comfort back 
from heaven to the hearts of these waiting men. He found no one in whom He 
‘is more deeply interested than in them, to whom He said, “I am with you all the 
days, even unto the completion of the age.” I say, reverently, that today in glory 
the Son of Man finds no one in heaven in whom He is more interested than He is 
in you and in me. We may each get our own blessing out of that thought. “I am 
with you,” He says; ‘my love is with you, my interest is with you; I shall never 


“ 


| into which my own unwatchfulness may lead me, He is with me. Some one said i 


' if you get there through your own fault, He won't.” I do not believe that. 


536 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


tire of your company.” O Master, I have tired of Thine, alas, again and again, and 
I have wandered away and left Thee, but Thou hast never tired of me. 


But these words mean much more. They of necessity imply His care. In any 
place of difficulty into which He leads me, He is with me. In any place of difficulty 


If it 
had been true, I know not how I should have got on. Do not put your limits upon 
the promises like that. “I am with you all the days.” Wandering child of God, 
are you hemmed in with difficulty and darkness, which you know is the result of 
your own folly? The Master has not left you; He is still there. Hear the words” 
to the church, which have their application to the believer, too: “Behold, I stand at’ 
the door and knock.” When? Why, when the church has almost forgotten Him, 
and when, perchance, there is only one man in the church that can hear the knoe c 
of the pierced hand upon the door. Still He is there waiting, waiting; “I am 
with you all the days.” Whether it be a place of difficulty into which God has led, or 
into which I, through my folly, have wandered, He is there; in the hour of Satan’s 
temptation, “all the days;” in times of danger, through adversity or prosperity, “all 
the days;” when other helpers fail and comforts flee, “‘all the days.” Oh, let. us get 
hold of that! The conference ends and we go back to business, or church work. How 
dare we face it all? “I am with you all the days.” ‘ 


THE COMPLETION OF THE AGE. 


But notice, there is something else here. “I am with you all the days, even unto 
the completion of the age.” What does that mean? To my own heart it takes the 
thought of death and lifts it out and flings it away. He is with us “unto the com-— 
pletion of the age,” not to the end of the world. Is the age complete yet? No, the 
age of which the Master spoke then is not completed, When will it be completed? 
When He comes. Then what did He say? He said to Peter, and James, and John, 
and the rest of them, “I am with you to the end of the age.” “But, Master, Thou ~ 
wilt be with us when we preach, and Thou wilt be with us when we work, and Thow 
wilt be with us on our missionary journeyings, but presently, if Thou shalt delay Thy — 
coming, we shall have to leave this land and these friends of ours.” “I am with you 
to the end of the age.” Is He still with Peter, and James, and John? Of course He 
is; He has never left them from that moment to this. But did they not die? No. 
What then did they? They “fell on sleep,” and His hand soothed them into the sleep 
and His hand awoke them in His presence, and He is with them now. He abolishe 
death and there is only one thing He says, and that is, “I am with you.” If He be 
with me what care I if there is a shadow like death through which I pass? If the 
end of life look dark, what is it but the shadow of the portal just outside the gate of 
eternal life? He is with me; that is everything. Suppose that He does not come before 
I am taken, or suppose that the moment shall come to me when wealth and health — 
are gone, when friends are helpless, when earth’s means of grace are denied, and you — 
watch the child of God going out into what men speak of as the gloom and the 
gathering darkness, and what is there? Health is gone, and friends are vanishing; 
everything is gone. No, no; listen! Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the — 
completion of the age.” fe 

Now, beloved, that carries us over the line which men call death, into that which is — 
beyond, and I may reverently take this word of my Lord, and with it light up every- 
thing that is beyond the moment when I leave this world behind me. May I not say 
to Him, “Yes, blessed Master, to me the end of the age, and also into the eternal ages, 
Thow art with me’? It is the promise in the power of which I shall go home and live; 


+7 


1 Am With You All the Days—Morgan. 537 


the promise in the power of which I shall go home to serve; it is the promise, the 
ht of which has made the shadows not to be, and the music of which has begun in 
e heart of the pilgrim of the night, the song of the everlasting morning: “I am 
th you all the days, even unto the completion of the age.” 

_My brother, sister, get hold of this: The material ends; the spiritual remains. 
ae conference is over; the Christ abides. The teachers pass; the Teacher remains. 
et us go Our way tomorrow or the next day, but as we go, let us sing, as we hear 


5 [This sermon is given here by permission of Northfield Echoes. It was delivered 
the Northfield conference in 1899.. It is characteristic of the man who came to the 


538 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


WALKING IN CHRIST. 


Hin. 1Gs MOME RS 


“In Him we move.” (Acts 27:28.) “As ye have received Christ Jesus, Lord, s 
walk in Him.”—Col. 1. 6, 9 

In Him we move. Walk in Him. The first verse, as you remember, is in 
Paul’s discourse at Athens, and does not speak specially of the Christian truth, | 
of Theistic truth, the truth of the eternal and supreme, in a respect in which he 
able to appeal even to the thinkers at Athens. But we must read for our own s 
surely all such Scripture words in the fullness of the light of Christ now. Jesus Cl 
is our way to the full knowledge of all and everything that God is. Jesus Christ i 
us, as we have just heard; the sphere of all the blessings of God, and so, in a s 
special and glorious, in Him we move. 

Now I am going to be very simple in this address, closing this morning. We 
been led into depths and heights of thought, all with the most practical possil 
purpose. May we now, so to speak, come down to walk upon the ground with 
we have gained in the upper air, and think most simply for a little time of walki 
in Jesus Christ. Surely it is not without God that I have been led to these texts 
Absolutely no consultation took place, but when Dr. Pierson announced his subj 
and delivered it, I could not but humbly believe that not without God had I be 
led steadily and without misgiving to this selection of these Scriptures, whose 
heart and message is, In Christ. So with a quiet confidence that our blessed Lord 
through His Word will speak to us, and that it will not be the mere talk of man, we 
will approach the thought upon Walk in Christ. as 

We are very soon going to break up, we shall soon be on the move. The railwa 
will be thronged here and there with those who have gathered at Keswick, and y 
are going back into common life. May every one of them remember that in Him 
move. Not only when we are sitting or kneeling together in His presence, in 
sanctuary, or in a chamber of worship, or a meeting like this, but when we ar 
the way to the station, when we are on the train, when we are taking our journey 
when we are effecting our connection on the line, in Him we move. There may be 
great deal of hurried moving externally—there is sure to be when a large assemk 
is breaking up and going by rail—but there will be no internal hurry in any trayele 
heart that recollects that in Him we move. 

But when we have moved and got where we are going, some, doubtless, to ° 
of much needed rest and change, and others, back to the duties which are Go 
primary will now for them, then we shall have to walk. And let us see to it that 1 
follow out St. Paul’s beautiful simple precept, ‘““Walk in Him.” Walk, you know, 
the Apostle’s favorite word, among many other words, for the realities of life. It 
life contemplated in its sensations and activities and experience down upon the ground 
of common things. There are aspects—we have been well reminded of it—in whi 
the Christian is to soar aloft with a glorious counteraction to the gravitation of se 
which can, if we humbly yield to it, bear us high indeed, and equally, too. But th 
from another view-point the very essence of the Christian life is to walk with two fe 
upon the real ground. Day by day, hour by hour, duty by duty, thing after thing, wi 


Walking in Christ—Moule. 539 


meant to walk.. Do not let us, from that point of view, fret for wings. It is better 
to use the feet. Do not let us want to live in a dream or in a cloud, even a cloud of 
golden crimson. Let us be very thankful for the real road, and very thankful for the 
real surroundings of it, and set ourselves to walk. Only walk in Him, The Apostle, 
you remember, has said, “As ye received Christ Jesus the Lord.” We may perhaps 
nslate his Greek words yet more clearly somewhat thus, “As therefore you received 
the Christ Jesus the Lord.” Such, I think, is the emphasis and succession of the 
thoughts—you received the Christ, received Him in truth of message, received Him in 
embrace of faith, received Him in union of grace, received Him as Jesus, your human, 
vyhile Divine, Lord and Brother, received Him as Lord, Master and more than Master, 
for the word is glorified with worship, as well as pregnant with Sonship—as you have 
humbly taken Him as the Christ Jesus, and your Lord, now remember you are in Him. 
He is, as we have been beautifully told, not our circle only, but our sphere. We have 
come into Him, we have stepped into a surrounding, into a sphere, into an atmosphere 
vhich is Jesus Christ. And now, says the Apostle, do not merely sit there, do not 
even merely kneel there, but walk in the walk of life in Him. For that wonderful 
sphere will be ubiquitous with you, wherever it is right that you should be, and as 
you go He will go, and as He goes you will go, and your home, if I may put it 
specially so, shall be about you for the activities, the intercourse, the occupations, the 
walk of every day. 


Let us break up the thought into some practical particulars. So walk in Him. 
Very well then, going back to your daily work, you will so walk in Him. Perhaps 
what we call direct Christian work is mainly your life’s work. Perhaps you are a 
missionary, perhaps you are a pastor, perhaps you are an evangelist, perhaps you are 
a visitor of the sick and of the lost. Perhaps, man or woman, your life has been defi- 
nitely dedicated to exercises like these for Christ. Remember you will more than ever 
walk and work in Him; not in yourselves, in the energies of your will, in the wisdom 
of your ideas, in the ambitions of your own joys, but in Jesus Christ as strength; in 
Jesus Christ as aim and end, in Jesus Christ as sphere. But you, even you, have things 
im your life which are not direct Christian work, and multitudes have lives to be lived 
ind walked through which are not mainly direct Christian work in the technical sense 
of the word. Mother of a family, do not think that it is God’s will you should neglect 
your children in order to glorify Christ in some enterprise for the lost around you 
which would make you neglect your children. He has given you them as your sacred 
work. Your supremely first thing is the work of the home. See that you walk in it in 
Him. Men who are called to the activities of secular life which need so greatly to be 
eavened and salted with Christians in common occupation, do not fret because you 
lave your business to attend to, your bank to be in, your circle of occupation, whatever 
t is, to study, your property to manage. There are hundreds and thousands for 
whom God's will is just this as the main walk, day by day, but there is not one of 
fou who is not called to walk in this in Christ. he 


And if you walk in this in Christ, what will be the result? The world will find you 
mut to be real in a very special way. If it is seen that your religion makes you a 
Christian in common things, if the walk in Christ is such that you are known to be 
factical to the uttermost, but Christian to the backbone, in common things of life, 
Du will be, by the grace of God, glorifying your Master. But you can only do it by 
falking up and down, everywhere in these things, in Jesus Christ. And oh, let us 
sek for the fulfilment of the prayer offered at the beginning of the meeting, that we 
ay be faithful to. our stewardship, whatever it is, walking in Jesus Christ. The shame 
d scandal of a Convention would be that people should go home from it to be 
pamy, to be unpractical, to be selfish under a spiritual cloak, when they are meant to 
home to do tenfold well the common thing, to be found faithful in the daily task, 


4 3 
540 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


to see God's will in the dust of the common road, because they are walking alon 
Jesus Christ. 

Then, dear friends, even so walk in Him. That is to say, among other th 
even so talk in Him. We will remember from this day forth more than ever that ¥ 
never have a right to say a word outside our Lord Jesus Christ, that whatever we 
talking about, and we shall have to talk about innumerable things in the course” 
human life, we never have a right to say a single word outside our Lord Jesus Chri 
Do not be afraid it will do any harm to your tongue that is exercised, do not think 
will make you unnatural and stilted, do not think it will make you formalized an 
mannerized, do not think it will ever give any real cause to them that are outside f 
say that the man is spoiled as a converser because he is in Jesus Christ. But you kne 
what it will do. You will find it absolutely impossible while you are recollecting ~ 
am in Him,” to say a word,that is untrue—and that is a thing that needs a great de 
of realizing—absolutely impossible to say the thing that is unkind, absolutely impo: 
sible to say the thing that is in the faintest degree harsh or judging, absolut 
impossible to say anything in any degree against any one that is not out-and-ouw 
the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake at a tremendous sacrifice of self. It will be impossibl 
talking in Jesus Christ, to make a reckless use of the tongue, which is one of 1 
disgraces of professing Christian life. ‘ 

Then we shall read in Jesus Christ. It does not mean we shall have no book bi 
this Book upon our shelves, and shall never open anything but volumes which at 
either the eternal Word of God itself, or books about the Bible or the soul life. I ha 
no doubt I am speaking to many a student here who absolutely ought to be readin 
and reading hard, at science, at literature, at history, or whatever it is. I am abs 
lutely certain I am speaking to numberless minds here that will be all the better fc 
some wholesome acquaintance with pure, true, lofty literature that is not avowed 
Christian, which will under certain conditions only make you more fit for the Master's 
use. But an inexorable condition of right reading of anything and everything, of th 
mathematical page, of the classical treatise, of the poem, of history, or whatever it n 
be, is this: that we shall walk about with our book in the Lord Jesus Christ, tha 
shall recollect, as much then and there as in the tent this morning with our B 
open, that we are in Him. That is the atmosphere, that is the place, those are tl 
walls, the floor, the ceiling, the windows within which the book is opened, and 
also is the light in which it is to be read. Has anyone here indulged in reading wh 
you know cannot be read in Jesus Christ? Then you will from this morning forth g 
that reading quietly but decisively up. And is there any reading that you know ab’ 
dantly might be in Christ, and has your duty been done as if you could take 
outside? Gather it all up, put your whole library indoors, and read in Him. 


And we shall enjoy in Jesus Christ. We are not made not to enjoy. He giveth 
all things richly to enjoy. Some of you will be going about this astonishing co 
and beholding things of beauty during this week. Do not be afraid to enjoy thi 
do not be afraid to be enraptured over the mighty hill, and the rolling flood, and 
crimson cloud. Only. remember you are to enjoy it through Him, you are to loo 
at Helvelyn and Skiddaw through our Lord Jesus Christ, you are to remem 
that what you are permitted, what you are welcomed by your Master to take 
and enjoy is all to be brought indoors, and to be, as it were, the picture on His walls, 
to be looked at within Him. 

And then you will endure in Jesus Christ. If you enjoy, it will be largely for : 
sake of recuperation of your being for God’s call to endure, to endure downright ha: 
work which is privilege and blessing when it is walking about in Christ; to endure, 1 
may be, pain and weakness when the outward man doth perish, as it will sooner or 
later, and is meant to do, only to be re-built so that it will never perish. But the 


im 


4 
Walking in Christ—Moule. 541 


itward man is perishing, wearing and tearing out, as we may translate the Apostle’s 
ord, and when life goes on and the man begins to feel that the wear is telling, 


e is giving off, and cannot do all he used to do. And then you will endure 
f the Spirit. You will very likely be called upon, before your face or behind 
our back, and it will come round before your face in time, to be heartily laughed at 
br your confession of Jesus Christ. A good deal of laughter is expended, and in many 
arious quarters, upon efforts made in this place and those who make them; and it is 
t agreeable, outside Jesus Christ, to, have this sort of thing going on about one’s 
ng-loved self. But if we walk up and down in our Lord Jesus Christ, even the fiery 
of ridicule will literally produce no bitterness—I know not if it need produce 
nything but hearty goodwill towards the ridiculer, and the earnest desire to profit 
n the slightest degree even by suggestions given by the ridicule; for a laugh which 
ay be unfair on the whole, may often be fair in a detail, and tell the man something 
bout himself it is wholesome to know. But we must walk up and down in the Lord 
esus Christ, and let these things come into us through the windows of Him, if the 
and of them is to be right to our ears, and in tune with the life in us and ours in 
dim. Do not trust yourself out of Jesus Christ even for the smallest troubles of that 
Dear friends, we can fill in these few attempted details into a much larger cata- 
gue. We will all endeavor to do it, if I may humbly ask you, each man and each 
oman, for yourselves. But remember that we go away moving in Him, and that we 
settle down to life to walk in Him. There will be plenty of place to walk in in the 
Only, it will have just the limits, with the liberty, of home. For this is the 


_ There are many aspects in which we are in Jesus Christ. Wonderful wealth of the 
jas ages of God’s Word! You know those, as Dr. Pierson has reminded us, that have 
lis for their keynote. In Him—in Him,as the branch that we may abide in Him; in 
m as the limb that we may walk in Him and in vital union with Him; in Him (as 
is wonderful atmosphere surrounding us) for our very life. And oh (may we not 
ay also?), in Him as the child is in the home in Christ with a home inness, in Christ 
is the child enjoys the occupation of anything but ennui, the delightful business of 
ways something coming next, of a bright home life; and all around it the security, 
ad on the other hand the authority of the blessed parental home in which Christ is 
enter, Lord, Master, Head of it, and therefore of us. Oh, the blessed interest, the 
happy, joyful delight of the busy day spent in the atmosphere of such a home, the 
jecupations round the hearth, the occupations round the table, the occupations upstairs 
nd down. They are constantly succeeding but relieving one another, and unifying 
cause they are all in the home. And we are meant to look out upon life always from 
ome. We are meant to meet the solitudes in which bereavement sooner or later leaves 
eople, looking at it out of the windows of an unbreakable home. We are meant to 
neet the loudest roar of the city street, looking and listening to it so often through the 
alls of home, we are meant to take up the crudest and hardest and dullest things we 
€ got to do in‘daily duty, and bring them into the surroundings of the beautiful 
ber of home, where they will look so immensely different, put down amongst the 
archable riches of Jesus Christ. And this is fact, not imagination. Imagination 
as its part to do, but only by taking up and utilizing and applying fact. The glory 
it is not that we are poetizing, but realizing what the Bible tells us about our rela- 
ons with our Lord Jesus Christ. 

So, dear friends, we end this morning’s meeting where we began it with such 
ssed profit in Him, in Him as the Christ Jesus, the Master, in Him as the Lord to 
upon the Throne—and there, and only there, He always makes all things new. Do 
y of us feel that all things are getting rather old and faded in our soul’s life? The 


542 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


reason is certain if it is real spiritual going-off; Jesus Christ is somehow not upon 
Throne. The newness will spring up anew in Him. Now we are going away in 
and the result will be that He shall be found out in us, and we in Him. I hope 
sense the prophets will not be without honor in their own country as regards anyt ny 
that it may cost them to be lovingly and humbly, not self-assertively, true to 
Lord. But I trust they will not be out of honor in their country for another reaso 
because they are not so true to Him at home as they seem to be in the tent, bec 
the home duties are not all that they should be in their doing, because the h 
obedience, because the home thoroughness, because the home brigeinese) because 
home servingness is not all that it should be, because the man is not in his neighbo 
hood really, what he is supposed to be in the tent, because “the woman amongst 
friends is not in speech about others, and the man, too, all that is supposed to be 
law within the Keswick tent. And may we in that sense, or rather may our Mast 
us, be honored in our own country, they having no evil thing to say of us, nor fi 
with us except concerning the Lord our God. And so shall it be, with joy let us clo 
in remembering if, having received Christ Jesus the Lord, we just walk and live ne 
outside Him. 


{Handley Carr Glyn Moule, D. D.; Norrisian Professor of Divinity; Professoria 
Fellow at St. Catherine’s College since 1899; Hon. Chaplain to the Queen since 1 
First Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, 1881-99; born Dorchester, 1841; educ 
at home; Trinity College, Cambridge, Browne’s Classical Medallist, Cambridge, 1863 
Second Classic in the Tripos of 1864; B. D. 1894; D. D. 1895. Fellow of Tri 
College, Cambridge, 1865-81; Assistant Master at Marlboro, 1865-67; Dean of Trin 
College 1873-76; Select preacher at Cambridge, 1880, 1882, 1891, 1894, 1899; at 
ford, 1895.] : 


(6:3) 


THE REVERSAL OF HUMAN JUDGMENT. 


7. BE MOZLENM, D:D! 
_ “Many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be nirst.’—Matthew 19: 30. 
Perhaps there is hardly any person of reflection to whom the thought has not 
occurred at times of the final judgment turning out to be a great subversion of human 
mates of men. Society forms its opinions of men, and places some on a high 
pinnacle; they are favorites with it, religious and moral favorites. Such judgments are 
a necessary and proper part of the present state of things; they are so, quite inde- 
endently of the question whether they are true or not; it is proper that there should 
‘this sort of expression of the voice of the day; the world is not nothing, because it 
| transient; it must judge and speak upon such evidence as it has, and is capable of 
seing. Therefore those characters of men are by all means to be respected by us. as 
members of this world; they have their place, they are part of the system. But docs 
the idea strike us of some enormous subversion of human judgments in the next world; 
some vast rectification to realize which now, even if we could, would not be good for 
3? Such an idea would not be without support from some of those characteristic 
rophetic sayings of our Lord, which, like the slanting strokes of the sun’s rays across 
ne clouds, throw forward a track of mysterious light athwart the darkness of the 
ure. Such is that saying in which a shadow of the Eternal Judgment seems to come 
ver us—'* Many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.’’ It is impossible 
» read this saying without an understanding that it was intended to throw an element 
f wholesome scepticism into the present estimate of human character, and to check 
he idolatry of the human heart which lifts up its favorites with as much self-compla- 
ency as of enthusiasm, and in its worship of others flatters itself. 

Indeed, this language of Scripture, which speaks of the subversion of human 
udgments in another world, comes in connection with another language with which 
most remarkably fits in, language which speaks very decidedly of a great deception 
f human judgments in this world. It is observable that the Gospel prophecy of the 
irthly future of Christianity is hardly what we should have expected it beforehand to 
be; there is a great absence of brightness in it; the sky is overcast with clouds, and 
rds of ill omen fly to and fro: there is an agitation of the air, as if dark elements were 
work in it; or it is as if a fog rose up before our eyes, and treacherous lights were 
Moving to and fro in it, which we could not trust. Prophecy would fain presage 
ispiciously, but as soon as she casts her eye forward, her note saddens, and the 
ords issue in melancholy and sinister cadences which depress the hearer’s mind. 
nd what is the burden of her strain? It is this. As soon as ever Christianity is cast 
© the world to begin its history, that moment there begins a great deception. It is 
i pervading thought in Gospel prophecy—the extraordinary capacity for deceiving and 
being deceived that would arise under the Gospel; it is spoken of as something peculiar 
the world. There are to be false Christs and false prophets, false signs and wonders; 
jany that will come in Christ’s name, saying, I am Christ, and deceive many; so that 
it is the parting admonition of Christ to His disciples—‘Take heed, lest any man 
leceive you’”—as if that would be the great danger. And this great quantity of decep- 
on was to culminate in that One in whom all power of signs and lying wonders 


544 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the prophecy of the false one was implanted deep in the heart of Christianity. 

When we come to the explanation of this mass of deception as it applies to tk 
Christian society, and the conduct of Christians, we find that it consists of a great 
growth of specious and showy effects, which will in fact issue out of Christianity, not | 
implying sterling goodness. Christianity will act as a great excitement to human 
nature, it will communicate a great impulse, it will move and stir man’s feelings and 


zeal and ardor. But this brilliant manifestation will be to a large extent lacking im 
the substance of the Christian character. It will be a great show. That is to say, 
there will be underneath it the deceitful human heart—the xaturva callida, as Thomas 
4 Kempis calls it, gue se semper pro fine habet. We have even in the early Christian 
Church that specious display, of gifts which put aside as secondary the more solid 
part of religion, and which St. Paul had so strongly to check. Gospel prophecy goes: 
remarkably in this direction, as to what Christianity would do in the world; that it 
would not only bring out the truth of human nature, but would, like some powerful 
alchemy, elicit and extract the falsehood of it; that it would not only develop what was 
sincere and sterling in man, but what was counterfeit in him too. Not that Christianity 
favors falsehood, any more than the Law favored sin because it brought out sin. ne 
Law, as St. Paul says, brought out sin because it was spiritual and forced sin to be sin 
against light. So in the case of Christianity. If a very high, pure, and heart-seareh- 
ing religion is brought into contact with a corrupt nature, the nature grasps at the 
greatness of the religion, but will not give up itself; yet to unite the two requires a 
self-deception the more subtle and potent in proportion to the purity of the religion. 
And certainly, comparing the hypocrisy of the Christian with that of the old world, we 
see that the one was a weak production in comparison with the other, which is indeed 
a very powerful creation; throwing itself into feeling and language with an astonishing” 
freedom and elasticity, and possessing wonderful spring and largeness. 


There is, however, one very remarkable utterance of our Lord Himself upon this 
subject, which deserves special attention. ‘Many will say to me in that day, Lor 
Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name, and in Thy name cast out devils, and 
Thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I nev 
knew you.” Now this is a very remarkable prophecy, for one reason, that in the very 
first start of Christianity, upon the very threshold of its entrance into the world, it 
looks through its success and universal reception, into an ulterior result of that victory 
—a counterfeit profession of it. It sees before the first nakedness of its birth is over, 
prosperous and flourishing religion, which it is worth while for others to pay homa 
to, because it reflects credit on its champions. Our Lord anticipates the time wh 
active zeal for Himself will be no guarantee. And we may observe the difference 


to examine very strictly the tone and quality of it. They grasp at it at once; not so” 
our Lord. He does not want it even for Himself, unless it is pure in the individuals” 
But this statement of our Lord’s is principally important, as being a prophecy > 
relating to the earthly future of Christianity. It places before us public religious 
leaders, men of influence in the religious world, who spread and push forward by 
gifts of eloquence and powers of mind, the truths of His religion, whom yet He w 
not accept, because of a secret corruptness in the aim and spirit with which they d 
their work, The prophecy puts before us the fact of a great deal of work being do 
in the Church, and outwardly good and zealous work, upon the same motive if 
substance upon which worldly men do their work in the world; and stamps it as the 


activity of corrupt nature, The rejection of this class of religious workers is com- 


The Reversal of Human Judgment—Mosley. 545 


piete, although they have been, as the language itself declares, forward and active for 
‘spiritual objects, and not only had them on their lips. 

: Here then we have a remarkable subversion of human judgments in the next 
world foretold by our Lord Himself; for those men certainly come forward with 
established religious characters to which they appeal; they have no doubt of their 
position in God's kingdom, and they speak with the air of men whose claims have 
been acquiesced in by others, and by numbers. And thus a false Christian growth 
is looked to in Gospel prophecy, which will be able to meet even the religious tests 
of the current day, and sustain its pretensions, but which will not satisy the tests 
of the last day. 

We are then perhaps at first sight surprised at the sternness of their sentence, 
‘and are ready to say with the trembling disciple—*Who then shall be saved?” But 
when we reflect upon it, we shall see that it is not more than what meets the case; 
i. e., that we know of sources of error in the estimate of human character which will. 
‘account for great mistakes being made; which mistakes will have to be rectified. 


_ One source of mistake then is, that while the Gospel keeps to one point in its 
classification of men,—viz., the motive, by which alone it decides their character, the 
mass of men in fact, find it difficult to do so. They have not that firm hold of the 
moral idea which prevents them from wandering from it, and being diverted by 
irrelevant considerations, they think of the spirituality of a man as belonging to the 
department to which he is attached, the profession he makes, the subject matter he 
works upon, the habitual language he has to use. The sphere of these men, of whom 
the estimate was to be finally reversed, was a religious one,—viz., the Church, and 
this was a remarkable prop to them. Now, with respect to this, it must be observed 
that the Church is undoubtedly in its design a spiritual society, but it is also a society 
of this world as well; and it depends upon the inward motive of a man whether it is 
to him a spiritual society or a worldly one. The Church as soon as ever it is em- 
bodied in a visible collection or society of men, who bring into it human nature, with 
human influences, regards, points of view, estimates, aims, and objects—I say the 
Church, from the moment it thus embodies itself in a human society, is the world. 


but the active stock of motives in it are the motives of human nature. Can the 
Visible Church indeed afford to do without these motives? Of course it cannot. It 
must do its work by means of these to a great extent, just as the world does its work. 
Religion itself is beautiful and heavenly, but the machinery for it is very like the 
nachinery for anything else. I speak of the apparatus for conducting and administer- 
ng the visible system of it. Is not the machinery for all causes and objects much 
le same, communication with’ others, management, contrivance, combination, 
daptation of means to end? Religion then is itself a painful struggle, but religious 
achinery provides as pleasant a form of activity as any other machinery possesses; 
nd it calls forth and exercises much the same kind of talents and gifts that the 
machinery of any other department does, that of a government office, or a public 
stitution, or a large business. The Church as a part of the world must have active- 
ded persons to conduct its policy and affairs; which persons must, by their very 
uation, connect themselves with spiritual subjects, as being the subjects of the 
iety; they must express spiritual joys, hopes, and fears, apprehensions, troubles, 
als, aims, and wishes. These are topics which belong to the Church as a depart- 
nt. A religious society then, or religious sphere of action, or religious sphere of 
ects is irrelevant as regards the spirituality of the individual person, which is a 
ndtter of inward motive. 
_ To take an instance of a motive of this world. Statesmen and leaders of political 


me. s. 


parties may of course act upon a spiritual motive in their work, and have done so; 


546 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


viz., the single desire to do good in the sphere. of God’s temporal providence; and 
motive of their work may stand on a perfect equality with that of winning sou 
nevertheless the world’s great men do often act upon a known class of secondary 
motives. Dismissing then the grosser and coarser class of selfish aims, which con- 
spicuously and glaringly put the religious and secular worker on a level, so far as they 
adopt them, let us take that absorbing frailty, which sometimes figures as a virtue, 
You see in the case of a political man all the action of life, all its vital energy gather- 
ing round himself, and accumulating into a kind of egotistic capital, which i 
advancing and growing, as life and action go on—a representation of the man to 
himself, which goes by the name of greatness or glory; an ever-accompanying mirror 
into which he looks for his stimulus and inspiration. This great abstraction, this 
reflection and adumbration of himself, as it magnifies, becomes his one measure, it 
gives the worth to everything he does; whatever swells the bulk of this colossal 
impersonation is valuable, whatever does not is indifferent to him. It wholly emptie ; 


man, draining all the freshness of his spirit, and drying up the sap of nature, till he 
only feels one wish which.can speak to him. Everything is grudged which does not 
feed this fount. Natural interests die, even the impress of personal attachments fades 
away; whatever is outside the central impulse is in the way; he does not want it, 
can do without it; everything else is only instrumental to this one devouring end. 

this great Bh aatoen which represents hirhself is growing, all is right; it must be 
growing to the last; it is a duty, the first of duties, the sum of all duty, the final cause 
of his being, and his conscience is pricked if he misses any opportunity of an accessio n 
to this mystic treasury, this chamber of imagery within him. Nor is the fault only one. 
of gigantic minds; we may see that even ordinary men are sometimes taken up with 
creating a petite sample of this personification. But what substantial difference is 
there in this class of motives as they act upon a religious leader, and as they act upon 
a political leader? The former, if he is of an ambitious mind, has the same kind of 
ambition that the other has; he wants success, and the spread of his own principles 
and his own following is his success. Is there not as much human glory in the bril : 


principles? Is it GE a temporal, an earthly, and a worldly reward to be called Rabbi, 

Rabbi? Christ said it was. If then one of the great critics of man could speak of “the 
muddy source of the lustre of public actions,” the scrutiny may be carried as well to 
a religious as a political sphere. The truth is, wherever there is action, effort, aim at — 
certain objects and ends;—wherever the flame of human energy mounts up; all th 
may gather either round a centre of pure and unselfish desire, or round a centre < 
egotism; and no superiority in the subject of the work can prevent the lapse into t 
inferior motive. In the most different fields of objects this may be the same: it is 
quality of the individual. Whatever he does, if there is a degeneracy in the temper 
his mind, it all collects and gathers, by a false direction which it receives from the false 
centre of attraction, round himself. The subject or cause which a man takes up makes | 
no difference. The religious leader can feel, alike with the political, and as strongly, ! 
this lower source of inspiration; can be accompanied by this idolized representation — 
of self, this mirror in which he sees himself growing and expanding in life’s area. Ares 
the keen relish for success, the spirit which kindles at human praise, and the gusts of ~ | 
triumph—the feelings which accompany action upon a theatre, guaranteed no place in q 
a man, by his having religious zeal? These are parts of human nature, and it is not 
zeal but something else which purifies human nature. So far as religion only supplies. ; 
a man of keen earthly susceptibilities, and desire of a place in the world, with a 
subject or an arena, so far that man stands on the same ground with a politician who - 
is stimulated by this aim. They are the same identical type of men in differen 


The Reversal of Human judgment—Mozley. 547 


pheres. There is a conventionai difference between them, but there is one moral 
heading. Both may be doing valuable work, important service in a public sense; but 
if you do not think the politician a spiritual man because he is a useful man, no more 
m ust you think the active man in the religious sphere to be so. Spirituality belongs 
to the motive. 


There is a great common stock of secondary motives then, of lower stimulus and 
incentive, in the religious and secular worker, which feeds their efforts, keeps them 
up to the mark, and supplies them with strength and power. But there is this differ- 
‘ence between the two, in the action of these motives. Worldly passions tend to be 
‘made deeper and keener in those who by their place and profession are obliged to 
‘disavow and to disguise them. So in Joshua’s punishment of Achan, or in St. Peter’s 
punishment of Ananias and Sapphira, regard doubtless was had to the secrecy of the 
-yice in both cases,—avarice. The avarice was stronger, more corrosive, because it 
was under disguise; the disguise of a high profession; in the one case of a soldier of 
God, fighting in a sacred war; in the other case of a convert, just admitted into the 
kingdom of Heaven upon earth. So in the case of ambition; it is a deeper and 
stronger vice, as a concealed vice; it gains force by suppression: that kind of sup- 
p ession which is not a moral conquest of it, but only an outward cover. Thus, in a 
‘soldier, or a lawyer, or one who has embarked on any worldly calling, there is less 
danger in it, for the very reason that it is open and avowed; it is a recognized motive; 
omnia vitia in aperto leveora, as Seneca says; but when it exists under the special 
profession of religion, and a religion of humility, and has to be cloaked, not only is 
there the fault of concealment, but the vice itself is more intense by the concealment. 
It is a Jaw of our nature that it should be. The passion obliged to act under a 
disguise, becomes different in its nature from the open one; gains a more morbid 
‘strength and corrupts the character. And thus the ambition of the clerical order has 
always been attended by peculiarly repulsive features, which have been discriminated 
by the moral sense of mankind. 


It must be observed, however, that the Gospel has, with that penetration which 
belongs to it, extended the province and field of human pride from direct self, to self, 
as indirectly touched and affected by the success of party, or school, or cause. We 
see this extension of the signification of the vice implied in Christ’s denunciation of 
the proselytism of the Pharisees,—that they compassed heaven and earth to make one 
disciple: because if pride only applied to what exalted a man’s self directly or person- 
ally, the Pharisee might have replied—‘I have no private interest in the propagation 
of the doctrines of my school; it is no profit to myself personally; I only devote 
myself to it because of the propagation of religious truth, or that which we believe 
to be such, is a duty, and.if we value our own belief we must be animated by the wish 
to impart it to others. We must be zealous in winning over others to our own sect, 
provided we believe in the creed and principles of our sect, which we show we do 
9y belonging to it.” The Pharisee might have said this; but our Lord saw in the 
?harisee an aim which was not selfish in a direct sense; but which still indirectly, and 
bn that account not the less strongly, touched the proud self of the Pharisee. His 
buke recognizes and proclaims a relation to truth itself in man, which may be a 
fish one. It was a new teaching, a disclosure beneath the surface. Truth is an 
ticle of tangible value, it gives conscious rank to its possessors, it gives them the 
Osition of success in the highest department—viz., that of the reason and judgment; 
hile to miss getting it is failure in that department. Man can thus fight for truth as 
piece of property, not upon a generous principle, but because his idea of truth—the 
ectness or falsity of that idea—tests his own victory or failure. And his way of 
hting for it is spreading it. Its gaining ground, its being embraced by numbers, 
ifies his own decision. Thus a selfish appreciation of truth, and not the motive of 


548 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


charity only, is able to lead to efforts for its propagation; and there is such a thing as" 
corrupt proselytism, the eager desire to get hold of other minds representing the 
false relations to truth, and not the simple and disinterested ones. Proselytising — 
pharisaism is the first shadow of that great manifestation of the tyrannical aspect of — 
truth, or man’s idea of truth which afterwards became so terrible a distortion of 
Christianity. Deep concern for human souls would never have produced spiritual _ 
despotism or persecution; it was a selfish relation to truth to begin with which pro- — 
duced these; it was the lapse of the human heart from charity to pride in the matter. — 
The vindictive punishment of error did not arise from the sense of value of truth, 
but from men holding truth, or their idea of it, as a selfish treasure; contrary opinions — 
threatened their hold of this treasure: its forced acceptance rooted them in possession — 
of it. The propagation of truth became the pride of dominion over souls. 

One would not, of course, exclude from the sphere of religion the motive of esprit 
de corps; it is undoubtedly a great stimulus, and in its measure is consistent with ail — 
simplicity and singleness of heart; but in’an intense form, when the individual is 
absorbed in a blind obedience to a body, it corrupts the quality of religion; it ensnares — 
the man in a kind of self-interest; and he sees in the success of the body the reflection — 
of himself. It becomes an egotistic motive. There has been certainly an immense — 
produce from it; but the type of religion it has produced is a deflection from sim- © 
plicity; it may possess striking and powerful qualities, but it is not like the free religion — 
of the heart; and there is that difference between the two, which there is between what — 
comes from a second-hand source and from the fountain head. It has not that natural- — 
ness (in the highest sense) which alone gives beauty to religion. 

Again, those who feel that they have a mission may convert it into a snare to — 
themselves. Doubtless, if, according to St. Paul, ‘he who desireth the office of a 
bishop desireth a good work,’ so one who has a mission to do some particular work — 
has a good office given him. Still, where life is too prominently regarded in this light, 
the view of life as a mission tends to supersede the view of it as trial and probation. 
The mission becomes the final cause of life. The generality may be born to do their 
duty in that station of life in which it has pleased God to call them; but in their own © 
case the mission overtops and puts into the shade the general purpose of life as pro- 
bation; the generality are sent into the world for their own moral benefit, but they 
are rather sent into the world for the benefit of that world itself. The outward object | ; 
with its display and machinery is apt to reduce to a kind of insignificance the inward — 
individual end of life. It appears small and commonplace. The, success of their own 
individual probation is assumed in embarking’ upon the larger work, as the less is. 
included in the greater; it figures as a preliminary in their eyes, which may be taken 
for granted; it appears an easy thing to them to save their own souls, a thing, so to ~ 
speak, for anybody to do. 7 

What'has been dwelt upon hitherto as a source of false magnifying and exaltation 
of human character, has been the invisibility of men’s motives. But let us take 
another source of mistake in human judgment. ea 

“ Nothing is easier, when we take gifts of the intellect and imagination in the 
abstract, than to see that these do not constitute moral goodness. This-is indeed a 
mere truism; and yet, in the concrete, it is impossible not to see how nearly they 
border upon counting as such; to what advantage they set off any moral good there — 
may be in a man; sometimes even supplying the absence of real good with what looks 
extremely like it. On paper these mental gifts are a mere string of terms; we see 
exactly what these terms denote, and we cannot mistake it for something else. It is 
plain that eloquence, imagination, poetical talent, are no more moral goodness than . ' 
riches are, or than health and strength are, or than noble birth is. We know that — 
bad men have possessed them just as much as good men. Nevertheless, take them — 


The Reversal of Human Judgment—Mozley. 549 


moral subjects—to bringing out, e. g., with the whole force of intellectual sympathy, 
‘the delicate and high regions of character—does not one who can do this seem to 
have all the goodness which he expresses? And it is quite possible he may have; but 
‘this does not prove it. There is nothing more in this than the faculty of imagination 
and intellectual appreciation of moral things. There enters thus unavoidably often into 
‘a great religious reputation a good deal which is not religion but power. 


Let us take character which St. Paul draws. It is difficult to believe that one who 
had the tongue of men and of angels would not be able to persuade the world that he 
himself was extraordinarily good. Rather it is part of the fascination of the gift, that 
the grace of it is reflected in the possessor. But St. Paul gives him, besides thrilling 
“speech which masters men’s spirits and carries them away, those profound depths of 
‘imagination which still and solemnize them; which lead them to the edge of the unseen 
world, and excite the sense of the awful and supernatural; he has the understanding 
of all mysteries. And again, knowledge unfolds all its stores to him, with which to 
illustrate and enrich spiritual truths. Let one then, so wonderful in mental gifts, com- 
_ bine them with the utmost fervor, with boundless faith, before which everything gives 
way; boundless zeal, ready to make even splendid sacrifices; has there been any age 
in which such a man would have been set down as sounding and empty? St. Paul 
could see that such a man might yet be without the true substance—goodness; and 
that all his gifts could not guarantee it to him; but to the mass his own eloquence 
would interpret him, the gifts would carry the day, and the brilliant partial virtues 
_ would disguise the absence of the general grace of love. 

Gifts of intellect and imagination, poetical power, and the like, are indeed in them- 
selves a department of worldly prosperity. It is a very narrow view Of prosperity that 
‘it consists only in having property; gifts of a certain kind are just as much worldly 
prosperity as riches; nor are they less so if they belong to a religious man, any more 
than riches are less prosperity because a religious man is rich. We call these gifts 
worldly prosperity, because they are in themselves a great advantage, and create suc- 
cess, influence, credit and all which man so much values; and at the same time they are 
not moral goodness, because the most corrupt men may have them. 

But even the gifts of outward fortune themselves have much of the effect of gifts 
@ mind in having the semblance of something moral. They set off what goodness a 
‘man has to such immense advantage, and heighten the effect of it. Take some well- 
‘disposed person, and suppose him suddenly to be left an enormous fortune, he would 
feel himself immediately so much better a man. He would seem to himself to become 
suddenly endowed with a new large-heartedness and benevolence. He would picture 
himself the generous patron, the large dispenser of charity, the promoter of all good 
in the world. The power to become such would look like a new disposition. And in 
the eyes of others too, his goodness would appear to have taken a fresh start. Even 
ious piety is recognized more as such; it is brought out and placed in high relief, 
when connected with outward advantages; and so the gifts of fortune become a kind 
of moral addition to a man. 

Action then, on a large scale, and the overpowering effect of great gifts, are 
vyhat produce, in a great degree, what we call the canonization of men—the popular 
udgment which sets them up morally and spiritually upon the pinnacle of the temple, 
d which professes to be a forestalment, through the mouth of the Church or of 
igious society, of the final judgment. How decisive is the world’s, and, not less 
onfident, the visible Church’s note of praise. It is just that trumpet note which does 


550 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


not bear a doubt. How it is trusted! With what certainty it speaks! How large a 
part of the world’s and Church’s voice is praise! It is an immense and ceaseless 
volume of utterance. And by all means let man praise man, and not do it grudgingly 
either; let there be an echo of that vast action which goes on in the world, provided we 
only speak of what we know. But if we begin to speak of what we do not know, and 
which only higher judgment can decide, we are going beyond our province. On this” 
question we are like men who are deciding irreversibly on some matter in which - 
everything depends upon one element in the case, which element they cannot get at. 
We appear to know a great deal of one another, and yet if we reflect, what a vast. 
system of secrecy the moral world is. How low down in a man sometimes (not 
always) lies the fundamental motive which sways his life! But this is what everything 
depends on. Is it an unspiritual motive? Is there some keen passion connected — 
with this world at the bottom? Then it corrupts the whole body of action. There is 
a good deal of prominent religion then, which keeps up its character, even when this — 
motive betrays itself; great gifts fortify it, and people do not see because they will i 
not. But at any rate there is a vast quantity of religious position which has this one 
great point undecided beneath it; and we know of tremendous dangers to which it is 
exposed. Action upon a theatre may doubtless be as simple-minded action as any q 
other; it has often been; it has been often even childlike action; the apostles acted on a 
theatre; they were a spectacle to men and to angels. Still what dangers in a spiritual 
point of view does it ordinarily include—dangers to simplicity, inward probity, sincer- | 
ity!’ How does action on this scale and of this kind seem, notwithstanding its relig- 
ious object, to pass over people not touching one of their faults, leaving—more than — 
their infirmities—the dark veins of evil in their character as fixed as ever. How will 
persons sacrifice themselves to their objects! They would benefit the world, it would © 
appear, at their own moral expense; but this is a kind of generosity which is perilous q 
policy for the soul, and is indeed the very mint in which the great mass of false spir- — 
itual coinage is made. ; 4 

On the other hand, while the open theatre of spiritual power and energy is sO 
accessible to corrupt motives, which, though undermining its truthfulness, leave 
standing all the brilliance of the outer manifestation; let it be considered what a 
strength and power of goodness may be accumulating in unseen quarters. The way 
in which man bears temptation is what decides his character; yet how secret is thea 
system of temptation! Who knows what is going on? What the real ordeal has a 
been? What its issue was? So with respect to the trial of griefs and sorrows, the 
world is again a system of secrecy. There is something particularly penetrating, and © 
which strikes home in those disappointments which are specially not extraordinary, a 
and make no show. What comes naturally and as a part of our situation has a probing — ‘4 
force grander strokes have not; there is a solemnity and stateliness in these, but the g: 
blow which is nearest to common life gets the stronger hold. Is there any particular 
event which seems to have, if we may say so, a kind of malice in it which provokes. pa 
the Manichean feeling in our nature, it is something which we should have a diff- 
culty in making appear to any one else, any special trial. Compared with this inner — 
grasp of some stroke of Providence, voluntary sacrifice stands outside of us. After 
all the self-made trial is a poor disciplinarian weapon; there is a subtle masterly irri- 
tant and provoking point in the genuine natural trial, and in the natural crossness of > 
events, which the artificial thing cannot manage; we can no more make our trials — 
than we can make our feelings. In this way moderate deprivations are in some cases 4 
more difficult to bear than extreme ones. “I can bear total obscurity,” says Pascal, 
“well enough; what disgusts me is semi-obscurity; I can make an idol of the whole, 
but no great merit of the half.” And so it is often the case that what we must do as 
simply right, and, which would not strike even ourselves, and still less anybody else, is 7 


- 
The Reversal of Human Judgment—Mozley. 551 


jt st the hardest thing to do. A work of supererogation would be much easier. All 
pis points in ts: direction of great work going on under common outsides where it 


It is upon such a train of thought as this which has been passing through our 
minds, that we raise ourselves to the reception of that solemn sentence which Scripture 
has inscribed on the curtain which hangs down before the Judgment Seat—“The first 
shall be last; and the last shall be first.” The secrets of the tribunal are guarded, and 
yet a finger points which seems to say—‘Beyond, in this direction, behind this veil, 
‘things are different from what you will have looked for.” 

Suppose, e. g., any supernatural judge should appear in the world now, and it is 
ident that the scene he would create would be one to startle us; we should not soon 
be used to it; it would look strange; it would shock and appal; and that from no 
‘other cause than simply its reductions; that it presented characters stripped bare, 
‘denuded of what was irrelevant to goodness, and only with their moral substance left. 
e judge would take no cognizance of a rich imagination, power of language, poetical 
gifts, and the like, in themselves, as parts of goodness, any more than he would of 
richness and prosperity; and the moral residuum left would appear perhaps a bare 
result. The first look of divine justice would strike us as injustice; it would be too 
‘pure a justice for us; we should be long in reconciling ourselves to it. Justice would 
‘appear, like the painter’s gaunt skeleton of emblematic meaning, to be stalking 
hrough the world, smiting with attenuation luxuriating forms of virtue. Forms, 
changed from what we knew, would meet us, strange unaccustomed forms, and we 
‘should have to ask them who they were—‘You were flourishing but a short while 
ago, what has happened to you now?” And the answer, if it spoke the truth, would 
be—‘Nothing, except that now, much which lately counted as goodness, counts as 
‘such no longer; we are tried by a new moral measure, out of which we issue differ- 
ent men; gifts which have figured as goodness remain as gifts, but cease to be good- 
ness.” Thus would the large sweep made of human canonizations act like blight or 
volcanic fire upon some rich landscape, converting the luxury of nature into a dried- 
up scene of bare stems and scorched vegetation. 

__ So may the scrutiny of the last day, by discovering the irrevelant material in men’s 
goodness, reduce to a shadow much exalted earthly character. Men are made up of 
professions, gifts and talents, and also of themselves, but all so mixed together that we 
‘cannot separate one element from another; but another day must show what the moral 
_ substance is, and what is only the brightness and setting off of gifts. On the other 
F hand, the same day may show where, though the setting off of gifts is less, the 
_ substance is more. If there will be reversal of human judgment for evil, there will be 
Teversal of it for good too. The solid work which has gone on in secret, under com- 
mon exteriors, will then spring into light, and come out in a_ glorious 
aspect. Do we not meet with surprises of this kind here, which look like 
auguries of a greater surprise in the next world, a surprise on a vast scale? 
Those who have lived under an exterior of rule, when they come to a trying moment 
ometimes disappoint us; they are not equal to the act required from them, because 

heir forms of duty, whatever they are, have not touched in reality their deeper fault 
f character, meanness, or jealousy, or the like, but have left them where they were 
—they have gone on thinking themselves good because they did particular things, and 

ised certain language, and adopted certain ways of thought, and have been utterly 

~ unconscious all the time of a corroding sin within them. On the other hand, some one 

who did not promise much, comes out at a moment of trial strikingly and favorably. 

| This is a surprise then which sometimes happens, nay, and sometimes a greater sur- 


552 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


prise still, when out of the eater comes forth meat, and out of a state of sin the 
springs the soul of virtue. The act of the thief on the cross is a surprise. Up to 
time when he was judged he was a thief, and from a thief he became a saint. For even 
in the dark labyrinth of evil there are unexpected outlets; sin is established by habit in 
the man, but the good principle which is in him also, but kept down and suppressed, 
may be secretly growing too; it may be undermining it, and extracting the life and 
force from it, In this man then, sin becomes more and more, though holding its place 
by custom, an outside and coating, just as virtue does in the deteriorating man, till at 
last, by a sudden effort and the inspiration of an opportunity, the strong good casts off 
the weak crust of evil and comes out free. We witness a conversion. 

But this is a large and mysterious subject—the foundation for high virtue to be- 
come apparent in a future world, which hardly rises up above the ground here. We 
cannot think of the enormous trial which is undergone in this world by vast masses" 
without the thought also of some sublime fruit to come of-it some day. True, it may 
not emerge from the struggle of bare endurance here, but has not the seed been sown? | 
Think of the burden of toil and sorrow borne by the crowds of poor; we know that 
pain does not of itself make people good; but what we observe is, that even in those 
in whom the trial seems to do something, it yet seems such a failure. What incon- 
stancy, violence, untruths! The pathos in it all moves you. What a tempest of char- 
acter it is! And yet when such trial has been passed we involuntarily say—has not a 
foundation been laid? And so in the life of a soldier, what agonies must nature pass 
through in it. While the present result of such trial is so disappointing, so little seems 
to come of it! Yet we cannot think of what has been gone through by countless mul- 
titudes in war, of the dreadful altar of sacrifice, and the lingering victims, without the 
involuntary idea arising that in some, even of the irregular and undisciplined, the 
foundation of some great purification has been laid. We hear sometimes of single 
remarkable acts of virtue, which spring from minds in which there is not the habit 
of virtue. Such acts point to a foundation, a root of virtue in man, deeper than habit; 
they are sudden leaps which show an unseen spring in a man, which are able to co m= 
press in a moment the growth of years. 4 

To conclude. The Gospel language throws doubt upon the final stability of much 
that passes current here with respect to character, upon established judgments, and the 
elevations of the outward sanctuary. It lays down a wholesome scepticism. We do 
not do justice to the spirit of the Gospel by making it enthusiastic simply, or even 
benevolent simply. It is sagacious too, Itisa book of judgment. Man is judged i q 
it. Our Lord is judge. We cannot separate our Lord’s divinity from His humanity 
and yet we must be blind if we do not see a great judicial side of our Lord’s human — 
character—that severe type of understanding, in relation to the worldly man, which | 
has had its imperfect representation in great human minds. He was unspeakably ~ 
benevolent, kind, compassionate; true, but He was a Judge. It was indeed of Hisiae 
very completeness as man that He should know man, and to know is to judge. He ~ 
must be blind who, in the significant acts and sayings of our Lord, as they unroll — 
themselves in the pregnant page of the Gospel, does not thus read His character; he — 
sees it in that insight into pretensions, exposure of motives, laying bare of disguises; 
in the sayings—‘‘Believe it not;” “Take heed that no man deceive you;” “Behold I ~ 
have told you;” in all that profoundness of reflection in regard to man which great 
observing minds among mankind have shown, though accompanied by much of frailty, 
anger, impatience, or melancholy. His human character is not benevolence only; — 
there is in it wise distrust—that moral sagacity which belongs to the perfection of man. — 

Now then, as has been said, this scepticism with regard to human character has, — 
as a line of thought, had certain well-known representatives in great minds, who have 
discovered a root of selfishness in men’s actions, have probed motives, extracted aims, 


’ 


The Reversal of Human Judgment—Mozley. 553 


and placed man before himself denuded and exposed; they judged him, and in the 
frigid sententiousness or the wild force of their utterances, we hear that of which we 
cannot but say—how true! But knowledge is a goad to those who have it; a disturb- 
ing power; a keenness which distorts; and in the light it gives it partly blinds also. The 
fault of these minds was that in exposing evil they did not really believe in goodness; 
goodness was to them but an airy ideal—the dispirited echo of perplexed hearts—re- 
turned to them from the rocks of the desert, without bearing hope with it. They had 
“no genuine belief in any world which was different from theirs; they availed them- 
selves of an ideal indeed to judge this world, and they could not have judged it with- 


therefore the conception of a good world was necessary to judge the bad one. But 
e ideal held loose to their minds—not as anything to be substantiated, not as a 
type in which a real world was to be cast, not as anything of structural power, able 
to gather into it, form round it, and build up upon itself; not, in short, as anything 
of power at all, able to make anything, or do anything, but only like some fragrant 
scent in the air, which comes and goes, loses itself, returns again in faint breaths, and 
ises and falls in imperceptive waves. Such was goodness to these minds; it was a 
‘dream. But the Gospel distrust is not disbelief in goodness. It raises a great suspense 
indeed, it shows a curtain not yet drawn up, it checks weak enthusiasm, it appends a 
warning note to the pomp and flattery of human judgments, to the erection of idols; 
and points to a day of great reversal; a day of the Lord of Hosts; the day of pulling 
down and plucking up, of planting and building. But, together with the law of sin, 
_ the root of evil in the world and the false goodness in it, it announces a fount of true 
‘Natures; it tells us of a breath of Heaven of which we know not whence it cometh 
and whither it goeth; which inspires single individual hearts, that spring up here and 
‘there, and everywhere, like broken gleams of the Supreme Goodness. And it recog- 
‘nizes in the renewed heart of man an instinct which can discern true goodness and 
‘distinguish it from false; a secret discrimination in the good by which they know the 
good. It does not therefore stand in the way of that natural and quiet reliance which 
we are designed by God to have in one another, and that trust in those whose hearts 
we know. “Wisdom is justified of her children;”’ ‘“My sheep hear My voice, but a 
stranger will they not follow, for they know not the voice of strangers.” 


[This sermon was preached before the university, and was recommended by Presi- 
dent A. G. K. McClure, of Lake Forest University, as one ef the ten best sermons 
of the century. 

( James B. Mozley, D. D., was born in 1813 and died in 1878. He was educated 
at Oxford, where he became Magdalen fellow in 1837 and Regius professor of divinity 
in 1871, and canon of Worcester in 1869. His literary work consisted chiefly of doc- 
trinal doctrines on predestination and baptism, also the Bampton lectures on miracies. ] 


554 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE LIFE 15 THE LG 


ANDREW MURRAY. 


“The Life is the Light.” In the opening words of John’s gospel we have 
great spiritual truth stated. In John’s preaching, in Andrew’s call to Peter, in Philip’s 
testimony to Nathanael, the joy of the new-found Messiah at once manifests itself in 
confession and in invitation. Where Christ as the Life has entered the heart, He 
as the Light ever shine out into the surrounding darkness. We shall be best >re 
pared to take in the full application of this truth to our modern Christian life if 
gather up the lessons the story teaches as to Christ and the life which He gives. 

1. What is Salvation? It is coming to Christ. John points to Christ. W 
His disciples follow Christ He calls them to make a personal acquaintance. Witl 
Andrew and Peter and Philip and Nathanael it is all one thing—they come to Jesus, 
they find Him, they learn to know and receive Him as their Savior. This is salvati 
It is not, as many think, depending upon a certain work Christ has done, or believ 
certain truths He has revealed, or doing certain things He has commanded. These 
have their value, and are most needful. But salvation itself, its true root and its r 
power, consists in coming to Christ and getting into personal relation with H 
“This is the record, that God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son; 
that hath the Son hath life.” Faith means not merely a confidence in certain promis 
God has made, or the acceptance of a certain gift Christ can bestow; but an openi 
of the heart to Him, and recéiving of Himself as its Life. 

_ This truth needs to be studied and pressed home. True religion is a close personal 
friendship with the Lord Jesus. Prayer is not only a means of obtaining certain ¢ 
from Christ, but the joy of holding personal intercourse with Him. Obedience is 
the performance of certain duties, but the living acceptance and carrying out of 
will—of following Him as Leader and Lord. Through all its duties religion has i 
secret in the joy and strength which love alone can give. Let us from the very com- 
mencement of the gospel get firm hold of the cruth that, though He is now in heaven, 
a personal friendship and intercourse, as real as between Him and His disciples on 
earth, is the only religion in which there will be power to serve and please and witnes 
for Him. This alone is the Life that will be able to shine out with its Divine Light. 

CHRIST, THE LAMB OF GOD. . 

2. Who is this Christ? John twice proclaims Him to be the Lamb of God, and — 
that name He has carried to the throne and bears through all eternity. It has a doub! 
meaning. It speaks of the work He has done in giving His blood as a sacrifice for 
our sins; as the price of our redemption; as the fountain for our cleansing; as the 
nourishment of our soul. There is no mystery in Scripture more deep than this: we — 
are bought, we are redeemed with the blood of the Lamb of God. There can be no 
name more precious than the name the Lamb of God. The Christ to whom we must 
come is He whose blood is the measure of His love, of His right to us, of our cleans- 
ing, and of our life through Him. Let us trust and follow, let us preach and honor 
the Lamb of God in His atonement and redemption, as He brings us to God and gives _ 
us living access to and experience of all His love and favor. And let us say to Him 


without ceasing, in love and adoration, “Thou art worthy, for Thou hast redeemed us 
to God by Thy blood! 


The Life Is the Light—Murray. 5556 


_ But the Lamb not only signifies the work, but equally the nature of Christ. As 
the Lamb of God, He is the meek and lowly One. In His deep humility and depend- 


his Creator. He taught us, what we never could have conceived, that humility is our 
highest glory, because it glorifies God; and our only blessedness, because it frees 
as from that self which is our only misery. Oh, let us follow the Lamb of God as the 
meek and lowly One, until we experience that the highest salvation for which He 
‘edeemed us, or which He can bestow on us, is His own meek and gentle nature. 
What a change would come over the world and the Church if this were truly preached 
and practiced! He that truly comes to the meek and lowly Lamb of God and follows 
Him will become meek and lowly like Him. 

_ 3. How does this Christ gather men to Himself? It is intensely interesting to 
notice the different ways in which men are led. Andrew and his companion are 
suided to Christ by the preaching of John. Peter is brought by his brother Andrew. 
Philip is called by Christ directly, and Nathanael by Philip. What a means of grace 
preaching has been in all ages! What millions it has brought to Christ, and yet what 
millions it leaves unhelped and untouched! The preaching of John the Baptist teaches 
us that the blessing depends not only on what we preach, but how we preach. John 
was filled with the Spirit from his birth. John had direct communication with heaven 
teaching him the mystery of the Christ. John had learned the mystery of the Christ, 
as the recipient and the dispenser of the Holy Ghost. No wonder his preaching was 
n power. The Church need beware of nothing more earnestly than the danger of 
reaching without the power to bring men to Christ. The gospel preached “with the 
doly Ghost sent down from heaven” will bear this blessed fruit. 

What means of grace personal witness-bearing has been! Its living testimony 
“T have found,” its loving offer “Come and see,” is a ministry of reconciliation within 
teach of every Christian. Where the preaching is not supported by witness-bearing it 
will soon lose its power. The true preacher knows its value and seeks to call it forth. 
As long as the winningeof souls is considered to be the work of one man, he and the 
believers whom he ministers must suffer loss. They are kept from that spiritual exer- 
ise and activity which is essential to a healthy life. He is robbed of the support which 
their witness and their prayer could give. The unconverted and the anxious lose the 
most effective argument for the truth of what is preached—the proof that those with 
whom they live could give that Jesus has met and is saving them. , 


PERSONAL FELLOWSHIP WITH CHRIST. 


4. This brings us to what we said at the commencement. It appears to be the 
great lesson the Church of our time needs to learn. When Christ as the Life has 


ist’s invitation and their testimony to others, was to lead to personal fellowship 
ith the Lord Jesus. The Life is in a Person, and can only. be known and received by 
ose and continued contact with Him. Even so, the one power of the Christian life 
manifestly seen to come from this personal intercourse. It was the disciples’ stay 
h Him that night, it was Peter’s coming to Him and hearing what He said to him, 
t was Philip’s listening to His call and Nathanael’s listening to His teaching that made 
tem what they became. And it was no less this personal intercourse that made them 
ich effective witnesses for Him. John the Baptist and Andrew and Philip and 
uthanael all prove that it was the conviction that His presence had wrought that 
de it a joy to acknowledge and proclaim Him as Lord. 

_ Why is it that in our days the great majority of Christians are so unfaithful to 


556 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


their call to be Christ’s witnesses, and so impotent in presence of the millions of - 
ishing nominal Christians and heathen? Why, but that religion has become a selfis 
thing, a trusting in Christ for a future salvation, without anything of real present loy 
and fellowship and joy in Him? Why, but that the great truth of Christ dwelling i 
the heart, Christ possessing the whole heart, with all its powers as its exceeding jo 
and only love, is to so many a mystery that is hidden and unsought? No wonder | 
with all our agencies, the great masses—a majority in our large Christian cities— 
remain alienated from Christ, and so little relatively is done for the larger half of ou 
humanity sunk in heathenism. 1 
We must return to the primitive method. We must see that where the Life is 
working in power through direct, joyous contact with Jesus, there the Light will shin 
out brightly and in power. And the Church must preach in power of the Holy Gh Os 
that every believer is meant and fitted for and will find his blessedness in being, before 
everything else, a witness for Jesus. God has in these last few years been giving wo 
derful blessing and power in the Student Volunteer Movement. The secret of 
blessing and power has lain in its appeal to every Christian to give himself, un 
absolutely prevented by God, to go to the heathen and help fulfill the last great co 
mand. 
The basis and the strength of that appeal was the truth that it is the absolute dut: 
of every redeemed sinner to live and work for Him who purchased him with Hi 
blood. 
That movement is only the beginning of a greater one. What the Church ne ed 
is the preaching of a call for volunteers for home service. It must be a call for vol 
teers, not in the sense of leaving it free to Christians whether they will or will not 
themselves to witness and work for Jesus. No, but in the very different sense o 
telling them that they are under the most solemn obligation to give themselves to it 
that God asks no forced service, and therefore leaves them the terrible alternative o| 
refusing Him; that He beseeches them to accept this as their highest privilege and the 
only proof of their love. What a change will come when repentance and pardon an¢ 
Christ’s love in the power of the Holy Ghost are preached with this as their aim a n¢ 
issue: a share and a partnership with Christ in His work of loving and saving men! 
Why is it that this is so little seen and heard? Alas! the life is feeble. “The 
is preached and experienced, the life will shine out, and every believer will be a light 
out of whom there shines brightly and joyously the name and the love of Jesus. 


teachers, and all workers of every name! Remember that the personal joy of having 
met Jesus is what alone can inspire your teaching with the power of a divine conyi 
tion. Believe that your gracious Lord delights to give you this day by day. H 
“Come and see” is a standing invitation. Be sure that such intercourse, in which yor I 
own need and that of those entrusted to you is all talked over with Him and put into 


His hands, will reach some hearts, and that you will have the joy of bringing them to — 
Jesus. His “Come and see!” accepted and enjoyed will give your “Come and see!” 


the seeking and strengthening the feeble. “The Life is the Light.” Let the Life in 
you be strong and true, and the Light will shine out clear and bright. In Him is Life, 4 
and the Life is the Light of men. ; q 
[This sermon is reproduced from the South African Pioneer, and will be read with 
interest by admirers of this great author of devotional books. ] 


COMMUNION WITH GOD. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN. 


“One thing have I desired of the Lord, which I will require: even that I may dwell 
a the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, 


_ What the Psalmist desired, we Christians enjoy to the full—the liberty of holding 
pbmmunion with God in His temple all through our life. Under the Law, the presence 
f God was but in one place; and therefore could be approached and enjoyed only at 
t times. For far the greater part of their lives, the chosen people were in one sense 
cast out of the sight of His eyes;” and the periodical return to it which they were 
lowed, was a privilege highly coveted and earnestly expected. Much more precious 
fas the privilege of continually dwelling in His sight, which is spoken of in the text. 
One thing,” says the Psalmist, “have I desired of the Lord . . . that I may dwell 
i the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, 
ind to visit His temple.” He desired to have continually that communion with God 
M prayer, praise, and meditation, to which His presence admits the soul; and this, I 
ay, is the portion of Christians. Faith opens upon us Christians the Temple of God 
therever we are; for that Temple is a spiritual one, and so is everywhere present. 
e have access,” says the Apostle—that is, we have admission or introduction, “by 


mce, he says elsewhere, ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice.” 
Rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks.” And St. James, 
iS any afflicted? let him pray: is any merry? let him sing Psalms.” Prayer, praise, 
hanksgiving, contemplation, are the peculiar privilege and duty of a Christian, and 
lat for their own sakes, from the exceeding comfort and satisfaction they afford him, 
nd without reference to any definite results to which prayer tends, without reference 
O the answers which are promised to it, from a general sense of the blessedness of 
g under the shadow of God's throne. 


_ I propose, then, in what follows, to make some remarks on communion with God, 
f prayer in a large sense of the word; not as regards its external consequences, but 
3 it may be considered to affect our own minds and hearts. 

What, then, is prayer? It is (if it may be said reverently) conversing with God. 
€ converse with our fellow-men, and then we use familiar Janguage, because they are 
ir fellows. We converse with God, and then we use the lowliest, awfullest, calmest, 
mcisest language we can, because He is God. Prayer, then, is divine converse, differ- 
- from human as God differs from’man. Thus St. Paul says, “Our conversation is 
heaven’’—not indeed thereby meaning converse of words only, but intercourse and 
nner of living generally; yet still in an especial way converse of words or prayer, 
scause language is the special means of all intercourse. Our intercourse with our 
fellow-men goes on, not by sight, but by sound, not by eyes, but by ears. Hearing is 
the social sense, and language is the social bond. In like manner, as the Christian’s 


558 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


conversation is in heaven, as it is his duty, with Enoch and other Saints, to walk W 
God, so his voice is in heaven, his heart, “inditing of a good matter,” of prayers 
praises. Prayers and praises are the mode of his intercourse with the next world, as 
the converse of business or recreaticn is the mode in which this world is carried o 
in all its separate courses. He who does not pray, does not claim his citizenship with 
heaven, but lives, though an heir of the kingdom, as if he were a child of earth. _ 

Now, it is not surprising if that duty or privilege, which is the characteristic token 
of our heavenly inheritance, should also have an especial influence upon our fitness for 
claiming it. He who does not use a gift, loses it; the man who does not use his voice 
or limbs, loses power over them, and becomes disqualified for the state of life to which 
he is called. In like manner, he who neglects to pray, not only suspends the enjo 
ment, but is in a way to lose the possession, of his divine citizenship. We are memb 
of another world; we have been severed from the companionship of devils, and broug 
into that invisible kingdom of Christ which faith alone discerns—that mysteriou 
presence of God which encompasses us, which is in us, and around us, which is 
our heart, which’ enfolds us as though with a robe of light, hiding our scarred and 
discolored souls from the sight of Divine Purity, and making them shining as 
angels; and which flows in upon us too by means of all forms of beauty and grace 
which this visible world contains, in a starry host or (if I may say) a milky way of 
divine companions, the inhabitants of Mount Zion, where we dwell. Faith, I say, 
alone apprehends all this; but yet there is something which is left to faith—our own 
tastes, likings, motives, and habits. Of these we are conscious in our degree, and we 
can make ourselves more and more conscious; and as consciousness tells us what they 
are, reason tells us whether they are such as become, as correspond with, that heavenly 
world into which we have been translated. ‘ 


I say then, it is plain to common sense that the man who has not accustomed him- 
self to the language of heaven will be no fit inhabitant of it when, in the Last Day, it is 
perceptibly revealed. The case is like that of a language or style of speaking of this 
world; we know well a foreigner from a native. Again, we know those who have been 
used to kings’ courts or educated society from others. By their voice, accent and Jan- 
guage, and not only so, by their gestures and gait, by their usages, by their mode of 
conducting themselves and their principles of conduct, we know well what a vast differ- 
ence there is between those who have lived in good society and those who have not. 
What indeed is called ‘‘good society” is often very worthless society. I am not spea : 
ing of it to praise it; I only mean, that, as the manners which men call refined or 
courtly are gained only by intercourse with courts and polished circles, and as t 
influence of the words there used (that is, of the ideas which those words, striking 
again and again on the ear, convey to the mind), extends in a most subtle way over all 
that men do, over the turn of their sentences, and the tone of their questions and 
replies, and their general bearing, and the spontaneous flow of their thoughts, and their 
mode of viewing things, and the general maxims or heads to which they refer them, 
and the motives which determine them, and their likings and dislikings, hopes and 
fears, and their relative estimate of persons, and the intensity of their perceptions 
towards particular objects; so a habit of prayer, the practice of turning to God and the 
unseen world, in every season, in every place, in every emergency (let alone its super- 
natural effect of prevailing with God)—prayer, I say, has what may be called a natural — 
effect, in spiritualizing and elevating the soul. A man is no longer what he was 
before; gradually, imperceptibly to himsclf, he has imbibed a new set of ideas, and 
become imbued with fresh principles. He is as one coming from the kings’ courts, — 
with a grace, a delicacy, a dignity, a propriety, a justness of thought and taste, a clear- 4 
ness and firmness of principle, all his own. Such is the power of God’s secret grace 
acting through those ordinances which He has enjoined us; such the evident fitness of 


Communion With God—Cardinal Newman: 559 


‘ment of divine fellowship and divine training. 
: I will give, for the sake of illustration, some instances in detail of one particular 
fault of mind, which among others a habit of prayer is calculated to cure. 
; For instance; many a man seems to have no grasp at all of doctrinal truth. He 
cannot get himself to think it of importance what a man believes, and what not. He 
tries to do so; for a time he does; he does for a time think that a certain faith is neces- 
ary for salvation, that certain doctrines are to be put forth and maintained in charity 
| to the souls of men. Yet though he thinks so one day, he changes the next; he holds 
_ the truth, and then lets it go again. He is filled with doubts; suddenly the question 
osses him, “Is it possible that such and such a doctrine is necessary?” and he 
elapses into an uncomfortable sceptical state, out of which there is no outlet. Reason- 
ngs do not convince him; he cannot be convinced; he has no grasp of truth. Why? 
Because the next world is not a reality to him; it only exists in his mind in the form 
of certain conclusions from certain reasonings. It is but an inference; and never can 
‘be more, never can be present to his mind, until he acts instead of arguing. Let him 
| but act as if the next world were before him; let him but give himself to such devo- 
‘tional exereises as we ought to observe in the presence of an Almighty, All-holy, and 
All-merciful God, and it will be a rare case indeed if his difficulties do not vanish. 
] Or again: a man may have a natural disposition towards caprice and change; he 
may be apt to take up first one fancy, then another, for novelty or other reason; he may 
‘take sudden likings or dislikings, or be tempted to form a scheme of religion for him- 
self of what he thinks best or most beautiful out of the systems which divide the world. 
Again: he is troubled perhaps with a variety of unbecoming thoughts, which he 
would fain keep out of his mind if he could. He finds himself unsettled and uneasy, 
dissatisfied with his condition, easily excited, sorry at sin one moment, forgetting it the 
' next, feeble-minded, unable to rule himself, tempted to dote upon trifles, apt to be 
- caught and influenced by vanities, and to abandon himself to languor or indolence. 
ig Once more: he has not a clear perception of the path of truth and duty. This is 
‘an especial fault among us now-a-days; men are actuated perhaps by the best feelings 
nd the most amiable motives, and are not fairly chargeable with insincerity; and yet 
there is a want of straightforwardness in their conduct. They allow themselves to be 
‘guided by expediency, and defend themselves, and perhaps so plausibly, that though 
_ you are not convinced, you are silenced. They attend to what others think more than 
_ to what God says; they look at Scripture more as a gift to man than as a gift from 
od; they consider themselves at liberty to modify its plain precepts by a certain 
discretionary rule; they listen to the voice of great men, and allow themselves to be 
swayed by them; they make comparisons and strike the balance between the imprac- 
ticability of the whole that God commands, and the practicability of effecting a part, 
and think they may consent to give up something, if they can secure the rest. They 
hift about in opinion, going first a little this way, then a little that, according to the 
oudness and positiveness with which others speak; they are at the mercy of the last 
peaker, and they think they observe a safe, judicious, and middle course, by always 
ceeping a certain distance behind those who go furthest. Or they are rash in their re- 
Tigious projects and undertakings, and forget that they may be violating the lines and 
fences of God’s law, while they move about freely at their pleasure. Now, I will not 
dge another; I will not say that in this or that given case the fault of mind in question 
for any how it is a fault), does certainly arise from some certain cause which I choose 
0 guess at; but at least there are cases where this wavering of mind does arise from 
cantiness of prayer; and if so, it is worth a man’s considering, who is thus unsteady, 
mid, and dimsighted, whether this scantiness be not perchance the true reason of such 


560 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


infirmities in his own case, and whether a “continuing instant in prayer”—by which I 
pray be ‘ 


something extraordinary, as medicine is extraordinary, a “redeeming of time” from 
society and recreation in order to pray more—whether such a change in his habits 
would not remove them? 


For what is the very promise of the New Covenant but stability? what is it, but a 
clear insight into the truth, such as will enable us to know how to walk, how to profess, 
how to meet the circumstances of life, how to withstand gainsayers? Are we built 
upon a rock, or upon the sand? are we after all tossed about on the sea of opinion, 
when Christ has stretched out His hand to us, to help and encourage us? “Thou wilt 
keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee.” 
Such is the word of promise. Can we possibly have apprehensions about what man 
will do to us or say of us, can we flatter the great ones of earth, or timidly yield to the - 
many, or be dazzled by talent, or drawn aside by interest, who are in the habit of divine 
conversations? “Ye have an unction from the Holy One,” says St. John, “and ye 
know all things. I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but 
because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth. . . . The anointing which ye 
have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you. . . . 
Whosoever is born of God, doth not commit sin, for his seed remaineth in him; and he 
cannot sin, because he is born of God.” This is that birth, by which the baptized soul 7 
not only enters, but actually embraces and realizes the kingdom of God. This is the 
true and effectual regeneration, when the seed of life takes root in man and thrives. 
Such men have accustomed themselves to speak to God, and God has ever spoken to 
them; and they feel “the powers of the world to come” as truly as they feel the presence 
of this world, because they have been accustomed to speak and act as if it were real. 
All of us must rely on something; all must look up, to admire, court, make themselves - 
one with something. Most men cast in their lot with the visible world; but true Chris- 
tians with saints and angels. 7 


Such men are little understood by the world because they are not of the world; and 
hence it sometimes happens that even the better sort of men are often disconcerted { 
and vexed by them. It cannot be otherwise; they move forward on principles so differ- 
ent from what are commonly assumed as true. They take for granted, as first” 
principles, what the world wishes to have proved in detail. They have become familiar 
with the sights of the next world, till they talk of them as if all men admitted them. ~ 
The immortality of truth, its oneness, the impossibility of falsehood coalescing with 
it, what truth is, what it should lead one to do in particular cases, how it lies in the 
details of life—all these points are mere matters of debate in the world, and men go ~ 
through long processes of argument, and pride themselves on their subtleness in 
defending or attacking, in making probable or improbable, ideas which are assumed 
without a word by those who have lived in heaven, as the very ground to start from. 
In consequence, such men are cailed bad disputants, inconsecutive reasoners, strange, he 
eccentric, or perverse thinkers, merely because they do not take for granted, nor go to ‘ 
prove, what others do—because they do not go about to define and determine the sights . 
(as it were), the mountains and rivers and plains, and sun, moon and stars, of the 
next world. And hence, in turn, they are commonly unable to enter into the ways of | 
thought or feelings of other men, having been engrossed with God's thoughts and ¢ 
God’s ways. Hence, perhaps, they seem abrupt in what they say and do; nay, even 
make others feel constrained and uneasy in their presence. Perhaps they appear Ki 
reserved too, because they take so much for granted which might be drawn out, and 
because they cannot bring themselves to tell all their thoughts from their sacredness, 
and because they are drawn off from free conversation to the thought of heaven, on — 
which their minds rest. Nay, perchance, they appear severe, because their motives 


~ 


Communion With God—Cardinal Newman. 561 


are not understood, nor their sensitive jealousy for the honor of God and their chari- 
table concern for the good of their fellow-Christians duly appreciated. In short, to 
the world they seem like foreigners. We know how foreigners strike us; they are often 
to our notions strange and unpleasing in their manners; why is this? merely because 
they are of a different country. Each country has its own manners—one may not be 
better than other; but we naturally like our own ways, and we do not understand other. 
We do not see their meaning. We misconstrue them; we think they mean something 
unpleasant, something rude, or over-free, or haughty, or unrefined, when they do not. 
And in like manner, the world at large, not only is not Christian, but cannot discern or 
understand the Christian. Thus our Blessed Lord Himself was not recognized or 
honored by His relatives, and (as is plain to every reader of Scripture) He often seems 
to speak abruptly and severely. So too St. Paul was considered by the Corinthians as 
contemptible in speech. And hence St. John, speaking of “what manner of love the 
Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God,” adds, “‘there- 
fore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not.”. Such is the effect of divine 
Mmediations: admitting us into the next world, and withdrawing us from this; making 
us children of God, but withal “strangers unto our brethren, even aliens unto our 
mother’s children.” Yea, though the true servants of God increase in meekness and 
love day by day, and to those who know them will seem what they really are; and 
though their good works are evident to all men, and cannot be denied, yet such is the 
eternal law which goes between the Church and the world—we cannot be friends of 
both; and they who take their portion with the Church, will seem, except in some 
remarkable cases, unamiable to the world, for the “world knoweth them not,” and does 
not like them though it can hardly tell why; yet (as St. John proceeds) they have this 
_ blessing, that “when He shall appear, they shall be like Him, for they shall see Him as 
He is.” 

_ And if, as it would seem, we must choose between the two, surely the world’s 
friendship may be better parted with than our fellowship with our Lord and Savior. 
What indeed have we to do with courting men, whose faces are turned towards God? 
We know how men feel and act when they come to die; they discharge their worldly 
affairs from their minds, and try to realize the unseen state. Then this world is noth- 
ing to them. It may praise, it may blame; but they feel it not. They are leaving their 
goods, their deeds, their sayings, their writings, their names, behind them; and they 
tare not for it, for they wait for Christ. To one thing alone they are alive, His com- 
ing; they watch against it, if so be they may then be found without shame. Such is 
the conduct of dying men; and what all but the very hardened do at the last, if their 
Senses fail not and their powers hold, that does the true Christian all life long. He is 
_ ever dying while he lives; he is on his bier, and the prayers for the sick are saying over 
him. He has no work but that of making his peace with God, and preparing for the 
adgment. He has no aim but that of being found worthy to escape the things that 
hall come to pass and to stand before the Son of man. And therefore day by day 
unlearns the love of this world, and the desire of its praise; he can bear to belong 
the nameless family of God, and to seem to the world strange in it and out of place, 
so he is. 7 

_ And when Christ comes at last, blessed indeed will be his lot. He has joined him- 
f from the first to the conquering side; he has asked the present against the future, 
preferring the chance of eternity to the certainty of time; and then his reward will be 
but the beginning, when that of the children of this world is come to an end. In the 
fords of the wise man, “Then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness before 
e face of such as have afflicted him, and made no account of his labors. When they 
See it they shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the strangeness 
0f His salvation, so far beyond all that they looked for. And they, repenting and 


. 


wy) 


562 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 
groaning for anguish of spirit, shall say within themselves, This is he whom we hac 
sometimes in derision and a proverb of reproach; we fools counted his life madn 
and his end to be without honor. How is he numbered among the children of G 


and his lot is among the saints!” 
ae 

[Note.—Here is added one of his addresses to the Catholics of Dublin, of which : 
limited edition has been printed by the Kirgate Press, Canton, Pa.] 


THE DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN. 


CARDINAL NEWMAN. 


It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflict 
pain. This description is both refined, and, so far as it goes, accurate. He is mainl} 
occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrasset 
action of those about him, and he concurs with their movements rather than takes th 
initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called th 
comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature—like an easy chair ora 
good fire, which do their best in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provide 
both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manne 
carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the mind of those with whom hi 
is cast—all clashing of opinion or collision of feeling, all restraint or suspicion ©} 
gloom or resentment, his great concern being to make every one at ease and at home 
He has his eyes on all his company, he is tender towards the bashful, gentle toward 
the distant, and merciful towards the absurd. He can recollect to whom he is speak 
ing; he guards against unseasonable allusions or topics which may irritate; he ‘i 
seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favor: 
when he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He nevet 
speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; | 
has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those wl 
interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best. He is never mean or littl 
in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp” 
sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a lon 
sighted prudency, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ey 
conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. Heh 
too much good sense to be affronted at insults. He is too well employed to rememb: 
injuries and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned 
philosophical principle; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereaveme’ 
because it is irreparable, and to death because it is his destiny. If he engages in con- 
troversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering 
discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like blunt weapons, tear 
and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their 
strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved 
than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinien, but he is too clear- 
headed to be unjust; he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive. 
Nowhere shall we find greater candor, consideration, indulgence; he throws himself 
into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes. He knows the weak- 
ness of human reason as well as its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be am 
unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or to “ 
against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. He respects 
piety and devotion; he even supports institutions as venerable, beautiful or useful, ys 


The Definition of a Gentleman—Cardinal Newman. 563 


sh he does not assent; he honors the ministers of religion, and it contents him to 
ne its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them. He is a friend of religious 


rms of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of 
ling which is attendant on civilization. Not that he may not hold a religion, too, in 
S$ Own way, even when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of 
agination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, 
ajestic, and beautiful without which there can be no large philosophy. Sometimes 
acknowledges the being of God, sometimes he invests an unknown principle or 
falities with the attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason or creation 
his fancy he makes the occasion of such excellent thoughts, and the starting-point 
Mi so varied and systematic a teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Chris- 
fanity itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical powers, he is able 
see what sentiments are consistent in those who hold any religious doctrine at all, 
id he appears to others to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which 
ist in his mind otherwise than as a number of deductions. Such are some of the 
eaments of the ethical character which the cultivated intellect will form, apart from 
e religious principle. They are seen within the pale of the church and without it, in 
ly men and in profligate; they form the beau-ideal of the world; they partly assist 
id partly distort the development of the Catholic. They may subserve the education 
a St. Francis de Sales or a Cardinal Pole; they may be the limits of contemplations 
fa Shaftesbury or a Gibbon. Basil and Julian were fellow students at the schools of 
\thens; and one became the saint and doctor of the Church, the other a scoffing 
d relentless foe. 


s: {John Henry Newman, D. D., an eloquent coadjutor of Dr. Pusey in the “Oxford 
act’ retrocession from the doctrines of the Reformation, and author of the famous 
Tract No. 90,” was born in London, February 21st, 1801. He gained high honors at 


ford, four years later. Here were preached thoughtful and brilliant sermons, till he 
cepted the Roman Catholic faith in 1845. He became superior of the Oratory of St. 
ilip Neri, Birmingham, and head of a high school for Roman Catholic youth. 
most all his sermons, published in nine volumes, show evidence of his ascetic spirit, 
ological convictions, and through moral consecration. ] 


564 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


wy 
ue 


CHRIST, THE ONLY HOPE OF THE WORLE 
J. P. NEWMAN, D. D. 


“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under he 1 
given among men, whereby we must be saved.”—Acts 4: 12. 


The history of our race is that of a funeral march from the cradle to the gra 
the music of the widow’s sigh and the orphan’s cry. If all the tears shed from the fi 
to last were gathered into one volume they would make a new ocean deeper thai 
Atlantic, broader than the Pacific. Were all the groans uttered from the beginni 
now gathered into one volume of sound there would be a new peal of thunder | 
than ever crashed along the mountains of the skies. Were all broken hearts 
Eden to Gethsemane and thence on to the present time gathered together there wo 
be a new mountain range vaster than the Sierras, higher than the Himalayas. _ ‘; 

How long is this condition of things to last? “Is there no balm in Gilead? is th 
no physician there?” Is our Bible a book of fables, is our Christianity a fancy, is ¢ 
immortality a dream, is our Savior mistaken in His great mission? Let me ask } 
ministers and you Christian men and women that pour out your prayers before 
. throne of the heavenly grace, who pour out your money for the support of home 4 
foreign work, let me ask the world, “Is there no balm in Gilead? is there no physic 
there?” 


saved.” These words are a bold challenge to the world. They make an ab 
assertion. There is no possibility of compromise, no possibility of diversion 
Jesus Gime our com This salvation speaks of two things: First, the readiieay n 


dition, so that his conscience will oe to every voice of duty and justice, so ail : 
will shall be in harmony with the will divine, and so that his affections shall ensh rine 
the Lord of lords, and King of kings. We call this conversion, regeneration, san¢ 
cation. This is the great mission of the Master. Has He accomplished that mis 
in you? 

There are two conceptions of the radical condition of man’s moral nature. Soi 
assert that human nature is radically good, and may rise to the highest excellence i 
pendent of an external force. But the Christian declares that human nature is radi 
bad, and the power to purify and elevate it is external; that the power to suppress vic 
and to develop virtye is not in man nor of man, nor in the church, nor in the sacra 
ments, nor in the Bible, nor in Christianity as a system of ethics and dogmas, | bu 
outside of man, higher than man, high as God. Here we join issue with those whi 
antagonize Christianity as the greatest reformatory force known to mankind. . 

It is only proper that we should place in juxtaposition the’ propositions of thos 
who assume the former as against the declaration of those who preach the latter. 

I. The statesman assumes that human government is the remedy for the wo d’ 
misery. He assumes that, inasmuch as vice flows from ignorance and poverty, vi at 
should issue from knowledge and competency; these from public justice; and publi 
justice from a wise, liberal, and paternal government. Yet history is a proof that thi 


, 


Christ The Only Hope of the World—Newman. 565 


heory is inadequate to the end. It is the province of constitutions and laws to restrain 
he evil and conserve the good; to protect, but not to reform. Whether constitutional 
yr statutory, law lacks the one essential element required in the case, namely, the power 
0 purify. That power is not within the province of law, whether human or divine. 
aw may dictate, guide, conserve; but it cannot purify. ‘“‘By the deeds of the law 
here shall no flesh be justified in His sight.” “For what the law could not do, in that 
it was weak, God sending His own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh, condemned sin 
n the flesh.” The power to purify does not inhere in the penalties of law. There is 
‘nothing reformatory in punishment, else every criminal in our penitentiaries would be 

| virtuous citizen and every soul in hell would become a saint. Something must be 
dded to effectuate the desired result. 


Doubtless one form of government is better than another; but all governments, 
whether paternal or autocratic, have been inadequate to suppress vice and give univer- 
prevalence to virtue. The feuds between Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, and 


ncompetency of law under a theocracy. What have the autocracies of Russia and 
‘urkey accomplished? Have the aristocracies of Venice and England, or the repub- 
s of Switzerland and America delivered society from vice, and blessed those nations 


inder the learned Pericles than under the tyrant Philip? Was Rome purer under the 
eloquent Cicero than under the cruel Nero? Is France holier under the republic than 
ander the empire? History proves that in their origin vice and virtue lie beyond the 
reach and scope of civil law. Law can reach actions, but it cannot reach the prin- 
iples from which actions spring. We find fault with officials, and I say that society 
leeds a more vigilant police, a more prompt judiciary, a more severe criminal code. 
t, had we angels for officials, would the results be different? Back of constitutions, 
ck of laws, back of administrations, there must be a moral sentiment which is at 
nce the power and glory of human governments. Our splendid government, the 
rowth of a century, the ripened wisdom of the best and purest and most beneficent 
f all the earth, would fall to pieces like a rope of sand, unsupported by the moral senti- 
‘ment of our people. That moral sentiment comes from Christianity accepted and 
racticed in everyday life. It is a.fact, worthy of our attention, that under the worst 


‘the Neros, the Waldensians under the Popes, and the Puritans under the Stuarts. The 
‘truth is, vice and virtue are to a large extent independent of civil government. 
Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” 


If. The scholar claims that the remedy for vice is to be found in a wise and uni- 


intellectual culture and mental repose. This scheme has been tested in an empire vast 
in extent and gray with age. Where will you find such intellectual culture and mental 


id is developed through the senses. Reduce the physical to the minimum, develop 
the intellectual to the maximum, and you get virtue.” In obedience to this dogma, 
the religious devotee in India degrades the body to exalt the intellect. There is an 
intellectual culture in India, especially in mathematics, such as would honor any 

ition; and there, also, is prevalent vice in its most hideous forms. There exist crush- 
ing caste, organized thuggery, religious sutteeism—until abolished by Christianity— 

nd that which is*the object of worship there, adorned with flowers and watered with 


ountains of India, let us look the civilized world over and see whether there is proof 
that men are pure in proportion as they are wise. Is there anything in mere knowl- 


566 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


edge that can purify? Chemistry admits us to the very secrets of nature in her marve 
ous combinations; but can a knowledge of gases, of liquids, of solids, purif 
Chemists have been known to commit the greatest crimes known to society. Is the 
anything in a knowledge of flowers, of rocks, of stars, to reform the human being ar 
to change man’s moral nature? Did wisdom save Solomon from vice, Bacon 

bribery, Byron from immorality? Some of the greatest monsters, whose lives hay 
scandalized history and damned society, have been men of imperial intellects. 
Bacon has well said, “In knowledge, without love, there is somewhat of malign 
Coleridge has said, “All the mere products of the understanding tend to death.” § 
Paul has said, “Knowledge puffeth up.’ Were we to add art to science, would y 
thereby reform society? It is a proud boast, that external beauty inspires a love fe 
moral beauty. This scheme was tried for a thousand years before Christ. Such wa 
the perfection of art in Greéce, that “the marble breathed under the chisel of Phidia 
and the birds of Attica pecked the grapes which Apelles painted on the canvas.” We 
the Athenians free from vice? You can find the counterpart of the most barbarot 
Hottentot among the foremost men of Greece in the days of Pericles, of Rome in th 
days of Cicero, of England in the days of Elizabeth. Art may refine the taste, D it 
cannot purify the heart. 


III. It is the theory of the Snilseibasnet that what is needed to elevate our ra 
is sweet charity; to educate the ignorant, to heal the afflicted, to improve the gel 
condition of society; but charity has failed to produce such a noble result. Mo 
philanthropy has sympathy with human condition, and not with human nature. TI 
rags of Lazarus appeal more powerfully than the soul of the beggar. Christ loo ce 
behind the rags of the poor, and the angels carried the soul of the beggar to the para 
dise of God. Thus it is that modern philanthropy is weak, inasmuch as it seeks S| 
temporary relief and not a radical cure. Go to Moscow, and the Russians will poin 
with pride, to a foundling hospital, wherein are twelve thousand foundlings. Th 
great institution was founded by Catherine the Second, and is supported by # 
Russian government with millions of dollars. But the pride of Russia is the shame 
Russia, for these children were born out of the sanctity of wedlock. Do you pcin 
our inebriate asylums, wherein degraded genius, and ruined fortunes, and bli 
honor are in retirement? Do you remind me of our reformed prison systems, and 
those houses of mercy for the relief of distress? I must remind you that all 
institutions are the product of sin. It is the purpose of Christianity to superind 
such a condition of society as to leave every penitentiary without a felon, and ev 
inebriate asylum without an inmate. _ 

IV. But what is the mission of Christ? What are His methods for the refo: 
tion of society? We can hardly call Him a philanthropist in the usually accep 
sense of that term. He did not do those things for which we glorify the mo 
philanthropist. He proclaimed to the world that great law of political science, “See 
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be adde 
unto you.” He passed through the world, declaring that great beatitude, “Ble 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The chief announcement of His evang 
was, “Ye must be born again.” In all these utterances there is little or nothing 0 
modern philanthropy. Christ did not come into the world to improve man’s mo al 
temporal condition. The things which He did not do and say are quite as edie 
as the things which He did do and say. Misery existed on every hand. The wi ; 
sighed in His presence, yet He never founded a house of mercy. The orphans c 
before Him, but He never built an orphan asylum. He went about doing good, | 
healed the sick, and raised the dead; but He did not heal all the sick, nor raise all tl 
dead. It was in order that He might write a credential for His divine philosoph ; 
that sin is the source of the world’s misery—that He performed miracles. He never 


Christ The Only Hope of the World—Newman. 567 


sent the schoolmaster abroad, never founded a college. Himself the wisest of men, - 


medica He might have given to the world, at a time when the science of medicine was 
_ inits infancy! But He did not come for this purpose. All these splendid inventions, 


He did not appear on earth as a statesman. What a civil constitution He might 
have given the nations of the earth! He did not express a preference for one form of 
government over another. He simply said, “Render unto Czsar the things that are 
esar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Slavery existed in His day more 
_ terrible than American slavery, yet He did not covet the poor honor of Wilberforce 

or of Lincoln. He talked of wars, of soldiers, of swords; yet, unlike Elihu Burritt, the 
learned blacksmith, He did not organize peace societies. The social evil prevailed in 
His day. He saw the poor courtesan in the streets of Jerusalem, but, unlike Mrs. 
rye, He did not establish midnight missions. He saw the drunkard reel through the 
‘streets of the Holy City, yet He never offered the pledge of total abstinence to any 
‘man. He did not come for this purpose. He would not do what man could do. He 
__was resolved on something higher and better. 


Standing on the eminence of the ages He looked out upon the world and saw the 
‘efforts of other men. He looked to China and saw that filial obedience had failed 
there; He looked to India and Greece and saw that intellectual culture had failed there; 
_ He looked to Rome and saw that law had failed there. There was one thing left which 
' no reformer had undertaken. Jesus resolved to take the citadel of the man, the human 
heart, and hence His beatitude was, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God.” To attain this Christ laid down the fundamental proposition, ““Ye must be born 
again.” There is nothing in the universe more powerful than the heart. It sways the 
_ passions and the appetites, the conscience and the will, the intellect and the affections; 
it sways character and destiny. Christ resolved to be the king of hearts, to be the 
beggar of hearts; and He goes through the world, saying, ““My son, give me thy heart, 
_ for out of the heart are the issues of life.” 

Behold the result of this divine philosophy. Wherever Christ is accepted as Savior 
and Lord there man is purified and society elevated. Did He not come into the world 
_ primarily to improve man’s temporal condition? He did something better. Wherever 
He is received in sincerity and truth there agriculture and commerce and manufacture 
are productive of the largest results. The wealth of the world today is in the hands of 
‘Christian nations. Under His benign philosophy houses of mercy, temples of piety, 
schools of learning, halls of justice, spring up upon every hand. The orphan is housed, 
_ the widow is cared for, and medical science ministers to the suffering. 


Is it true that He did not found a university? He did something better. He 
stimulated the human intellect and emancipated the common mind; and, wherever He 
is accepted, there the poets sing the sweetest, the orators declaim the, grandest, the 
statesmen are the wisest, and the scholars are the most profound. The original dis- 
Overies in science, and the original inventions in art, are the work of Christian men. 
Infidels have made valuable contributions to science and literature, but the original 
discoveries were made by Christian men. 


j Is it true that He did not come as a statesman? He did something better. He 
declared the brotherhood of man and preached the eternal principles of truth, justice 
nd fraternity; and as Christianity advances these great principles are incorporated 
‘in the constitutions and statutory enactments of the governments of the world, so that 


- 


568 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the prophecy will be fulfilled, ““The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms 
of our Lord and of His Christ.” Is it a fact that He never issued a proclamation of 
emancipation? He did something better. He proclaimed the equality of all men, and 
asserted the redemption of the human race in its entirety. Slavery has disappeared 
before His coming, and Christian nations have been the great emancipators in all time. 
Is it true that He did not organize peace societies? He proclaimed the beatitude, 
“Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God;” and antici- 
pated the time when war shall be no more, when there shall be a supreme cour 
of the world, with its chief justice and associate justices; and before that bar, England, 
France and Germany shall stand, to have their international. difficulties adjudicated. 
Is it true that He did not organize midnight missions? He resolved to do something 
better—to create in the heart of men an affection for women, founded upon personal 
esteem. He does not banish the courtesan from society. He demands reformation; 
“Sin no more.” Is it true that He did not offer the pledge of total abstinence to any 
man? He did something better. He wrote over the gateway of the temple in the 
skies, ‘“No drunkard shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.” 


It is a fact in history that rises to the majesty of law that all the upward moverse 
of society have been preceded by a revival of evangelical religion. The history of the 
world is in proof that the conscience must be aroused, the affections elevated, the 
passions restrained, and that private virtue and public morality are the safeguards of 
mankind. 


What is Christ’s plan for the suppression of vice and the development of 
virtue? He goes to the fountain-head of all our troubles. He knows the seat of 
sin is not in the flesh, nor in the intellect, but in man’s moral nature. Hence His 
proposition is the regeneration of the human soul. He breaks the power of sin, and 
He imparts the power of righteousness; He transforms the soul into His own likeness. 
Do you complain that the gospel has not accomplished more? It must be accepted 
first, and then it will accomplish its noble purpose. Is salt a failure because meat no 
salted putrifies? Is science a failure because some men will not be wise? Is govern- 
ment a failure because some will not keep the law? Would you see the full benefits of 
Christianity you must look into the hearts of men and see what passions have been 
restrained. You must lift the curtain of Christian homes and see what joys therein 
abide. You must call around you the millions of happy Christians who bless the earth 
with their devotions. Would you see the grand total, go to the houses of mercy ~ 
thronged with orphans, with the aged and infirm, with the deaf, and dumb, and blind, 
and indigent. Go to our schools of learning, where, from nature, the young mind is a 
led up to nature’s God. Go to our libraries, the depositories of Christian literature, 
whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. Would you see the whole, ascend the — 
mount of God and look into glory, and behold the company which no man can number, ~ 
who “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” whose _ 
youth is immortal, whose heaven is eternal, whose glory is ineffable. All these tell us is 
‘that Christ is the only all-efficient and all-sufficient reformer known to mankind. i 


What then is true is this, that there is no hope for humanity outside of this great 
truth of regeneration as taught by Jesus Christ our Lord, and when the human heart 3 
enshrines the Master, when every motive springs from Him, and every purpose centers i 
in Him, when the intellect is sanctified and all the passions and appetites are held 
under His sway, then comes that better condition of humanity of which the prophets 4 
dreamed and which the Savior anticipated. But “there is none other name under — 
heaven whereby we must be saved.”’ This power to regenerate mankind is not in the 
intellect, it is notin our schools of learning, it is not in our houses of mercy; it is out- 
side of man, higher than man, high as God. It is only in Jesus Christ our Lord. — 


4 . a ‘ 4 
0 


Christ The Only Hope of the World—Newman. 569 


ss every other hope; dismiss philosophy, dismiss science, dismiss law, dismiss 


“In the Cross of Christ I glory, 
Towering o’er the wrecks of time, 
All the light of sacred story, 
Gathers round its head sublime.” 


[This sermon is reproduced by permission of The Northfield Echoes. ] 


570 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


GETHSEMANE, THE ROSE GARDEN 
OF GOD. 


W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, LL. D. 


“Without shedding of blood is no——.”—Hebrews 9: 22. 


I do not use the complete sentence. It is true even upon the lowest plane that 
without shedding of blood, there is nothing, no mighty result, no achievement, 
no triumph. Every worthy deed costs something; no high thing can be done 
easily. No great thing can be accomplished without the shedding of blood. Life 
is just our chance of making this great and strange discovery. Many of us never 
make it. We begin by trifling, by working with a fraction of our strength. We soon 
see that nothing comes of that. At last, if we are wise, we see that all the strength is 
needed. What have we besides this? We must disrobe ourselves. We do it; yet our 
object remains ungained. What more have we to give? We have our blood. So at 
last the blood is shed, the life is parted with, and the goal is reached. We are happy 
if we know that everything noble and enduring in this world is accomplished by the 
shedding of blood, not merely the concentration of the heart and soul and mind on: 
one object, but the pruning and even the maiming of life. Young men are being 
taught this lesson now, and unless all signs are false they will be taught it more sternly 
in the future. 


Without shedding of blood there is no ——. There has been from the beginning 
a profound and solemn witness in the human heart to this. Many of the primitive 
religious ideas are God’s deep preparation of the mind and heart of man for the grand 
Gospel of Christianity, the substitution of the Lord Jesus Christ for guilty inne 
This witness is embedded in our language. What is meant by the word “bless?” It is 
derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for blood. We may legitimately translate this by 
saying that before we can truly bless another human being we must shed our blood 
for him. You can lighten a brother’s way by cups of cold water, by small gifts, 
smiles, by friendly words, and these things are great in the eyes of Christ. But to ble 
in the superlative degree we must part with life. Without shedding of blood it cannc¢ 
be. And the primitive religions everywhere bear the same witness. It was thought 
that a life had to be buried in the seed-ground before there could be a harvest. The old 
legend of Copenhagen tells us that its founders failed again and again. Their wor 
was destroyed by the sea till at last a human life was sacrificed, and the city becam 
stable. I might quote from the Greek tragedians, whose theology is a deep theology, 
to the same effect. However crude, however distorted these notions might be, they a 
pointed men onwards to the supreme Altar of the universe where Jesus died, “the just 
for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” 


So the Eternal Son shed as it were great drops of blood in Gethsemane, andl , 
offered Himself immaculate to God on the Cross. We can never render the doctrine 
of the Atonement in terms of human self-sacrifice and self-surrender. Rudyard Kip- 
ling, in his “Light that Failed,’ puts the true word into the mouth of one of his 
characters. “I’d take any punishment that is in store for him if I could, but the worst > 
of it is that no man can save his brother.” But the human analogies help us, and, 
indeed, the doctrine of the Atonement without them would be a mere blank for our 
minds. So I seem to see how it is that the simple receive and understand the plainest — 


Gethsemane, The Rose Garden of God—Nicoll. 571 


_ preaching of the glorious truth of propitiation, and leap to it, while those whose minds 
are overlaid with speculation and what is called culture find it difficult. Alas! we 
often see theologians, even Evangelical theologians, using infinite evasions and subtle- 
‘ties to disencumber themselves of the one weapon without which the Evangelist can 
do nothing at all. But we know that Christ’s appearing would have had no purpose 
_ and conduced to no end if He had not stayed long enough with us to shed His blood 
in Gethsemane and Calvary. To know what our redemption cost Him we must, with 
the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, look at Gethsemane as well as Calvary, and 
even then we do not know. 


“None of the ransomed ever knew 
How deep were the waters crossed, 
Or how dark was the night that the Lord passed through, 
Ere He found the sheep that was lost.” 


But we do know something. We see Him in His extremity when He began fully 
_ to understand the bitterness of His cup. We hear Him pray His prayer with strong 
crying and tears. “If it be possible let this cup pass from Me.” That transeat calix! 
There is no prayer like that, no prayer ever uttered with such intensity. The prayer 
that is lifted when it seems just possible that the cup may pass, and that the pleading 
_ may decide it, is in itself a shedding of blood. We realize the dim witnesses who heard 
afar the broken moaning, the long sobs, who witnessed the hard-won victory which 
seemed a defeat, who could not watch with Him one hour. We know what the strain 
must have been when there came to His succor the all-pitying but undimmed Angel. 
Tf it had not been that God made His minister a flame of fire in that darkness, could 
Christ have conquered? The cup was not taken away, but the prayer was answered, 
for His lips were made brave to drink it. Perhaps they are right who say that Geth- 
_ semane was the crowning point of our Redeemer’s sufferings, though it was on Calvary 
that He finished His work. I do not know. He quivered for a moment on 
Calvary, too. 

I shall endeavor to illustrate simply two missionary ideas partly suggested by 
etymology. Blessing, as we have seen, means blood-shedding. With blood, too, are 
_ connected the words bloom and blossom; that is, the perfection and crown of life 
comes out of death. So, then, we speak first of blessing from blood-shedding to 
others, and next of the perfect bloom of life in ourselves coming out of death. 


I. Blessing comes from blood-shedding; that is, our power to bless in the highest 
sense comes from our shedding, as it were, great drops of blood. We need not shed 
them literally, though the Church has justly placed the martyrs first. The Church of 
Rome never prays for the martyrs, but makes request for their prayers. The martyrs it 
_ sees before Christ in robes of crimson, and the saints in white. The blood of the 
“martyrs is the seed of the Church. We cannot atone, but we can bless. We cannot 
have a share in the one perfect Oblation, the Evening Sacrifice of the world, but we 
fill up that which is behind the afflictions of Christ. Of every great servant of Christ 
it is true that the Lord says, “I will show him how great things he must suffer for My 
_ Name's sake.” It would not be right to say that it is the suffering that counts, and not 
the labor. What is true is that the labor without the suffering does not count, that the 
two in a fruitful life are indissolubly joined. We are familiar with the great passages 
_in which the Apostle is driven to use the awful language of the Passion, where he says, 
P ey am crucified with Christ, I die daily.” And it is true that all along the way there 


a rock comes to little, but the elect have one that ptdridde above all, one shedding of 
: blood, one death, after which the rest seems easy. Can we know the Gethsemane of 


572 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


another? I think not often. It is passed, as a rule, with little sign or show. When 
George Howe, in the ‘Bonnie Brier Bush,” came home to die, his mother hid herself 
beneath the laburnum to see his face as the cart stood beneath the stile. It told her 
plainly what she had feared, and Marget passed through her Gethsemane with the gold 
blossoms falling on her face. You may be passing through yours now, and there is 
little to show it—some absence of manner, some twitching of the lips, but no more; 
and you will never tell anyone of it, and no one may discover it even after you are dead. 
One may suspect another man’s Gethsemane, the time when he parted with his life, 
but very likely he is wrong, and the surrender he is thinking of was accomplished 
almost without murmur or reluctance. It is so in biographies. We sometimes think 
that we see when we do not. The Gethsemane may be, and often is, the rooting out 
of some cherished ambition that has filled the heart and occupied every thought. It 
may be the shattering of some song, the breaking of some dream. It may be, and 
often is, the great rending of the affections, the cutting of the soul free from some 
detaining human tenderness. Anyhow, the full agony cannot last more than a little, 
though the heart-ache may persist through a lifetime. “Could ye not watch with Me 
one hour?” I sometimes think that blood-sheddings are far more common than we 
are apt to imagine, and that they take place in the most unlikely lives. In the memoir 
of Dr. Raleigh, a prosperous suburban minister with every earthly ambition realized, 
there is a significant passage. When he was at the zenith of his fame he said that 
ministers came and looked round at his crowded church, and envied his position. 
“They do not know what it cost me to come to this.” So, in James Hamilton’s life, 
we are permitted to see how he parted, for Christ’s sake, with his great ambition. He 
wished to write a life of Erasmus, and devoted many years to preparation, but other 
claims came and balked him of his long desire. He says: “So this day, with a certain 


touch of tenderness, I restored the eleven tall folios to the shelf, and tied up my memo- ~ 
randa, and took leave of a project which has sometimes cheered the hours of exhaus- 


tion, and the mere thought of which has always been enough to overcome my natural 


indolence. It is well. It was a chance, the only one I ever had, of attaining a small - 


measure of literary distinction, and where there is so much pride and haughtiness of 
heart it is better to remain unknown.” I think we may easily see where the Geth- 
semane was in Henry Martyn’s life, and I think one may also see it in John Wesley's 
life, though I should not care to indicate it. But the heart knoweth its own bitterness. 
What we know is that the Gethsemanes in the Christian life come in the course of duty, 
and in obedience to God’s will as it is revealed from day to day. 


Wesleyan Methodists have always recognized that blessing must come from the 
shedding of blood, from the parting with the life. 1 miight quote many passages, but 
must content myself with two. John Wesley, speaking of a reputed saint, rejects his 
claims, saying, ‘‘No blood of the martyrs is here, no reproach, no scandal of the Cross, 
no persecution of them that live godly.” Dr. Adam Clarke, in his adress at the founda- 
tion of the London Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1816, made special 
reference to the Moravians. I need not say how great the Moravian influence was on 
early Methodism. He told his hearers how, when the Moravians were only six hun- 
dred in number, they had missionaries all over the world. The beginning was in this 
wise. A negro named Anthony came from St. Thomas, and passed under the influence 
of Zinzendorf. He said that his fellow slaves were seeking a missionary to declare to 
them the true God, but the missionary could only find entrance if he went as a slave. 
Two brethren, Leonard Dober and Tobias Leopold, immediately offered themselves, 
and expressed their willingness to be sold as slaves that they might preach Christ. We 
may be sure, whether we are aware of the facts or not, that no life that brings fruit to 
God is without its Gethsemane, its parting with life, its shedding, as it were, great 
drops of blood. But, as the Savior’s blood fell on the cursed ground and blessed it, 


Gethsemane, The Rose Garden of God—Nicoll. 573 


so the blood of the surrendered soul makes Gethsemane a garden. If not now, then 
hereafter; sooner or later the time must come. 


II. The bloom and perfection of life to the missionary comes from the shedding of 
blood. Observe that I am not speaking here of the blessing to others, but of the 
blessing that is meant to come to ourselves in the great enrichment of the spiritual life 
that should follow, and abundantly make up for the impoverishment and expenditure 
of the natural life. What comes after the parting with the natural life, after the shed- 
ding of blood, after the death to the world? Various things come, but what ought to 
come is the resurrection life, which the shedding of blood has made room for. 


It does not always come even to the servants of God whose life is faithful. Their 
work is fruitful, never without result, but they themselves have not the full blessing of 
the resurrection life. 

(1) Often the Gethsemane of the soul means a brief tarrying in this world. It 
seems as if too much had gone, as if the spirit could not recover its energies. There 
are a few books peculiarly dear to the heart of the Church, which I may call Gethse- 
mane books. The chief are the lives of Brainerd, Martyn, and McCheyne. All of 
these died young, not without signs of the Divine blessing, but prematurely—rich and 
fervid natures exhausted and burnt out. I do not overlook physical causes and reasons, 
but in each case there was a Gethsemane. Read the memoir of Brainerd, which 
Wesley published in an abridged form. It was written by Jonathan Edwards, the 
greatest intellect of America. Mark its reserved passion, its austere tenderness. Read 
the story of young Jerusha Edwards, who followed her betrothed so soon, and you feel 
that you have done business in great waters. Read Brainerd’s aspirations. ‘Oh! that 
I might be a flaming fire in the service of my God. Here I am; Lord, send me; send 
me to the ends of the earth; send me to the rough, the savage pagans of the wilderness; 
send me from all that is called comfort in life or earthly comfort; send me even to 
death itself, if it be but in Thy service and to promote Thy kingdom.” 

(2) Sometimes the earthly life parted with is not fully replaced by the resurrection 
life, and a long-drawn melancholy ensues. It is so, I venture to think in the life of 
Charles Wesley. It will be granted by the most ardent admirers of that great saint and 
supreme Christian poet that the last thirty years of his life will not compare with those 
of his mighty, strenuous, ardent youth. They were sad years in the main, spent in 
comparative inaction, and with many weary, listless, discontented days. There is some- 
thing most attractive about the melancholy of his hymns, but it must never be for- 
gotten that there is no such thing as melancholy in the New Testament, and that such 
strains as: 

“T suffer out my three-score years 
Till the Deliverer come,” 
and 
“Explain my life of misery, 
With all Thy Love’s designs on me,” 


however they may fascinate us in many moods, are not really Christian. The text of 
Charles Wesley’s later years, the text that must ever be associated with his name, was, 
“T will bring the third part through the fire.’ He thought that one-third part of 
Methodists would endure to the end. He never sought an abundant entrance for him- 
self into the heavenly Kingdom, never asked more than that “I may escape safe to land 
—on a broken piece of the ship. This is my daily and hourly prayer, that I may escape 
safe to land.” In his later days he used to warn those who summoned him that a flood 
was coming which might sweep away much of the religion in the country. This was 
not the highest nor even the normal Christian life. Our Gethsemanes are not meant to 


574 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


end in gloom and melancholy. They are meant to give us, by the grace of God, a a 
richer, even an eternal life in the place of that which we have lost. Our sufferings must 
be well used, for ‘‘in this mortal journey wasted shade is worse than wasted sunshine.” 

(3) No, the bloom of life should come out of death. The resurrection life should 
pour into the depleted veins, and fill them with strength and peace. That was emi- 
nently the experience of John Wesley. Branch after branch was withered, but every 
time the new life rushed through all the arid fibres, and they bloomed again. There 
is no book, I humbly think, in all the world like John Wesley’s Journal. It is pre- 
eminently the book of the resurrection life lived in this world. It has very few com- 
panions. Indeed, it stands out solitary in all Christian literature, clear, detached, 
columnar. It is a tree that is ever green before the Lord. It tells us of a heart that 
kept to the last its innocent pleasures and interests, but held them all so loosely, so 
lightly, while its Christian, passionate peace grew and grew to the end. To the last 
there is not diminishing, but increasing, the old zeal, the old wistfulness, the calm, but 
fiery and revealing eloquence. John Wesley was, indeed, one of those who had attained 
the inward stillness, who had entered the Second Rest—of those who, to use his own 
fine words, are “at rest before they go home; possessors of that rest which remaineth 
even here for the people of God.” Jt is with peculiar love and reverence that one 
comes to his closing days, and follows him to his last sermon at Leatherhead, on the 
words, “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near;” 
and watches by his triumphant deathbed, and hears him say, “The clouds drop fatness.” 
The only one I can compare with him is Apostle Eliot, the missionary to the Indians, 
whose life is quaintly written by Cotton Mather. It used to be said in New England 
that the country was safe when Eliot was there. Hawthorne tells how the hero of 
“The Scarlet Letter” went to Eliot in his racking agony. Of that great apostle, worthy 
to stand with John Wesley, we read that he was a man of infinite serenity. His face 
shone with an almost supernatural radiance. But he had his bitter sorrows. His sons 
died before him, They were “desirable preachers of the Gospel,” but we are told that 
he sacrificed them ‘‘with such a sacred indifferency.” He was so nailed to the Cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ that the grandeurs of this world were just to him what they 
would be to a dying man. When, at a great age, and nearing the end, at last, he grew, 
like Wesley, still “more heavenly, more savory, more Divine, and scented more and 
more of the spicy country at which he was ready to put ashore.” he: 

The application of all this is very obvious. I, for one, believe the ancient word, 
“The knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.” But 
first there must fall on the earth the blood shed from faithful souls. There is no life 
save from the parting with natural life. Some young men whom I love have plans for 
the evangelizing of the world in the present generation. Yes, but what is evangelizing? 
The sending of Bibles; the delivery of the Message to everyone? No, but the shedding 
of the servants’ blood on every field. When the world has become one great Gethsem- 
ane we shall see over it all the flowers that grow, and grow only, in the garden where 
Christ’s brow dropped blood. But this morning some sweet mother will go through 
her Gethsemane and give her son. Said one in weeds, when asked if she subscribed to 
a missionary society, ““Yes, I gave my only son, and he died on the field.”” Some heart 
will hear me today, and answer to the call, and pass through its Gethsemane in this’ 
chapel, and return to open itself to the influx of the life of the Holy Spirit, and depart 
to years of mighty words and deeds. May it be so! I have heard it said that your 
people die well. Surely, of this death to the world of which I have been speaking 
this morning, those words of Charles Wesley’s are most of all appropriate: 


“Ah lovely appearance of death; 
What sight upon earth is so fair?” 


Gethsemane, The Rose Garden of God—Nicoll. 575 


‘ For us who remain there is a message. The service will be over in a moment; 
- there will be a collection. You will put your hands in your pocket and pick out a 
small coin, thinking of what you are to spend in other ways before you get home. 
— You will not miss it, not know that you have given it. Your missionary magazine will 
come to you, and you will look at it, or perhaps you will complain that those mis- 
sionary periodicals are so dull. And you think that the world will be converted after 
this fashion! No, the Church of Christ must be in an agony, praying more earnestly, 
sweating, as it were, great drops of blood, before the world can be brought to Christ. 
We give nothing until we give what it costs us to give, life. There is no life without 
death. Gethsemane is the rose garden of God. 


[W. Robertson Nicoll, LL. D., was born at Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, Oct. 10, 
_ 1851, and was educated at the University of Aberdeen. He served the Free churches 
at Dufftown and Kelso from 1874 to 1885. From 1886 he has been editor of the 
British Weekly, Expositor, Bookman and other publications. His literary work con- 
_ sists of a number of biographical and theological works. 

This sermon, reported for the British Weekly, was delivered at the annual 
meeting of the Wesleyan Methodist Foreign Missionary Society in Great Queen 
street chapel. ] 


576 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE CHURCH 
ORVGOD; 


WM. R. NICHOLSON, D. D. 
“An holy priesthood.”—1 Peter 2: 5. 


Assembled in our capacity as a Council, we shall have to engage our attention a 
variety of interests belonging to the outward and visible church of God. The outward 
and visible is of great importance; at the same time, the inward and invisible is of 
greater. A casket is valuable; yet only for the sake of the jewel within. What were 
we without our bodily organs? Still, the body were dead without the soul. It is the 
hidden intelligence within which gives to the eye its brightness, to the ear its music, 
to the tongue its eloquence, to the hand and the foot their activities. The Church of 
God in the earth has its manifold modes and polities, all of them important; but it has 
also its one informing life, and all modes and polities are worse than nothing if they: 
be not as obedient servants to the inhabiting spirit, or like John Baptist to his Lord, as 
only heralds of what is greater and better than themselves. The form, however, which 
is sO necessary, ever gravitates to formalism. We are apt to become so absorbed with 
looking at the machinery of the Church, as to leave uncared for the fire of the Holy 
Ghost, which, though out of sight, is alone what generates the motive power, and puts 
life into wheel and shaft for effectuating the proposed results. We scarce need an 
exhortation to look at the Church’s things which are seen; we do need to be urged | 
toward the Church’s things which are not seen. 

I crave your attention to the subject of the priesthood of the Church of God: the 
priesthood of the entire body of believers; the priesthood of every single believer. ' 


It is a subject far off from the beaten track of most Christians’ habitual thinking. - 
Pity it is that it is so; but the more the reason for exciting attention to so great a truth. 

Large is the space which is appropriated in Scripture to the priesthood of he 
Church. I might even say, that it is as the warp to the woof; interlacing with all other 
truths, and weaving the Word of God into a fabric of strength and beauty. Impos- 
sible, then, that it should be an indifferent truth, or even a truth only second-rate. It 
cannot be a speculative tenet; it must be a vital element of gospel blessedness. It is. 
not a theological fossil; it is a living power of gospel holiness. 

Here, however, as so often elsewhere, the traditions of Christendom are bewilder- 
ing and misleading. Priesthood, as generally conceived of, instead of being a plant of 
the Heavenly Father’s planting, is a parasite of man’s device, entwining around the 
‘Church, and absorbing its gospel juices. I wonder not that so many of those who love 


the gospel have looked at this whole subject, as at “a great horror of darkness.” But 


now, as the mariner uses his sextant when he would determine his position on the 
pathless ocean, and consults his compass to know in what direction to steer the ship, 
so, amid the wide waste of man’s traditions, we betake ourselves to God’s own estimate 
of the importance and preciousness of our subject. And as the miner, in his hunt for 
gold, is careful to follow up whatever ‘lead’ he may have discovered, so, finding out 
those veins of the precious metal which lie at the surface of Scripture, and any others 
which may be deeper down, let us go to explore our riches, till we know ourselves to 
be possessed of a mine of blessedness whose yield the largest lifetime shall not be able 
to exhaust, 


The Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. 577 


I. First of all, we see at the surface of the Word of God certain declarations of 
the priesthood of believers. 
1. ‘An holy priesthood” is the declaration of our text. “Ye,” saith the Apostle. 
He is writing to those to whom, as “believing,” he says that “Christ is precious.” 
“Ve an holy priesthood.” It is of that Church, then, which is the whole body of true 
believers in Christ, that he declares a priesthood. 
' Now this word “priesthood” has been transferred to the New Testament from 
Leviticus. Wherefore, say some, we are to understand the priesthood of Christians as 
merely a figurative application of the word. For have we blood to shed? Can we 
make expiation for sins? Have we anything to offer more than spiritual sacrifices, 
such as faith and thanksgiving? How, then, can we be literally priests? 
But are “spiritual” and “figurative” equivalent terms? Are “spiritual” and “real” 
the opposites of one another? Is the priesthood of Expiation the only priesthood of 
Leviticus? Let the Word of God reply. 
What doeth Christ in heaven? Is He not there as our High Priest? And yet 
e sheds no blood there, He makes no expiation for sins there. He did shed His 
blood once, on earth; He did make expiation then. Without that priesthood of His 
elf-offering on earth, He could not be our Priest in Heaven. That blood-shedding, 
however, has taken place, once for all. What doeth He, then, in His priesthood now 
in Heaven? He pleads in the presence of the Father the value of what He has finished. 
This, and this alone, is His priesthood there and now. Yet is it not a real priesthood? 
nd now what do we in our approaches to God? Plead we not the same blood-shed- 
ding, once for all? Carry we not into the Presence, by faith, the same values? He 
reads the expiation which He himself, indeed, has effected; and therein He infinitely 
differs from us. But it is the pleading of it, not the doing of it, which He is engaged 
about in heaven; the trustful claiming on the ground of it, and in the terms of the 
everlasting covenant ratified by His blood. So is it the trustful claiming on the 
ground of the same Expiation, and in the terms of the same Covenant, which believers 
in Him are engaged about. He is a better pleader than we, for He rests in His confi- 
dence with infinite complacency. Still, the one plea which He offers is our plea as 
well. Besides, as we offer it, the Father judicially regards us as judicially He regards 
Him, since we are “clothed upon with Him,” and His righteousness is our righteous- 
“Mess, nay, we are “God’s righteousness in Him.” Therefore, have we not in Christ a 
riesthood which is of the same nature with what He himself exercises in Heaven? 
7 The Lord Jesus Christ alone, as the antitype of Aaron, is commensurate with the 
‘Scriptural definition, that “Every high-priest taken from among men is ordained for 
i men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins.’ 
He offered himself a sacrifice for sins. That was His priesthood of expiation; and in 
that priesthood neither man nor angel can have the least possible part. “There 
‘Yemaineth no more sacrifice for sins.” The Priesthood of Expiation stood peerless and 


Supper. And when men think to satisfy for their sins by their own good deeds, or by 
their sufferings, whether as penance or as involuntary, they do but snatch from Christ 
ba honor of His own completed and Divine satisfaction for sins. But now His 


Statement of His having been “ordained for men in things pertaining to God.” When 
aron had shed the blood of the sin-offering, he had then to carry it within the vail; 
d this latter was equally ‘for men in things pertaining to God.” His being per- 


578 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


mitted to go with the blood into the Holiest was evidence of the Propitiation effecte 
by the Expiation, and accordingly, as he entered, the smoke of sweet incense envelope 
and arose from his person. And then, as with the blood he continued in the Presence 
it was virtually his act of pleading; as the fragrant fumes ascending symbolically 
expressed it, so, as it were, did the value of the blood ascend, and make its appeal te 
the Shechinah Deity there visible. Thus, while the shedding of the blood and he 
burning of the victim were Expiation, the going within the vail was Intercession. The | 
Priesthood of Expiation went not within the vail, its work being all done on the 
outside; but the Priesthood of Intercession, taking charge of the fact of Expiation 
finished, entered into the immediate presence of God. So, after His finished sacrifice 
of the Cross, Christ had yet a work to do in heaven. Having been Himself personallj 
delivered by means of His own sufferings, from the curse which He bare as the substi 
tute for sinners, He now appears before the Father as fragrant in the all-sufficiency 
His past, pleading for the salvation of those for whom He died, and as well for H 
own delectation in seeing of the travail of His soul. This is His Priesthood of Inter- 
cession; and in this priesthood His believing people may and do have part. Havi ng 
been delivered in His deliverance, we in Him do now appear before the Father in the 
same fragrance which is His, pleading both for ourselves and for the salvation ¢ 
others. Precisely because He is a priest in heaven, we also are priests. The brane! 
is in the vine; the believer is in his Savior. “As He is, so are we, even in this world, 
He offers up there the spiritual sacrifices of praise and intercession; we offer up her 
the spiritual sacrifices of praise and intercession. And both He and we offer them 
on the same one ground of His own past sufferings. Thus “spiritual” and “real” ai 
not opposites the one of the other. Nay, our functions as priests are even at the top 
and perfection of all priesthood, since they are of the same nature with those of the 
High-Priesthood of Christ in heaven, which High-Priesthood is the very flower and 
fruit of the Priesthood at Gethsemane and Calvary. 
Who, then, is a priest? In the rounded completeness of its meaning, Jesus Christ 
alone is exhaustive of the word. But the priesthood of expiation having been finishe 
a true priest now, whether Christ or any of His people, is one who has the distinction 
of direct access to the Father, who has it because of the sacrifice for sins accomplished, 
who is taken into closest nearness to the Father, and who thereupon has power wit 
God in praying for and laboring for others. Priesthood, accordingly, is the power Ot 
Divine Service, of all Divine Service. J ‘ 
Such a priesthood is the whole true Church of God. And a “holy” priesthood; 
set apart to God, and, in their character as priests, regarded by Him as His jewels. 
2. “Ye are a royal priesthood” is another declaration (1 Peter 2:9.) As priests, 
the people of God are Kingly. i 
Yet are they really Kings? And if not, must not priesthood also be interpreted 
figuratively? But it is not true that they are Kings only suppositiously. When tk 
shall have been “‘seated with Christ in His throne, even as He is set down in His 
Father’s throne,” will they not be Kings? When they “reign with Christ a thousand 
years,” will they not be Kings? And even now they are Kings, so far as concerns 
their title to Kinghood. Their priesthood is the foundation of their kinghood, even 
as Christ is “‘a priest upon His throne.” “Ye are a royal priesthood,” says the Apostle, 
“that ye should skow forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into 
His marvelous light.” As priests, they have been called out of darkness into God’s 
marvelous light.” Only as priests are they capacitated to show forth His praises. 
Only as priests, then, can he glorify Himself in them to crown them with glory an¢ 
honor. 
3. A third declaration is in that sublime song of all believers, “Unto Him that 


loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings ane 
/ 


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The Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. 579 


priests unto God and His Father, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. 
Amen.” (Rev. 1:5, 6.) There the priesthood is claimed by each individual of the 
body. They declare that they have been made priests through having been washed 
om their sins in Christ’s blood. He has presented them to the Father in His own 
sthood, and in that presentation they have been placed so near as that nearer 
cannot be, and, by consequence, they themselves have become priests. And they claim 
tas a matter of distinct thought and conscious appropriation. It is the subject-matter 
of their resounding doxology to Jesus Christ, and of their worshipping gladness. It 
5s not a thing merely to be conceded, and then lost sight of in the conventional leader- 
ship of a class. It is something pre-eminent, and to be looked at with rejoicing in the 
bright light of communion with God. 

_ 4. Yet another declaration concerns the risen saints. “Blessed and holy is he 
that hath part in the first resurrection. On such the second death hath no power, but 
they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years.” 
ey. 20:6.) Priests we shall be in the glories of the coming resurrection. Priest- 
hood is inseparable from a state of salvation. It is an everlasting thing. As the 
ever’s position in Christ is never lost, so neither his priesthood. As here and now 
is a priest in the direct access into the spiritual presence of God, and in Christian 
eficence toward men, so will he be a priest in the same offices there and then, 
entering into the beatific splendors of God’s visible residence, and exercising a various 
hinistration toward the nations then existent on the earth. ‘Blessed is he that hath 
art in the first resurrection,’ for “he shall be a priest.” Priesthood is the very 
expression of blessedness. 


And now, looking back over these declarations, we are at once arrested by the 
ident equality of all believers in the regard of priesthood. They are all together a 
‘priesthood, and each particular one is himself or herself a priest; as well Phebe the 
‘deaconess as Paul the Apostle, Onesimus the slave as Philemon the master. There 
are other official differences among them, some occupying one office in the church, 
some another. There are denominational differences. And there are differences of a 
‘practical kind; some, more than others, appreciating the fact of their priesthood, and 
feeling it as a mighty power of holy living. Hence, there are differences of personal 
lization in the joy of communion with God. And again, there are answering differ- 
mces in the degrees of personal reward in heaven. But in the fact and office of 
esthood there is absolute equality; only one and the same right and title, among 
hem all, to nearest access to God. And just here, on the one priestly level among all 
Christians, our Reformed Church plants its standard. 

That in the church of God, all of whom are a priesthood, there should be a 
Separate class specially called priests, and nearer to God than are the others, is simply 
an absurdity. The standing of every believer in Christ absolutely precludes it. In 
Israel there was such a separate class; but that was a ceremonial dispensation, and 
such an outward demarcation was indispensable for shadowing forth the good things 
Ocome. Ours, however, is not a ceremonial priesthood. Nor, in all the New Testa- 
ent, are Christian ministers, as such, even named priests. The minister is, indeed, a 
Priest, but only because he is a Christian, not because he isa minister. Nay, he is a 
inister only because he is first a priest. Priesthood is the power of Divine service; 
id with that power every one is gifted the instant he believes in Jesus, and is washed 
from his sins in the blood of redemption. When such an one is called of God into the 
Official ministry, it is that he shall expend his power of service in the way of preaching 
he gospel; but, even so, no more of priestly function does he exercise, than does the 
hristian mother who teaches her children about Jesus, and is interceding for them at 


he throne of grace. The priesthood of the Church is universal. But we need division 
of labor. 


580 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Nor is there a single service of God’s worship but what any Christian is compe 
tent to perform. Writers on Christian antiquities tell us, that the Lord’s Supper wi 
observed by the first believers at Jerusalem in their own houses, and at the conclusio 
of the ordinary evening meal. The analogy of the Paschal Supper, at which the maste 
of the household presided, would lead the first Christians into that practice, since it we 
at the Paschal Supper Jesus instituted that service. And evidently the laity at Corinth 
at the time of Paul’s writing his epistles to that Church, were in the habit of observin 
the Lord’s Supper at the close of an actual supper, and independently of the ministry 

Now that the ministry should have the leadership in the devotions of God’s hous 
is a thing eminently fitting, nor would we for an instant disturb that arrangement. | 
is in the last degree important, however, that we apprehend the true ground of th 
leadership; that we understand it to have come about by an arrangement of the bod 
of believers themselves, for convenience and order. For the insidious tendency of th 
outward and visible is to throw this truth of universal priesthood into the shade; ar 
to one brought up under the ordinary influences of Christendom, like an electric shoe 
to the nerves of the body, would be his first clear view of it. Moreover, in evel 
organization among men, and churches are no exceptions, the drift is evermore towa 
self-assertion and imperial rule. Concessions granted lovingly at first do at leng 
harden into rights domineeringly claimed. The administering of ordinances is 
arrogated to the ministry on the ground of Divine right; and the consequences af 
that a kind of superstitious attention is given to their perfunctory officiating, the je 
of direct fellowship with God is hindered, formalism is even provided for as though 
were the normal condition of the Church, and a mere churchism usurps the place 
faith’s beatific vision of God. Oh, the priesthoood of all believers is a very synonyt 
of “the Jiberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” 4 

II. But now, going down beneath the surface of Scripture, what other vein of th 
precious metal do we discover? This: that even the Priesthood of Leviticus w 
ordained to typify the service of Christians. 

Its first and chiefest business was the setting forth of Christ; and certain functiol 
it had, and they were the fundamental ones which could have no reference whatey 
except to His expiatory work. But Christ and His Church are inseparable. Whi 
in the counsels of Eternity he undertook the cause of human redemption, a church 
promised Him, a body of saved ones; would it not be most fitting, then, that w 
the Levitical priesthood was ordained for shadowing forth His work for oma 
should have been so ordained as also to shadow forth His Church? 4 

The Levitical priests were Aaron and his sons. What was the relationship subsis 
ing between him and them? There was a marked distinction between them, as W 
evinced in both dress and functions. Yet he and they were closely associated. Thi 
were made dependent on him, insomuch that only as he was filling his place, cou 
they stand in their places. Nay, they were represented in him; for when he went in 
the Holy of Holies, where they could not go, he bare with him the sins of “his house 
that those sins might be forgiven through the blood already shed. And they were I 
sons; none others were associated with him. 7 

Now, was such relationship for nothing? If, as the Apostle tells us, Aaron w 
the type of Christ, were nct his sons the type of Christians? Not exclusively indee 
But as, when Christ suffered on the cross, we were set forth in Him, so it was not | 
incongruous thing that, while in their bloody sacrifices the sons of Aaron typifi 
Christ solely, they should also, in those ceremonial deliverances resulting to them fre 
the blood of bulls and goats, have typified all believers as spiritually delivered by t 
blood of Christ. See, then, how minutely answered to, and fully, as between Chr 
and Christians, is that constitution of the Levitical priesthood. Are not Christians t 
sons of Christ? Is He not the second Adam, the progenitor of His people? De 


“ 
t The Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. 581 
not the branch grow out of the vine? They are indeed the sons of the Father, but are 
made su only in Christ, who is Himself the Son of the Father. And is it not only in 
the fact of Christ filling His place as our High Priest, that we stand in our places of 
service? And are we not now represented in Him in heaven? and, therefore, is not 
His blood, shed once for all, evermore cleansing us from all sin? And yet how 
marked the distinction. The gorgeous dress of Aaron, so transcending that of his 
sons, was it not symbolical of those Divine excellencies of person and character 
belonging to Christ, an appreciation of which prostrates us before Him in adoring 
reverence and worship? And the transcendent function of Aaron, he alone going into 
the Holiest, and representing there in blood and incense his priestly house, did it not 
symbolize Christ as personally alone in the work of redemption, as our Forerunner, 
matchless and mateless, whom we could not follow till after His work was done, and 
he had presented it to the Father? Were not the sons of Aaron the type of Christians? 
Did ever type prophesy its antitype more plainly or beautifully? 


_ But consider now Aaron himself. As High Priest, he was typically Christ. But 
another character he had than that of High Priest. He was a sinner, and needed to 
have atonement made for him. Therein he contrasted with Christ, and the contrast is 
marked in Scripture (Heb. 5:3; 9:7). Personal Aaron, then, was atoned for by what 
official Aaron did. And because personal Aaron was in official Aaron, therefore might 
personal Aaron stand before God in even the Holiest. Now personal Aaron, as being 
accepted in official Aaron, was typically all believers; for are they not in the antitypical 
Aaron, and, what is more, in him in even the Holiest, in nearest access to God? Hence 
hat wonderful word of the Apostle, “We have boldness to enter into the Holiest by the 
blood of Jesus.” And accordingly, when at length the blood of Jesus was shed, the 
vail of the Holiest was rent in twain, and the Holiest itself has been actually laid open 
to every believer. Thus Aaron himself was a type of Christians. But of all priestly 
functions the very topmost was that of going into the Holiest; and so, intimate com- 
munion with God, joys of fellowship, a clear, deep-felt, serene assurance of our home 
in heaven, all this is not only priestly blessedness, it is the ultima thule of priesthood. 


Consider, next, that Aaron’s priesthood and that of his sons are spoken of in the 
law (Ex. 28:1) as being but one ministration of priesthood. So essentially included 
in Aaron, typically speaking, was all priesthood. And what read we of the one minis- 
tration of priesthood of Christ and Christians? It is Jesus who speaks in that sublime 
oracle, “In the midst of the Church I will sing praise unto thee” (Heb, 2:2); He, the 
Leader of the praises of His Church. And in that Apocalyptic scene, when prayers 
of all the saints were lying, like sacrifices, upon the golden altar before the throne, it 
was Jesus who added to those prayers His own incense; and the prayers were borne 
upward by the smoke of the incense upon its fragrant wings (Rev. 8:3, 4). His priest- 
hood, as He is now in the heavens, and their priesthood are but one ministration. 

And now, in view of all this remarkable foreshadowing of the Church in Leviticus, 
is it not strange that every priestly action of that book should be predicated of Chris- 
tians, though, of course, in the spiritual fulfillment? Did those priests offer sacrifices? 
We offer up “spiritual sacrifices.” Did they bear incense before God? The Philippian 
ievers are said to have presented to God “‘an odor of a sweet smell;” for it was the 
sweet merits of Christ which the incense typified, and believers are enveloped in His 
merits. Did the priests of Leviticus eat of the flesh of their peace-offerings? So do 
Christians, by faith, “eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man,” and feast 
upon the peace of God. Did they intercede for the people? So is it the duty of 
believers in Christ to do, and “the prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” Were 
they teachers of the law? So do Christians “hold forth the word of life,” and “minister 
grace to the hearers.” Did they separate clean from unclean? Christians are described 


582 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


as doing spiritually what they did but ceremonially, and as “coming out and being Fe 
separate from evil.” Did they cut off unclean persons from the congregation of Israel? — 
Christians are in duty bound to “mark them which cause offences contrary to the 
doctrine which they have learned, and avoid them.” And did they go into the Holy © 
Places? Aaron especially into the Holiest? So do believers “draw near to God,” 
and “enter into the Holiest.” 


¥ 

On the other hand, no action at all is predicated of Christians that is not described 
as priestly. Do they pray? Their prayers are “set forth before God as incense, and 
the lifting up of their hands as the evening sacrifice.” Do they sing praises to God? 
It is “the sacrifice of praise’ which they “offer” (Heb. 13: 15); this word offer being, in 
the Greek, the regular Septuagint word for the offering of sacrifices. Do Christians 
exercise faith in Christ? “The sacrifice of their faith,’ saith the Apostle; and again, 
“The service of their faith;” that is, the priestly ministration of their faith, the Greek — 
word for “service” here being a Levitcal word (Phil. 2:17). Are they to do good, 
and to communicate of their pecuniary substance? “With such sacrifices God is well 
pleased.” Do any of them preach the gospel? It is a priestly serving, as the Apostle’s 
word expresses it (Rom. 15:16), and leads to the “offering up” of converted men to 
God. Do they present their bodies, and devote themselves to God? They do it as “ 
living sacrifice;” and, according to the Greek of the Apostle, it is their “reasonabh 
(spiritual) priestly service” (Rom. 12:1). In fine, does “the blood of Christ purge their 
consciences from dead works to serve the living God” (Heb. 9:14), to serve Him in” 
all possible acts of service? The Apostle’s word is, to “‘serve as a priest.” Or, does 
the-Christian “serve God in his spirit in the gospel of His Son” (Rom. 1:9), including 
all possible service in thoughts, affections, purposes, motives, in every detail, and 
throughout the life? The word “serve” in that place is the serving of a priest. The 
Christian is a priest to his God in his spirit; in all his inner self, and therefore through 
all his outer self; “not in a material temple, not a material altar, but in his spirit, and at 
the gospel of Christ.” So that, as Christians, we do nothing except as priests. All | 
worship is the action of priesthood. The devout culture of the heart is the work of a 
priest. The overcoming of evil, the growth in spiritual life, the doing good to others, 
all is priestly. For, it was by giving us access to God in the Holiest, that is, by 
making us priests, that the salvation in Christ has empowered us for service. To say 
that we are priests is to say that we are capable servants of God; and if we appreciate 
our priesthood, we become acceptable servants. A separate class of priests in the 
Church? Most damaging conceit; not only blasphemous toward Christ, but a greedy 
plunderer of all fields of Christian blessedness. 


Yes, the priesthood of Leviticus was ordained to typify the service of Christians. 
What honor conferred upon our holy living. What nearness to God it proves to be 
ours. What oneness with Christ it demonstrates. 


III. And now we strike a third vein in this great mine of spiritual wealth; the 
Consecration to the priesthood of Leviticus receives its fulfillment in the setting apart 
of believers. 


The latter is an exact answering to the former, as antitype to type. In the eighth 
chapter of Leviticus we have the account of that Consecration. 


1, “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Take Aaron and his sons with him.”* 
Aaron’s being “taken,” that is, chosen, represented that “Christ glorified not Himself 
to be made a high priest,” but was called of God, and set apart to His work in the 
counsels of eternity. And Aaron’s sons being “taken” represented that the people of 
Christ have been chosen of God to be His people. For, hath He not “chosen them in 
Christ?” Hath He not “called” them, and “drawn” them? Did He not “take” Saul 


The Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. 583 


‘of Tarsus, and Lydia, too, whose heart He opened to attend to the things which were 
‘spoken to her? The first step in our being made priests is one which shows how 
graciously God loves us. 

2. But only the sons of Aaron were taken with him. None others were admitted 
to the priesthood. And does God ever put into the gospel service any who are not 
included in that word of Christ to His Father, ‘‘Behold, I and the children which Thou 
hast given me?” Men are dead as toward God till they be born again, and dead men 
render no service. But when He “quickens” them into life and makes them “the sons 
of God,” then are they ‘““His workmanship created unto good works.” Priesthood and 
Sonship, therefore, are inseparably allied. Only a child’s service is acceptable to God, 
and only a child’s spirit is the spirit of priesthood. The joyous action of a child and 
the’ functions of priesthood blend in one. Inherent in priesthood is the principle of 
“the full assurance of faith.” Whoever says, in the depths of his feelings, Abba, 
Father, feels his priesthood. 

Thus, priesthood is no part of the outward arrangements of God’s Church; 
although it is what should permeate the outward, like thought in sound, like heat in 
light. It is not created by Papal conclave or by churchly council. It is no dangling 
pendant to the concatenation of historic centuries. It exists only in the birth of God’s 
life in the soul. Not the so-called Apostolical Succession is the principle of its being. 
The family principle is that which dominates the priesthood of the Church of God. 
Whoever is a member of the family of faith is a priest of God, man or woman, prince 
Or peasant, minister or layman. Whoever belongs not to the family of faith is not a 
priest of God, although on his head had been laid the hands of all the generations of 
Bishops from Linus of Rome to Pius IX. 


8. Again, Aaron and his sons were washed with water. While water as used for 
refreshment sets forth in Scripture the influences of the Holy Spirit, as used for 
washing it is the blood and sufferings of Christ. As, “Christ gave Himself for the 
Church, that He might cleanse it with the washing of water by the word.” Aaron’s 
being washed with water was Christ’s being washed with His own blood and sufferings. 
For, bare He not our sins in His own body? Was not the defilement of our guilt im- 
puted to Him? And when the damnatory wrath of His Father was being poured out 
upon Him, did He not Himself say, ‘‘Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto 
my soul?” (Psalm 69.). But did He avail to cleanse away the guilt laid upon Him? 
| Then was He washed with His own blood and sufferings. And, accordingly, the sons of 
Aaron being washed with water with Aaron typified the fact that believers died with 
‘Christ, and have been washed from condemnation with His blood. The sufferings of 
their Substitute were the sufferings of believers. Now, Aaron and his sons were 
_ washed in order to priesthood. So Christ was not ‘‘made perfect” in priesthood except 

“through sufferings.’’ And believers are introduced into their priesthood only through 
the sufferings of Christ. Their priesthood starts into being only out of salvation pos- 
sessed. It is not for procuring salvation, but only for service. And always salvation 
before service, and as the foundation of service. 


4. As another step in the consecration, Aaron and his sons were clothed for the 
"Office of priesthood. Aaron, in “garments of glory and beauty.” His sons, not in the 
_Magnificence belonging to him; for the excellencies of Christ are His own. Yet the 
." were so clothed as to be like Aaron; for the excetlencies of Christ are imputed to 
us. The fine white linen of Aaron was upon his sons; that same material clothed both 
him and them; and are not believers clothed with the same righteousness which is 
¢ hrist *s? Not only washed from condemnation, but judicially made righteous, and 
therein personally accepted. Not only so, but the sons of Aaron were represented in 
name of their tribe, as inscribed upon one of the onyx stones of memorial in the 


that effect, is an imitation of the holy oil; as in the sentence, “Receive ye the Holy 


584 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


shoulder pieces of Aaron’s Ephod, and there they were enveloped in even the magnifi- — 
cence of the High Priest. So God has made beautiful all believers with the beauty of 
Christ. Not merely accepted in His righteousness, but even endeared to God, and His — 
very delight. Sanctified, says the Apostle: “sanctified through the offering of the — 
body of Jesus Christ.” Priesthood and sanctification to God are inseparably allied; 
and he is the appreciative priest who realizes that God has covered him over with the 
entire preciousness of his Savior. q 
5. Again, Aaron and his sons were anointed with the holy oil. Peter says, “God 
anointed: Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost,” and John says, “The anointing © 
which ye have received.”” Thus how important to priesthood that we should have the 
sanctification of the Spirit as well; that He should teach us to feel the power of our 
sanctification in Christ, and to work it out in every day results. 
Whoever should imitate that holy oil should be cut off from Israel (Ex. 30: 33). © 
Men cannot confer the Holy Ghost; and a claim to do it, without express authority to 


Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God now committed unto 
thee by the imposition of our hands.” Not so are priests ever made. 

6. At length the filling of the hands of Aaron and his sons was the crisis of their 
consecration. The very word “consecration” is, in the Hebrew, “fillings.” The “ram 
of consecration” is the ‘‘ram of fillings.” So that the decisive moment of the conse-— 
cration was when their hands were filled, for it was giving the priest wherewith to 
offer. Now their hands were filled with the slain “ram of consecration,” and what 
had filled their hands was afterwards in part burned on the altar “for a sweet savor” to 
God, and in part eaten. When Christ presented Himself to the Father, His hands were © 
full of the merits of His ‘‘obedience unto death,” “‘a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling 
savor.” And to His people it is given to have their hands filled with the same merits 
and the same sweet savor. Not alone are their persons accepted, but their works also. © 
Their hands, the organs of activity, are filled. It is a normal idea of priesthood that 
Christ’s merits are presented to the Father in every exercise of the priest’s office; in 
every prayer, in every praise, in every meditation, in every labor for others; insomuch” 
that even a cup of cold water given to a disciple in the name of a disciple is Christ 
filling the hand, and shall not lose its reward. A wonderful thing it is that His merits 
should pervade and sweeten all our imperfect obedience. Like as in a plant, in which — 
you have first the substance of it, and then that substance filled and beautified with the © 
green and the fragrance of vegetable life. We may fail to appreciate this, and, by 
consequence, may practically fail, in many things we do, to “walk worthy of the Lord 
unto all pleasing.” But such is the official enrichment of our priesthood. What we — 
need is to cultivate a joyous faith in this endowment of our office, as corresponding to 
the priest’s eating of a part of the consecration ram. Thereby we should grow strong — 
in our consciousness of Christ in everything, and it would irradiate the sense of duty 
with the feeling of gladness, and make us to abound not alone in duties done, but, 
what is more, in the confidence of God’s approval of our dutifulness. For, whatever — 
the satisfaction resulting to our moral nature from the idea of duty performed, yet, as , 
matter of fact, we never do duties perfectly, and of the fact of our failures not seldom } 
have we so painful a conviction that it disheartens for service. But take home the , 
truth, that the merits and sweetness of Christ are made of God to fill and character our © 
obedience, like as in a cluster of ripened grapes, it is the virtue of the vine which has — 
expressed itself in the luscious fruit, and then neither idleness nor indifference shall be 
allowed to waste our energies, and even duties that are unpleasant will take on an 
attractive look. Oh, a Christ-fullness is what belongs to our service, and our priest- 
hood is a joy for ever. : 


The Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. 585 


In fine, is not the Setting Apart of believers the Antitype of the Consecration to 
the Priesthood of Leviticus? In the very process of being saved in Christ is involved 
the being set apart or consecrated to service. “I have ordained you,” said Jesus, “that 
ye should go forth and bring forth fruit.” A divine ordination to office is theirs. 
Priestcraft it is which would use the Levitical consecration for sequestering and 
exaggerating the Christian ministry; but Priesthood it is which Shines to our view in 
the application of it to Christians. 


IV. Finally, the Actual Entrance of the Levitical Priests upon the discharge of 
their functions was made to foreshow the Resurrection Life of Christian service. 

The priests went not to their work till the eighth day; that is, the day after the 
seven days of their consecration had ended. On that eighth day Aaron stood forth in 
his perfected priesthood. On that day, then, he was the type of the Lord Jesus as 
risen from the dead; for Aaron’s Antitype, as having beén “made perfect through 
sufferings,’ could have had his perfected priesthood only in resurrection. Thus the 
eighth day was one of God’s symbols of resurrection; even as still Sunday, the eighth 
day, is the festival of resurrection, it being the eighth with reference to what has gone 
before and out of which it has risen, but as well the first with reference to what may 
follow, even as resurrection is the beginning of a new series of time. 

Now in correspondence to the fact, that in association with Aaron his sons also 
_ stood to their work not till the eighth day, is it not said that believers have risen with 
_ Christ? that their “life is hid with Christ in God?” and that even now they are “seated 
_ with Him in the heavenlies?” And does not Scripture bring this their resurrection life 
to bear with tremendous force in respect of all holy service? “If ye then be risen with 
Christ,” was Paul’s grand appeal to the Colossians. 


Thus was it foreshown that the only sphere of priesthood is resurrection life. We 
cannot be priests except as we have risen with Christ; we cannot properly discharge 
our priesthood except as we are realizing this fact. That we have actually passed from 
death unto life, and really have in us the risen life of Christ, and in our spirits here and 
now are part and parcel of the new creation of God; that is our resurrection life; and 

“priesthood has its play and power in a clear assurance of it. We are priests “not after 
the law of a carnal commandment,” but, in our Divine Melchisedec and Captain of our 
salvation, “after the power of an endless life.” Our priesthood in the present time is 
but the earnest and anticipation of it in heaven. Hence Priesthood appreciated is 
heavenly-mindedness. It sends forth its faith into the Heavenly Sanctuary, and brings 
back for its own inspiration and strengthening the foretasted blessedness of priesthood 
_ there. There we ‘shall follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.” There we shall 
serve God in the perfection of service; each one of us as that six-winged seraph of 
_ whom it is said, “with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, 
and with twain he did fly.” How transporting the prospect. How quickening to our 
halting service now. Is it not evident that we should become more thoroughly the 
"practical servants of God, if we were conspicuously under the power of our resurrec- 
tion life? How it would put to flight worldly ambition, unseemly strife, unholy greed, 
: envyings, sensualness, selfishness. And honesty and honor, patience, meekness, tem- 


¥ 
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4 


pa tat tS Sed ia Nea 


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‘perance, diligence, brotherly kindness, and charity, how richly they all would grow 
along the pathway of priesthood in resurrection life. 

Looking back now over all this wealthy domain of Christian thought which we 
have endeavored to explore, what impression have we of God's estimate of the impor- 
tance and preciousness of Priesthood? Is it not the most spiritual, the most heavenly, 
of subjects? The priesthood of the people of God is their being put in possession of 
“the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of peace.” It is the direct outcome of the 
believer's personal union with the Savior, and of his identification with the work of 
his Substitute. It is Sonship. It is Sanctification. Tt is Heavenly-mindedness. It 


+ 
. 


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586 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


is the Earnest of Heaven. It is the power of service. It touches our Christian life 
not alone at one or two points, but covers it from head to foot. It is our ability to 
walk worthy of the Lord unto all well-pleasing, and to adorn the doctrine of God 
our Savior. It is the glorification of God’s boundless love for His saved ones in 
Christ. 

And the doctrine of priesthood it is all-important that we keep clear and familiar. 
Like a sun-glass, it brings the rays of light, otherwise scattered, to a burning focus. 
It necessitates the full honoring of Christ; enforcing the truth that nothing must be 
allowed to intervene between Him and the believer; and putting upon Him the whole 
weight of our souls. It defines and makes more vivid personal fellowship with God, 
and suffuses it with incense ahd fragrance. It demonstrates that the Assurance of 
Faith, instead of being that aristocratic privilege which so many think is accorded to 
only a favored few, is indeed the common birthright of every believer. And it directs 


us into “the joy of the Lord” which “is our strength,” and certifies us that “our joy 


may be full.” Moreover, it is the irresistible antagonist of some of the deadliest errors 
prevailing in Christendom. 

Brethren, we have different appointments of service. There are ministers and 
laymen, parents and children, friends and neighbors; but whatever our station, we are, 
as believers in Christ, priests of God. Let us appreciate it. Especially here, in the 
Council of our Church, let our gospel priesthood dominate our action, and distill into 
our souls both sweetness and light. Give honor to the Word of God. “Read, mark, 
learn, and inwardly digest.” “Thy words were found,” said Jeremiah, “and I did eat 
them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart.” Oh, if only our 
Reformed Church, laity and clergy both, were living in the full priestliness of their 
standing in Christ! “Awake, O North wind, and come thou South; blow upon our 
garden, that the spices thereof may flow out!” 


Beloved brethren, my own heart interprets you, that you would not be satisfied 


to have me release your attention until I had spoken a brief loving tribute to him, — 
whose memory just now, by a melancholy interest, is uppermost in our hearts. Pass- 


ing, then, from the discussion of our glorious theme, and bearing with us its gospel 
blessedness into this the hour of our Church’s great sorrow, permit me to say that it 
has been with somewhat of painful effort I have sought to discharge the duty of this 
occasion. It was laid upon me by his appointment. And so frequently, during the 
composition of my sermon, my love for him brought up his image before me, and I 
delighted myself at thinking how one with me he would be in the thoughts and truths 
which I was preparing to deliver here. But what unexpected alterations of human 
experience. It was while engaged upon the closing pages of my manuscript I received 
the startling telegram, “Bishop Cummins is dying; come by the first train.” Dropping 
my pen, I hastened with all dispatch from Philadelphia to his home in Maryland, that, 
if possible, I might catch from his own lips his dying testimony. Alas, I was too late. 
His redeemed spirit had been for some hours with Jesus, when I reached that stricken 
and desolate household. Yet, although I had not the privilege of listening to himself, 
I learned of his triumphant departure from the vivid recitals of his weeping family. 

Our beloved Bishop and Leader was ready; not merely resigned, but acquiescent. 
“Then let me die,” was his quick response, when told by the physician that nothing 
more could be done. Then, with a trust strong, clear, and serene, like that of Stephen, 
he added, “(Lord Jesus receive my spirit.” After an interval he continued, 


“Jesus, lover of my soul, 
Let me to Thy bosom fly, 
While the billows near me roll, 
While the tempest still is high; 


The Priesthood of the Church of God—Nicholson. 587 


Hide me, O my Savior, hide, 
Till the storm of life is past; 
‘ Safe into the haven guide; 
O receive my soul at last.” 


His very last utterance on earth was no more than what infant lips might have 
said, “Jesus, precious Savior;” at once his farewell to the world below, and his home- 
greeting to the world above; the simplest of all expressions of the heart, yet the sub- 
limest of all formulas of thought; the shortest, yet the fullest. So he died; and so he 
lives. In such words as these, as in a chariot of fire, his ascending spirit went triumph- 
ing “far above all heavens;” and yet, not until upon the Elishas left below had fallen 
the mantle of Elijah, in that message to the Church, ‘Tell them to go forward.” 
The very process of his dying was the march of victory. Within one hour and a 
quarter from his first knowing that he could not recover, all was over. The summons 
had come to him, and, as it were, in the twinkling of an eye, he was required to answer 
it. Yet no consternation, not even a disturbance; all was so calm, so absorbed in the 
sweet will of God, so blissful. He died as he had lived; he lives as he died. He had 
fulfilled his priesthood on earth; he is now in the priesthood of the heavens. He had 
here drawn nigh in full assurance of faith; he is now within the vail, where faith has 
merged in sight. 
“His sword was in his hand, 
Still warm with recent fight, 
Ready that moment, at command, 
Through rock and steel to smite. 
His spirit, with a bound, 
Left its encumbering clay; 
His tent, at sunrise, on the ground 
A darkened ruin lay. 
Soldier of Christ, well done! 
Praise be thy new employ; 
And while eternal ages run, 
Rest in thy Savior’s joy.” 
This is not the time to analyze his character, neither to delineate his great work, 
neither to forecast the magnitude of its far-reaching results. The future will provide 
for the due rendering of those services. But no labored effort do we need for giving 
shape to our present vivid apprehensions, or for calling forth our lively affections. We 
recognize without delay how rich and sacred a bequest to us is his memory, so untar- 
nished. We recall at once the sweetnesses of his character, his marked humility, his 
Christ-like meekness, his long-suffering gentleness, his unretaliating speech, nis per- 
sistent patience. We remember his abiding faith in God and His word, his 
understanding of the gospel, his personal trust in Jesus, his reliance on Christ as his 
only righteousness, his rejoicings in the felt blessedness of salvation experienced; his 
moral bravery, his courage of faith, his decision of character, his self-abnegation, his 
sacrifice of self for truth and principle; his fervid oratory, his eloquent defence and 
preaching of the gospel, and his influence over men. We speak what we know, and 
testify what we have seen. 
Great indeed is our loss. No other man, be he how transcendent as he may, can 
ever stand to the Reformed Episcopal Church in the same relations, for he was our 
Luther. Nor shall his name ever fade from the annals of the Church militant. He 
was spared sufficiently long to us, that our Church might stand upon her own feet; 
and now her banner is unfurled to the breezes of heaven, and on its gleaming folds 
inscribed the legend, “Jesus, precious Savior.” His death is to us as God’s clarion 
call; his absence from us is filled up with the presence of Jesus. 


588 _ Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


His beloved family and our beloved Church are inseparable in the bonds of 
sorrow; but to them and to us the gospel truths at which we have been looking are 
sunlight to the gloom. We have sometimes seen in the west a pile of dark clouds 
whereupon, and soaring high above them, a scene of gorgeous grandeur, of many} 
blending hues of light, of temple, towers, and palaces, was enkindled by the settin 
sun; and in the ravishing of our imaginations, as though the New Jerusalem had com 
down out of heaven in burnished gold and flashing gems, we thought no more of 
dark clouds at the base, save only as enhancing by contrast the glory on high. “T 
sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory whic 
shall be revealed in us.” 


[This sermon by Bishop Nicholson of the Episcopal Reformed Church is regarded 
as one of the best of the century by James M. Gray, D. D., author of the Synther 
Plan of Bible Study. It was preached July 12, 1876.] 


i 


(589) 


THE PROMINENCE OF THE ATONEMENT. 
EDWARDS A. PARK, D. D. 


“For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him 
crucified.”—I Corinthians, 2: 2. 


Should the apostle who penned this eloquent expression resume his ministry on 
earth, and should he deign to hold converse with us on the principles of his high 
calling, and should he repeat his strong words,—I am now, as of old, determined not 
to know anything among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified—some of us 
would feel an impulse to ask him: 


“Can your words mean what they appear to imply? You are learned in Rabbin- 
ical literature; you have read the Grecian poets, and even-quoted from Aratus; you 
have examined the statuary of Greece, and have made a permanent record of an 
inscription upon an altar in ancient Athens; you have reasoned on the principles of 
Aristotle from effect to cause, and have taken rank with the philosophers, as well as 


' orators of the world; and now, you seem to utter your determination to abandon all 


knowledge save that which concerns the Jew who was crucified. You once said that 
you had rather speak five words with the understanding, than ten thousand words in 
an unknown tongue; and here, lest the pithy language of this text should fail of being 
truly apprehended, we desire to learn its precise meaning in three particulars: 

“In the first place, do you intend to assert that our knowledge is controlled by 
our will? You determined not to know anything save one. Can you by mere choice 
expel all but one of your old ideas, and make your mind like a chart of white paper 
in reference to the vast majority of your familiar subjects of thought?” 


‘I am ready to concede,’ is the reply, ‘that much of our knowledge is involuntary; 
still a part of it is dependent on our will. In some degree, at some times, we may 
attend to a theme or not attend to it, as we choose, and thus our choice may influence 
our belief, and thus are we responsible, in a certain measure, for our knowledge. 
Besides, the word “know” is used by us Hebraistic writers to include not only a 
mental apprehension, but also a moral feeling. When we know Christ, we feel a hearty 
complacence in Him. Again, to “know” often signifies to manifest, as well as to 
possess, both knowledge and love. We do not know an old acquaintance when we 
of set purpose withhold all public recognition of him, and act outwardly as if we were 
inwardly ignorant of his being. But I, Paul, say to you, as I said to the Corinthians, 
that I shall make the atonement of Christ, and nothing but the atonement of Christ, 
the main theme of my regard, of my loving regard, and such loving regard as is openly 
avowed.’ 

Thus our first query is answered; but there is a second inquiry which some of us 
would propose to the apostle, were he uttering to us personally the words which 
he wrote to the Corinthians. It is this: 

“Should a Christian minister out of the pulpit, as well as in the pulpit, know 
nothing save the crucified one? Did you not know how to sustain yourself by the 
manufacture of tents; and did you not say to the circle of elders at Ephesus,—These 
hands have ministered to my necessities? Did you not dispute with the Roman 
sergeants—plead your cause before the Roman courts? Must not every minister 


590 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


cease for a time to converse on the word of Jesus; and must he not think of providing 
for his own household, lest he become worse than an infidel?” : 


‘I am willing to admit, is the reply, ‘that the pulpit is the place whee ‘the 
minister should speak of Christ with more uniform distinctness than in other places; 
but there are no places, and no times, in which he should fail to manifest, more o 
less obviously, his interest in his Redeemer. Wherever he goes he has a pulpit. 
Whether he eat, or drink, or whatever he do, he must do all for the glory of God, 
and the highest glory of God is Christ, and the highest honor of Christ is in Him 
crucified. A minister must always respect the proprieties of life; in honoring them 
he knows that appropriate model man, who, rising from the tomb, wrapped up the 
napkin that was about His head, and laid it in a place by itself. Now the proprieties 
of life do require a minister to speak in the pulpit on themes more plainly and more 
easily connected with the atonement, than are various themes on which he must. 
speak in the market-place or in the schools. But all subjects on which he may 
discourse do lead, sooner or later, more or less obviously and easily, to the great 
work of Jesus; and he should converse on them with the intent of seizing every hint 
they give him, following out every line to which they point him, in the direction 
of the cross. I have been in many synagogues, and in the temple, and on Mars’ Hill, 
and on a Mediterranean ship-deck; and once was I hurried along in a night-ride from 
Jerusalem to Czesarea with four hundred and seventy soldiers, horsemen and spear- 
men. I have resided at leisure with my arm chained to a Roman guard in a prison 
at the Capital of the Roman Empire; but in all such places I have felt, and every- 
where I do feel, bound to speak out, and to act out, all the interest which the fitnesses” 
of the occasion admit, in the atonement of Jesus; and not to manifest, and not to 
feel, any interest in any theme which may lessen my regard for this—the chiefest 
among ten thousand!’ 

But there is a third question which some of us would propose to the apostiall 
were he to speak in our hearing the words of the text: 

“Should every man, as well as every minister, cherish and exhibit no interest in — 
anything but Christ? Should a sailor at the mast-head, a surgeon in the extirpation — 
of the clavicle, a warrior in the critical moment of the last charge, look at nothing, — 
and hear of nothing, but the cross? Must not every one conduct businesses, and 
sustain cares, which draw his mind away from the atonement?” 

‘I am ready to grant,’ is the reply, ‘that some duties are less plainly and less 
intimately connected than others with the work of Jesus; but all of them are connected — 
with it in some degree, and this connection may be seen by all who choose to gain — 
the fitting insight. The great principle of duty belonging to the minister in the 
pulpit, belongs to him everywhere; and the great principle of duty belonging to the q 
minister, belongs to every man, woman, and child. There is not one religion for the 4 
man when he is in the temple, and another religion for the man when he is in the 
parlor or in the street. There is not one law for the ordained pastor, and another law 
for the tradesman or the mechanic. The same law and no different one, the same — 
religion and no different one, are the law and religion for the apostles, and publicans, — 
and prophets, and taxgatherers, and patriarchs, and children, and nobles, and beggars. 
Every man is bidden to refuse everything, if it be the nearest friend, who interferes — 
with the claims of the Messiah; and therefore every man, layman as well as clergyman, 
must keep his eye fixed primarily upon the cross. He may see other things within the 
range of that cross, but he must keep the cross directly at the angle of his vision, 
and allow nothing else, when placed side by side with the tree on Calvary, to allure 
his eye away from that central, engrossing object.’ : 

Here, then, is our third question answered; and in these three replies to these 
three queries, we perceive the meaning of our text to be: that not on the first day only, 


The Prominence of the Atonement—Park. 591 


but on every day likewise, not in the religious assembly only, but in all assemblies, 
and in all solitudes likewise, not the preacher only, but the hearer likewise,—every man 
must adopt the rule, to give his voluntary, his loving, his secret and open regard to 
nothing so much as to the character and work of his Redeemer. 

Having inquired into the meaning of the apostle’s words, let us proceed, in the 
next place, to inquire into the importance of making the atonement of Christ the only 
great object of our thought, speech, and action. 

And here, did we hold a personal interview with the author of our text, we should 
_ be prompted to put three additional queries before him. Our first inquiry would be: 
“Ts not your theme too contracted? It is well to know Christ, but in all the vary- 
_ ing scenes of life is it well not to know anything else? Will not the pulpit become 
wearisome if, spring and autumn, summer and winter, it confine itself to a single topic? 
We have known men preach themselves out by incessant repetitions of the scene 
¢ at Calvary,—a scene thrilling in itself, and on that very account not bearing to be 
i presented in its details, every Sabbath day. How much less will the varying sensibili- 
" ties of the soul endure the reiteration of this tragic tale every day and at every 
interview! Such extreme familiarity induces irreverence. The Bible is not confined 
to this theme. It is rich in ecclesiastical history, political history, ethical rules, 
metaphysical discussion, comprehensive theology. It contains one book of ten 
chapters which has not a single allusion to God, and several books which do not 
mention Christ; why then do you shut us up to a doctrine which will circumscribe 
the mind of good men, and result in making their conversation insipid?” 

‘Contracted!’—this is the reply—‘and do you consider this topic a limited one, 
whose height, depth, length, breadth, no finite mind can measure? Of what would you 
speak?’ 

“We would speak of the divine existence.” 

‘But Christ is the “I am.”’ 

“We would speak of the divine attributes.” 

‘But Christ is the Alpha and Omega; He searcheth the reins and trieth the 
hearts of men; He is the same yesterday, today, and forever; full of grace and truth; 
to Him belong wisdom and power and glory and honor; of His dominion is no end. 
Of what, then, would you speak?’ 

? “We would speak of the divine sovereignty.” 
‘But Christ taught us to say: Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy 
sight—and He and His Father are one.’ 
“We would converse on the divine decrees.” 
‘But all things are planned for His praise who was in Christ, and in whom 
Christ was at the beginning.’ 
“We would discourse on electing love.” 
‘But the saints are elect in Christ Jesus.’ 
| “We would utter many words on the creation of men and angels.” 
: ‘Now by our Redeemer were all things created that are in heaven and that are 
in the earth, visible and invisible.’ 
‘ “We would converse on the preservation of what has been created.” 
‘Now Christ upholdeth all things by the word of His power. What would you 
have, then, for your theme?’ 
My “We would take the flowers of the field for our theme.” 
‘But they are the delight, as well as the contrivance of the Redeemer.’ 
¢ “We would take for our theme the globes in space.” 
ie ‘But they are the work of His fingers.’ 
“Then we would take the very winds of heaven for our theme, lawless and 
"erratic as they are.” 


ae 


Se 


| 
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592 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


‘But Jesus taught us to comment upon these as an illustration of His truth. Hi 
poetic mind gave us the conception that the wind bloweth where it chooseth to blow; 
and we look on, wondering whence it cometh, and whither it goeth, knowing onkyl 
that is the breath of the Wonderful Counsellor, who arouseth it as He listeth, or 
saith, Peace, be still. What else then, do you prefer for your topic of conversation?” 

“We prefer the laws of nature for our topic.” 

‘But in them the Father worketh and Christ worketh equally.’ 

“Tf it be so, we will select the fine and useful arts for our subject.” | 

‘But all the materials of these arts and all the laws which compact them, and in’ 
all the ingenuity which arranges them are of His architectonic plan, He is the guide 
of the sculptor, painter, musician, poet. He is the contriver of all the graces which 
we in our idolatry ascribe to the human discoverer, as if man had originally 
invented them. The history of the arts is the history of Christ’s Ov SEES on earth, 
Will you propose, then, some other theme for your remark?’ 

“Do let us converse on the moral law.” 

‘You may; but Christ gave this law and came to magnify it.’ 

“Then let us comment on the ceremonial law.” 

‘You may; but all its types are prophecies of Jesus.’ 

“Then we will expatiate on virtue in the general.” 

‘Do so; but Christ is the first exemplar, the brighest representative of all abstract 
SOOELIS of all your virtue in the general.’ 

“Then we will take up the ethical maxims.’ 

‘Take them up; but they are embodied in Him who is the way, the truth, the life.’ 

“We will resort, then, to human responsibility for our subject of discourse.” 

‘But we must all appear before the judgment seat of that fair-minded arbiter who 
is man as well as God.’ 

“May we not speak of eternal blessedness?” 

‘Yes: but it is Christ who welcomes His chosen into life.’ 

“Shall we not converse, then, on endless misery?” 

‘Yes; but it is Christ who will proclaim: Depart, ye cursed.’ 

“The human body;—we would utter some words on that.” 

‘But your present body is the image of what your Lord wore once, and the body 
that you will have, if you die in the faith, is the image of what your Lord wears now; 
—the image of the body slain for our offenses and raised again for our justification. — 
And have you still a favorite theme which you have not suggested?’ , 

“The pleasures of life are our favorite theme.” 

‘Yes, and Jesus provided them and graced them at Cana.’ 

“The duties of the household are our favorite theme.” 

‘Yes, and Jesus has prescribed them and disciplines you by them, and will judge 
you for your manner of regarding them.—What would you have, then, what can you 
think of for your choice topic of discourse?’ 

“We love to talk of our brethren in the faith.” 

‘But they are indices of Christ, and He is represented by them.’ 

“We choose to converse on our Redeemer’s indigent, imprisoned, diseased, 
agonized followers.” 

‘And He is an hungered, athirst, penniless, afflicted in them, and whatsoever we 
do to one of them we do to Him, and what we say of one of them we say of Him.’ 

“May we speak in the pulpit of slaves?” 

‘Of slaves! Can you not speak of Medes and Parthians, Indians and Arabians? 
Why not then of Africans? Have they, or have they not, immortal souls? Was 
Jesus, or was He not, crucified for them? Was He ashamed of the lowly and the down- 
trodden, and those who have become the reproach of men and the despised of the 


q 


The Prominence of the Atonement—Park. 593 


F 


all things, globes or atoms, suggest thoughts leading in a right line or in a curved line 
to the cross of Christ. All things, being thus nearly or remotely suggestive of the 
atonement, are for your sakes; whether Paul or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, 
life, or death, or things present, or things to come,—all are yours, for your 
oughts, for your words. If things pertain to the divine essence, the whole of that 
s the essence of Jesus; if they pertain to the divine relations, all of them are the 
relations of Jesus; if they pertain to the noblest and brightest features of seraphs, all 


human life, in all our vicissitudes Jesus keeps up His brotherhood with us; if they 
‘pertain to the vilest and darkest spot of our depravity, they pertain to Jesus,—for to 
speak aright of sin is to be determined to speak of Christ and of Him crucified for sin. 
7 ‘And is this the doctrine which men call a contracted one? Narrow! The very 
suspicion of its being narrow has now suggested the first reason why you should place 
it and keep it as the crown of all your words and deeds:—it is so large, so rich, 
so boundless, that you need nothing which excludes it. And therefore,’ continues the 
Apostle, ‘I mean to know and to love nothing, and to make it manifest that I care for 
othing, in comparison with, and disconnected from, the God-man, as He develops all 
is attributes and all His relations on the cross.’ 
_ But were the author of these laconic words in a familiar conference with us, we 
might be tempted to address to him a second inquiry: 
} “Is not your theme too large? At first we deemed it too small, but now it swells 
: before us into such colossal dimensions that we change our ground, and ask: 
an the narrow mind of man take in this multiplicity of relations, comprehended in 
both the natures, and in the redemptive, as well as all the other works of Christ? Do 
‘not frail powers need one day as a day of rest, and one place as a sanctuary of repose, 
from every thought less tender than that of the atoning death itself? Must we not 
call in our minds from Christ and Him crucified, so as to concentrate all our 
emotions on the simple fact of Christ crucified?” 
‘Too large a theme!’"—this is the reply.— it is a large theme, toc large to be fully 
comprehended by finite intelligences. Men have dreamed of exhausting the atone- 
ment by defining it to be a plan for removing the obstacles which stand in the way of 
our pardon. It is too large for that definition, as the atonement also persuades the Most 
to forgive us. Then men have thought to mark it round about by saying that 
is a scheme for inducing God to interpose in our aid. But the atonement is too 
large for that defining clause, as it also presents motives to man for accepting the 
terposition of God. Then some havé thought to define it exactly, by saying that 
z atonement is both an appeal to the Law-giver and also an appeal to the sinner. 
Too large still is the atonement for that explanation. It is an appeal to both God and 
an, but it is more. It is an appeal to the universe, and is as many-sided as the 
iverse itself is to be variously affected. Can we by searching find out the whole 
atoning love? It is the love of Him who stretched out His arms on the fatal wood, 
and pointed to the right hand and to the left hand, and raised His eyes upward, and 
ast them downward; and thus all things above and below, and on either side, He 
nbraced in His comprehensive love. It is a large theme, but not too large to operate 
$a motive upon us. The immeasurable reach of a motive is the hiding of its power. 
e mind of man is itself expansive, and requires and will have something immense 
id infinite of truth or error, either overpowering it for good or overmastering it for 
evil. The atonement is a great theme, but not too great; and for the additional 
reason,—its greatness lies, in part, in its reducing all other doctrines to a unity, its 
| ae them around itself in an order which makes them all easily under- 
‘stood. We know in other things the power of unity amid variety. We know how 


iT 


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594 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


simple the geography of a land becomes by remembering that its rivers, although ~ 
meandering in unnumbered circuits around the hills and through the vales, yet 
pursue one main direction from one mountain to one sea. Now all the truths 
of God flow into the atonement. They are understood by means of it, because 
their tendencies are toward it; and it is understood by means of them, because ita 
receives and comprehends them. 

‘Consider more fully the first part of this sentence; all other truths are understood 
by means of the atonement. It gives to them all a unity by illustrating them all. 
Other truths are not so much independent themes, as they are branches growing up 
or side-wise out of this one root, and they need this single theme in order that their 
relations may be rightly understood. What, for example, can we know in its most 
important bearings, unless we know the history and office of our Redeemer? Begin 
from what point we may to examine the uses of things, we can never measure their 
full utility until we view them from the cross. The trees bud and blossom. Why? 
To bear fruit for the sustenance of the human body. But is this an ultimate object? 
The nourishment of the body favors the growth of the mind. But is the human mind 
an end worthy of all the contrivances in nature? Does the sun, with all its retinue of 
stars, pursue its daily course with no aim ulterior to man’s welfare? Do we adopt a 
Ptolemaic theory in morals, that man is the center of the system, and other worlds 
revolve around him? All things were made for God, as the Being in whom they: all 
terminate. Do they exist for elucidating His power? This is not his chief attribute. 
His knowledge? There is a nobler perfection than omniscience. His love? But 
there is one virtue imbedded as a gem in His love, and His love is but a shining casket 
for this pearl of infinite price. This pearl is grace. This is the central ornament of the 
character of Jehovah. But there is no grace in Jehovah save as it beams forth i 
Christ; not in Christ as a mere Divinity, nor in Christ as a mere spotless humanity, 
but in the two united, and in that God-man crucified. All things were made by Him 
and for Him, rising from the cross to the throne. Without reference to Him in His” 
atoning love, has nothing been made that was made in this world. The star in the 
East led wise men once to the manger where the Redeemer lay; and all the stars of 
heaven lead wise men now to Him who has risen above the stars, and whose glory 
illumines them all. He is termed the sun of righteousness; and, as the material sun. 
binds all the planets around it in an intelligible order, so does Christ shine over, and 
under, and into, and through all other objects, attract them all to Himself, marshal 
them all into one clear and grand array, showing them all to be His works, all sug- 
gestive of our duty, our sin, our need of atonement, our dependence on the one God, 
and the one Mediator between God and man. - 

‘The first part of my sentence was, All other truths are understood by means of 
the atonement. Consider next the second part: The atonement is understood by 
means of other truths. It crystallizes them around itself, and reduces them into a 
system, not only because it explains them, but also because it makes them explain it. 
Tt is not too large a theme, for all the sciences and the arts bring their contributions 
to make it orderly and plain. Our text is a simple one, because its words are inter- 
preted by a thousand facts shining upon it, and making themselves and it luminous in 
their radiations around and over it. Listen again to its suggestive words: 

“For I determined not to know any thing among you save Jesus Christ, and Him 
crucified.” 

‘Now, what is the meaning of this plain term, “Christ?” It means a “King.” But 
how can we appreciate the King, unless we learn the nature of the beings over whom 
He rules? He reigns over the heavens; therefore we investigate the heavens. The 
whole earth is full of His glory; therefore we study the earth. He is the Lord over the 
angels; when we reflect on them, we catch a glimpse of Him in His regal state. He 


The Prominence of the Atonement—Park. 595 
is the King of the Jews and the Gentiles. When we meditate on men, we enjoy a 
glance at Him who was born for this end, that He might have dominion over our 
‘race. When we contemplate the material worlds, all the vastness and the grandeur 
included in them—the sphere of mind, all the refinement and energy involved in it— 
‘we are overpowered by the reality, surpassing fable, that He who superintends all the 
“movements of matter and first spake it into being and once framed, as He now 
governs, the souls of His creatures—He is the King who atoned for us; and the more 
we know of the stars in their courses, and of the spirit in its mysteries, so much the 

eeper is our awe in view of the condescending pity which moved their Creator to 
“become one with a lowly creature acquainted with grief for you and me. So much is 
involved in the word, “Christ.” 


‘But our text speaks of Jesus Christ. That word, “Jesus!” What is the meaning 
of it? It means a “deliverer,”’ and in the view of some interpreters it means “God, 
the deliverer.”’ Deliverer? From what? We do not understand the power of His 
“great office, unless we learn the nature and the vileness of sin; and we have no con- 
‘ception how mean, how detestable, sin is, unless we know the needlessness of it, the 
xs obleness of the will which degrades itself into it, the excellence of the law which is 
dishonored by it. All our studies, then, in regard to the nature of the will, the 
unforced voluntariness of depravity, the extent of it through our race, the depth of it, 
ne purity of the commands aiming to prevent it, the attractions of virtue, the strange- 
mess of their not prevailing over the temptations of vice—they are not mere 
"metaphysics; they are studies concerning the truth and the grace of Immanuel, who is 
r od with us, and whose name is “Deliverer’”’ because He delivers His people from 
their sins; sins involving the power and the penalty of free wrong choice; a penalty 
including the everlasting punishment of the soul; a punishment suggesting the nature 
and the character of the divine law, and the divine Lawgiver, in their relation to the 
conscience and all the sensibilities of the mind; and that mind, as undying as its Maker. 
All these things are comprehended in the word, “Jesus.” 


‘But our text speaks of Jesus Christ and Him crucified: and this third term, 
“crucified,” adds an emphasis to the two preceding terms, and stirs us up to examine 
‘our own capabilities—to learn the skill pervading our physical organism, so exquisitely 
ented for pain as well as pleasure; the wisdom apparent in our mental structure, so 

enly sensitive to all that can annoy as well as gratify; and thus we catch a glimpse 
of the truth, that He who combines all of our. dignity with none of our guilt, and 
with all of the divine glory, and who thus develops all that is fit to be explained in 
‘man, and all that can be explained in God—He it is who chose to hang and linger 
with aching nerve and bleeding heart upon the cross for you and me. This cross 
— out an atonement of the sciences and the arts and brings them also, as well as 
devout men, at one with God; all of them tributary to the doctrine that we are bought 
with a price—that we are redeemed, not with silver and gold, but with the precious 
blood of a man, who was God manifest in the flesh. Too large a theme is the atone- 
ment? But it breaks down the middle wall of partition that has kept apart the 
different studies of men; and it brings them together as illustrations of the truth, which 
in their light becomes as simple as it is great. 
_ ‘The very objection, then, that the redemptive work is too extensive for our 
familiar converse, has suggested the second reason why it should be the main thing 
for us to think upon, and speak upon, and act upon: It systematizes all other themes, 
and gains from them a unity which becomes the plainer because it is set off by a 
luminous variety; and for this cause,’ continues the apostle, ‘I intend to know nothing 
with supreme love, except this centralizing doctrine which combines all other truths 
into a constellation of glories.’ 


J 


| ee 


{ 


third hour, the hour of triumph, when His troops of heralds shouted at His arrival: 


596 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


There is still a third inquiry which we might present to the author of our text, 
could we meet him in a personal colloquy: r 

“Your words all converge toward one point; will they not then become manoto- 
nous, and inapposite to the varying wants of various, or even the same individuals?” 

“A monotonous theme!’—this is the reply: ‘What can be more diversified than 
the character and work of Him who is at one time designated as the omniscient God, | 
and at another time as a Mechanic; at one time as a Judge, and at another time as an 
Intercessor; now a Lion, and then a Lamb; here a Vine, a Tree, there a Way, a Door; 
again a Stone, a Rock, still again a Star, a Sun; here without sin, and there He was — 
made sin for us. :: 

‘Monotonous is this theme? Then it is sadly wronged, and the mind of man is 
sadly harmed; for this mind shoots out its tendrils to grasp all the branches of the tree | 
of life, and the tree in its healthy growth has branches to which every sensibility of 
the human mind may cling. The judgment is addressed by the atonement, concerning 
the nature of law, of distributive justice, the mode of expressing this justice either by 
punishing the guilty or by inflicting pain as a substitute for punishment, the influence 
of this substitution on the transgressor, on the surety, on the created universe, on God 
Himself. There is more of profound and even abstruse philosophy involved in the 
specific doctrine of the atonement, than in any other branch of knowledge; and there 
has been or will be more of discussion upon it, than upon all other branches of knowl- 
edge; for sacred science is the most fruitful of all sciences in logical deduction, and 
this specific part of the science is the richest of all its parts. 

‘Not only the judgment, but also the imagination is addressed by the atonement, 
as this is the comprehensive event pointing to those three several hours, the like to 
which have never been heard of, no, nor ever shall be: that first hour, the hour of 
humiliating change, when the Son of God, who had been from the beginning with 
God, gathering in the praises of angels and enjoying the honors of His universal 
reign, on a sudden left the bosom of His Father, and choirs of angels followed far off 
from His train, and heralded to the shepherds His arrival on earth; and that second 
hour, the hour of gloom, when the only begotten Son, smitten of the Father, cried 
out with a loud voice at the heaviness of the blow, and the earth was astonished more 
than when the prophet asked of old: Was the Lord displeased against the rivers? 
Was Thine anger against the rivers? Was Thy wrath against the sea? And that. 


Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King 
of glory shall come in, scarred in His hands and feet and side, but over all His foes 
victorious, and marching from His cross to His throne—and let all the angels of God 
now worship Him! What was the appearance of heaven, how did its hosts look during 
that first hour, when the very light of heaven moved out of its place, and descended 
gracefully like a star to Bethlehem? And what was the solemnity of heaven, what was 
the deed done there, during that second hour, when the first Person withdrew Himself 
from the second Person, and the angels veiled their faces at the unutterable solitude 
of Him who trod the wine-press alone? And what was the festival in the realm of 
joy during that third hour, when its monarch came riding prosperously home, with 
His sword upon His thigh, and all the hearts of the redeemed threw open their doors: 
for His glad entrance—a conqueror, and more than conaueror, welcome, welcome 
to His everlasting rest! At these three scenes, in a life all full of transporting eras, 
the imagination falters, and lingers around them, and loses itself in a strange delight; 
and whether it be in the body or out of the body, it cannot tell. And will you say that 
scenes like these are monotonous?” 4 

“Not so for the poet or the philosopher,” we might reply, “but are they variously 
appropriate for the common mind?” 


stirs tamer tes cE. 


sda 


ls 


The Prominence of the Atonement—Park. 597 


‘The common mind!’—this is the rejoinder. ‘The common mind is reached first 
of all by the Atonement. Those children who cried “hosanna” in’ the temple are yet 
in our eye as pictures of thousands of children, who feel and love the divine attributes 
as they are made plain and well-nigh tangible in Jesus. Simeon and Anna yet stand 
in that same temple as statues representing hundreds of aged saints, who love to read 
the history of their Redeemer when all other letters become illegible, and who can 
hear His voice when all other voices become inaudible, and who grow young again 
as His fresh doctrine rejuvenates their heart. Zaccheus climbing the sycamore still 
remains in our vision as a symbol of many a rich extortioner, who cannot rest until 
he has entertained his Lord, and consecrated the half of his goods to the poor, who 
are to be always with him, reminding him of their Redeemer. That widow weeping 
as she measures her slow steps out of the city, and smiling through her tears as she 
receives her Son healthy from the bier on which He was borne toward the needlessly 
opened tomb, yet continues in our view as a representative of many a mourner relieved 
by His timely charities. Those minstrels who laughed Him to scorn are images of 
millions who despise Him; and then He blesses them, and then with glad voice they 
spread the fame of Him round about; the fame of Him whose mission it is to render 
good for evil, and to be the friend of His foes. If I desire to be soothed, I find 
nowhere such gentleness as at His last supper. If I aim to be stimulated, I find noth- 
ing like His crown of thorns stirring me to duty. If I need to be joyous, whither shall 
I go but to Him, all whose garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia out of the 
ivory palaces, whereby they have made him glad? 

‘The very intimation that the Atonement addresses only one sensibility, and is 
appropriate to only one class of men, in one mood of mind, has now suggested the 
third reason why this doctrine should be the main spring of our inward and outward 
enterprise: It is so flexible and multiform, that it must be apposite to every man in 
every change of character or state; and therefore,’ continues the apostle, ‘I desire to 
make nothing prominent in my inward thought or outward life, except this ever-fitting 
truth of Jesus Christ and Him crucified!’ 

Having now stated three reasons why it is important to make the redemptive 
scheme our main object of interest, let us close this discourse with three brief inquiries 
into the method of giving the desired prominence to this wonderful scheme. 

And, first, were we conversing face to face with the author of our text, when he 
had become Paul the aged and the counsellor, we might ask him: 

“In what method shall we resist our natural disinclination to make the grace of 
Christ so conspicuous? Is there not such a disinclination? Will not your hearers, 
will not you yourself, much more, shall not we who have never been caught up to the 
third heaven, feel tempted to elevate self above the redemptive mercy?” 

‘I fear it;'"—this is the reply—I fear it for myself. Many secret misgivings have 
disturbed me. I know the need of watchfulness. But I have a fixed resolve. If any 
man be tempted to find some less humbling theme, I more; circumcized the eighth 
day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews, as 
touching the law a Pharisee (after the most straitest sect I lived a Pharisee), as touch- 
ing the righteousness of the law blameless. Yet I am determined to count all these 
things as loss, that I may win Christ. 

‘You inquire about my hearers. They will prefer to gratify their self-esteem, 
rather than receive the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus. I have tried them again 
and again. I knew the pride of Corinth when I avowed to her citizens: I am deter- 
mined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I knew 
then that Corinth was called, The Wealthy. For more than eighteen months I dwelt 
within her proud walls. I met her glad citizens on the Acrocorinthus, enjoying their 
magnificent scenery. I saw them going down the marble steps of their fountain 


598 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Peirene, where their famed Pegasus, as they believed, was caught by Bellerophon. Vg 
visited their stadium, and I drew one of my illustrations from it. I looked in upon & 
their theatre, and was moved by it to exclaim: We are become a theatre to the world, 
to angels, to men. I beheld the gay throngs at the Corinthian Amphitheatre, that ; 
edifice so massive that the remains of it, as also of their stadium and their theatre, — 
are yet to be seen, aid long alter your dying day will be visited and admired by your ~ 
own countrymen. It is true, I did feel often that those votaries of pleasure would — 
look upon my preaching of the cross as foolishness in comparison with their rounds. % 
of festivity. But none of these things moved me. I was not ashamed of the Gospel i 
of Christ. I had a fixed plan. I wrote from Corinth to the very capita. of the world: i 
So much as in me is, I am ready to preach the Gospel to you who are at Rome also. — 
Wherever I went, I knew that bonds and imprisonment awaited me for my chief theme 
of discourse, yet I was determined to confer not with flesh and blood; for I said: A { 
necessity is upon me; yea, woe is me if I preach not the Gospel of Christ even in them a 
palaces of Corinth and of Rome. And if my steadfast resolution helped me to resist 
my own and my hearers’ pride in the brilliant cities of the East, then your set resolve — ‘ 
will nerve you anywhere, everywhere, to the same humbling service. 4 

‘Here, then, is the first method in which you may keep up the habit of making 
Jesus and Him crucified, the soul of all your activity: Bring to your help the force of 
a resolute determination. There is a tendency in this resolute spirit to divert your 
thoughts from other themes, to turn the current of your sensibilities into the right | 
channel, to invigorate your choice, to exert a direct and reflex influence in confirming — 
the whole soul in Jesus. God is in that determination. He inspires it. He invigorates - 4 
it. He works with it and by it. There is a power in it, ee the power is not yours 
it is the power of God. God is in every holy resolve of man.’ oe: 

In our interview with the apostle we should address to him a second inquiry: 3 

“Tn what method can we avoid both the fact and the appearance of being slavishly 7 
coerced into the habit of conversing on Christ and on Christ alone? You speak of 
taking your stand, adhering to your decision; but this dry, stiff resolve—comes any — 
genial spirit from it? Will you not be a slave to your unswerving purpose? Your ? 
inflexible rule—will it not be a hard one, wearisome to yourself, disagreeable to others? 
You hold up a weighty theme by a dead lift.” 

‘I am determined’—this is the reply—‘and it is not only a strong, but it is a loving — 
resolve. For the love of Christ constraineth me; whom having not seen in the flesh 
I love; in whom, though now I see him not, yet believing, I rejoice with joy unspeak- _ 
able and full of glory. It is not a business-like eeolatnel It is not a diplomatic © 
purpose. It is not a mechanical force. It is an affectionate decision. It is a joyous 
rule. It is the effluence of a supreme attachment to the Redeemer. 

‘And this is the second method in which you may retain Jesus Christ as the jewel 
of your speech and life: Cherish a loving purpose to do so. A man has strength to — 
accomplish what with a full soul he longs to accomplish. Your Christian toil will be 
irksome to you, if it be not your cordial preference; but if your undeviating resolve 
spring out of a hearty choice of your Savior, then will it be ever refreshed and 
enlivened by your outflowing, genial preference; then will your pious work be the 
repose of your soul. There is a power in your love to your work. It is a power to 
make your labor easy for yourself and attractive to others. This is not your power; 
it is the power of God. He enkindles the love within you. He enlivens it. He gives 

“it warmth. He makes it instinct with energy. God is in all the holy joy of man,’ 

In our conference with the author of our text we might suggest to him our third 
and last inquiry: 

“Tn what method can we feel sure of persevering in this habitual exaltation of 
Christ? You speak of your stern purpose, but can you depend upon the continuance 


The Prominence of the Atonement—Park. 599 


of it? You speak of your cordial as well as set resolve. But who are you? (forgive 
our pertinacious query.) Jesus we know. But His disciples, His chief apostles—is 
not every one of them a reed shaken with the wind, tossed hither and thither, unstable 
as a wave upon the sea?” 

‘I know it is so’—this is the reply. ‘Often am I afraid lest, having preached the 
Gospel to others, I should be a castaway. And after all I am persuaded that nothing— 
height, depth, life, death, nothing shall be able to separate me from the love of Christ; 
- for I put my confidence in Him, and while my purpose is inflexible and affectionate, it 
is also inwrought with trust in the atonement and the intercession. I do pursue my 
Christian life in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. For all the piety of the 
best of men is in itself as grass, and the goodliness thereof as the flower of the field. 
Therefore serve I the Lord with all humility of mind and with many tears and 
temptations. Yet I am determined with a confiding love. I am troubled on every 
side; my flesh has no rest; without are fightings, within are fears; in presence I am 
base among you, my bodily presence is weak and my speech contemptible; and if I 
must needs glory, I will glory in the things which concern my infirmities. Still, after 
all, I am determined, my right hand being enfolded in the hand of my Redeemer. I 
know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I 
have committed unto Him against that day. For my conversation is in heaven, from 

_ whence I am to look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile 
body that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty 
working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself. I say the truth in 
Christ; I lie not; I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an 
apostle, because I injured the church of God; I am less than the least of all saints. 
Still I am determined; for by the grace of God I am what I am; and this grace which 
was bestowed upon me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than they all; 


yet not I but the grace of God which was with me; for I can do al! things through 
Christ which strengtheneth me, and therefore I am determined. 


‘Borne onward, therefore, by your fixed plan, and no one can succeed in anything 
without a plan, yet you must never rely ultimately upon your determined spirit. 
Allured further and further onward by your delight in your plan, and no one can work 
as a master in anything without enthusiasm in his prescribed course, still you must 
‘not place your final dependence upon your affectionate spirit; for if you take, for your 
last prop, either the sternness or the cheerfulness of your own determination, then 
~ you will know your determination, and you are not to know anything save Jesus Christ 
and Him crucified. Here, then, is the third method in which you may give the fitting 
prominence to the best of themes: You must rest for your chief and final support on 
_ Him and only on Him, from whom all wise plans start, by whom they all hold out, 
_ to whom they all tend, who is all and in all, Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’ 

My Christian brethren, you are all apostles. Every man, every woman, every 
_ child, the richest and the poorest, the most learned and the mostaignorant of you—who 
_ have come up hither to dedicate yourselves and this sanctuary* to your Lord, all 
being sent of Him to serve Him, have in fact and in essence the same responsibility 
_festing on you as weighed on the author of our text. And he was burdened by the 
‘same kind of temptations and fears which oppress your spirit. But he was held up 
om failing in his work by a three-fold cord; and that was his resolute determina~ 
tion, as loving as it was resolute, and as trustful as it was loving, to know nothing save 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The last that you hear of him as an impenitent man 
wis in the words: “And Saul, yet breathing out threatening and slaughter against the 
4 disciples of the Lord.” It was Christ whom the proud Jew last opposed. The first 
that you hear of him as a convicted man is in the words: “Who art thou, Lord?” It 
; *This sermon was preached at the dedication of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, April 24, 


’ Him, speaking of Him, loving Him first, and last, and midst, and without end. 


600 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


was Christ whom the inquiring Jew first studied. And the first that you hear of 
as a penitent man is: ‘‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” It was Christ to who 
the humble disciple first surrendered his will. And the first that you hear of hima 
Christian minister is: “And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues that He 
is the Son of God.” And the last that you hear of him as a Christian hero is: “I have 
fought the good fight, I have finished my course. I have kept the faith; henceforth 
there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” And the secret of this victorious 
career is in words like those of our text: “I adhered to my plan (when among he 
fickle Corinthians), I was decided (when among the vacillating Galatians), to know 
nothing (when among the learned at Athens and them of Czsar’s household at 
Rome); save Jesus Christ (when I was among my own kinsmen who scorned Him) 
and Him crucified (when I was among the pupils of Gamaliel, all of whom despise¢ 
my chosen theme; still I was determined to cling to that theme among the Greek 
and the Barbarians, before Onesimus the slave and Philemen the proud master; for 
loved my theme, and, suffering according to the will of God, I committed the keeping 
of my soul to Him in well-doing as unto a faithful Creator.” a i 

And herein is it to be your plan, my brethren, and your joy, not to make thi 
sanctuary the resort of wealth and of fashion, but rather of humble suppliants, who b; 
their prayers may divert all the wealth and fashion of the world into the service of you 
Lord; not to make this temple ‘the resting place of hearers who shall idly listen : 
the words of an orator, but a temple of earnest co-workers with Christ—thinking | 


you come to this house of God on the Sabbath, as you go from it, as your week day 
recollections gather around it, may you renew and confirm your plan to know your 
Redeemer, and not only to know Him, but—who is sufficient for these things?—not te 
know any thing save your Redeemer; and not only to shut yourselves up to the 
supreme love of nothing except Christ, but also—His grace will be sufficient for yo 
to worship and serve Christ in the central relation of Him crucified. Knowing EF 
alone, He will sustain you as fully as if He knew you alone. He will come to you 
this temple as frequently as if He had no other servants to befriend. He will listen 
your prayers as intently as if no supplications came up to Him from other altars, 
He will intercede for you as entirely as if He interceded in behalf of no one else; 
remember, that when He hung upon the cross, He thought of you, and died for 

just as fully as if He had been determined to think of no one, and to die for no 0 
save you, whom He now calls to the solemn service of consecrating your own souls 
and your “holy and beautiful house” to the glory of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 


[Edwards A. Park was born at Providence, R. L., December 29, 1808, and died 
in 1900. He received his education at Brown University and Andover Theologica 
Seminary; degree of D: D. from Harvard in 1844. After two years’ pastorate in 
Braintree, Mass., he became professor at Amherst, occupying the chair of Christian 
theology from 1847 to 1881, and emeritus professor to the time of his death, Andoy 
Seminary. He founded and was editor for forty years of Bibliotheca Sacra. I 
addition to his theological writings on the Atonement, etc., he wrote a number of 
biographies. It is said he once had a conversation with a German philosopher, 
incognito, and after he had tangled him up the gentleman cried out: “Either you are 
the devil or Professor Park.” phi 

This sermon is from The Gospel Invitation, published in Boston some years 
since. | BY 


A WORD IN SEASON TO HIM THAT 
IS WEARY. 


JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. 


“The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned that I should know how 
‘to speak a word in season to him that is weary.”—Isaiah 1: 4. 

_- Shall I be very far wrong in my estimate if I take you to be as I myself often am, 
‘all weary? Probably there are some young hearts here who will hardly allow: them- 
s Ives to be included in that somewhat mournful estimate, but I think I am speaking 
along the line of fact, and actual and most painful experience, when I assume that 
Nine men out of every ten in this great multitude know personally, humblingly, the 
‘meaning of the word weary. Some are weary of labor, some are weary of waiting— 
weary of suffering, weary of the cruel pain that never ceases to gnaw the poor heart. 
Just in proportion as ‘you understand the meaning of the term “weary” and all that it 
implies you will enter into the poetry, the genius, the divinity of this exquisite text, 
“The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned that I should know how to 
speak a word in season to him that is weary.” 

_ -The power of speaking to the weary is, then, according to this text, nothing less 
than a divine gift. As you see the divinity in your gifts will you be careful of them, 
x thankful for them: every gift seems to enshrine the giver, God. But how extraordi- 
ary that this power of speaking to the weary should not be taught in the schools! It 
S$ not within the ability of man to teach other men how to speak to the weary-hearted, 
_ the wounded in spirit, the sore in the innermost feelings of the being. But can we 
"Tay down directions about this and offer suggestions? Probably so, but you do not 
touch the core of the matter. There is an infinite difference between the scholar and 
the genius. The scholar is made, the genius is inspired. Information can be imparted, 
but the true sense, the sense that feels and sees God, is a giit direct from heaven. 

It is a common notion that anybody can sing. Why can yousing? Why, because 
Thave been taught. That is your mistake. You can sing mechanically, exactly, prop- 
erly, with right time, right tune, but really and truly you cannot sing. Here is a man 
With his notes and with the words, and the same hearers exclaim, “Oh, that he would 
go on forever!”” How is that?—the words exactly the same, the notes identical—how? 
Soul, fire, ever burning, never consuming, making a bush like a planet. The great 
difficulty in all such cases is the difficulty of transferring to paper a proper or adequate 
conception of the power of the men who thus sway the human heart. There are some 
men whose biographies*simply belie them, and yet every sentence in the biography is 
true in the letter; but the biography is little else than a travesty and a caricature, 
ause the power was personal-—it was in the face. in the voice, in the presence, in the 
gait, in the touch—an incommunicable power; the hem of the garment trembled under 


It is a common notion that any man can visit the sick. Let me tell you that very 
‘dew ministers can enter a sick chamber with any probability of doing real and lasting 
good, They can read the Bible and they can pray, and yet, when they have gone, the 
_ room seems as if they had never been there. There is no sense of emptiness or desola- 
_ tion. Other men, probably not so much gifted in some directions, will enter the sick 

‘room, and there will be a light upon the wall, summer will gleam upon the window- 


602 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


pane, and angels will rustle gently in the air, and it will be a scene of gladness and 
vision of triumph. How is that? The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the 
learned that I might know how—how to speak a word in season to him that is we 
The Lord God hath not only given me a word to say, but He hath given me learning 
teach me how to speak it. Place the emphasis upon the how, and then you develo 
all the mystery, all the tender music, all the infinite capacity of manner. a 
You may say the right word in the wrong tone, you may preach the gospel as if 
it were a curse. The common notion is that anybody can go into the Sunday School 
and teach the young. I fanoy that it would be well if a great many persons left the 
Sunday School all over the world. Teach the young—I would God I had that great 
gift, to break the bread for the children, and to be able to lure and captivate opening 
minds, and to enter into the spirit of the words— 7 
Delightiul task, to rear the tender thought, 
To teach the young idea how to shoot. 5 


Why, it requires to be father and mother and sister and nurse and genius to speak 
the young. They may hear you and not care for you; they may understand your 
words and be repelled by your spirit. You require the tongue of the learned to know 
how to speak, and that tongue of the learned is not to be had at school, college 
university—it is not included in any curriculum of learning; it is a gift divine, breath- 
ing an afflatus, an inspiration—the direct and distinct creation of God, as is the star 
the sun. a 

The speaker, then, is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the representative of the 
Father, the incarnate Deity. He it is who is charged with the subtle learning, He it 
is whose lips tremble with the pathos of this ineffable music. , 

Though the gift itself is divine, you must remember that it is to be exercisec 
seasonably. The text is, “That I should know how to speak a word in season.” 
There is a time for everything. It is not enough to speak the right word; you musi 
speak it at the right moment. Who can know when that is? You cannot be taught. 
You must feel it, see it hours beyond; nay, you must know when to be silent for 
whole twenty-four hours, and to say to yourself, “Tomorrow, at such and such a time, 
I will drop that sentence upon his listening ear.” “The day after tomorrow he will 
probably be in circumstances to admit of this communication being delivered with 
sympathy and effect.” How few persons know the right time—the right time in con- 
versation! Some people are never heard in conversation, though they are talking all 
the time. They talk so unreasonably, they talk when other people are talking, they 
can not wait, they do not know how to come in along the fine line of silence; they 
do not understand the German expression, “Now an angel has passed,” and they do 
not quickly enough follow in his wake. Consequently, though chattering much, they 
are saying nothing—though their words be multitudinous, the impression they make 
is a blank. . é 

I have aripe seed in my hand. As an agriculturist I am going to sow it tonight. 
And any laborer in the field can tell me that I should be acting foolishly in sowing it 
just now. Why? “It is out of season,” the man says. “There is a time for the doing 
of that action; I will tell you when the time returns—do it then, and you may expect 
a profitable result of your labor.” 

Then I will change my character and be a nurse, and I will attend to my patient 
(perhaps I will over-attend to him—some patients are killed by over-nursing), and I 
will give the patient this medicine—it is the right medicine. So it is, but you are 
going to give it at the wrong time; and if you give the medicine at the wrong time, 
though itself be right, the hour being wrong, you shall bring suffering upon the 
patient, and you yourself shall be involved in pains and penalties. Thus we touch the 
very subtle and sensitive line in human life—the line of refined discrimination. You 


(oO 


A Word in Season to Him that is Weary—Parker. 603, 
“may say, “I am sure I told him.” You are right—you did tell him, and he did not 
hear you. You may reply, “I am perfectly confident I delivered the message—I 
reached the exact words of the gospel.’’ So you did, but you never got the hearing 
eart, your manner was so unsympathetic, so ungentle, so cruel (not meant to be 
consciously so), that the man never understood it to be a gospel. You spoiled the 
sic in the delivery, in the giving of the message. The Lord giveth the tongue of 
e learned that he to whom it is given may know how to speak—how to speak the 
right word—how to speak the right word at the right point of time. You want divine 
; aching in all things, in speech not least. 

Why, this is a curious word to find in the Bible. Does the Bible care about weary 
ople? We have next to no sympathy with them. If a man be weary, we give him 
iotice to quit; if he ask us to what place he can retire, we tell him that is his business, 
‘not ours. Now, the tenderness of this Book is to me one of the most telling, convine- 
‘ing arguments on behalf of the inspiration and its divine authority. This Book means 
‘to help us, wants to help us, says “I will try to help you, never hinder you; I will wait 
r you; I will soften the wind into a whisper; I will order the thunder to be silent; 
| I will quiet the raging sea; I will wait upon you at home, in solitude, at midnight, 
anywhere—fix the place, the time, yourself, and when your heart most needs me I will 
be most to your heart.” Any book, found in den, in gutter, that wants to do this 
‘should be received with respect. The purpose is good; if it fail, it fails in a noble 
“object. 

___ Everywhere in this Book of God I find a supreme wish to help me. When I most 
need help the words are sweeter than the honeycomb. When other books are dumb, 
‘this Book speaks most sweetly to me. It is like a star—it shines in the darkness, it 
“waits the going down of the superficial sun of my transient prosperity, and then it 

‘breaks upon me as the shadows thicken. This is the real greatness of God: He will 
‘not break the bruised reed. I have reminded you before that because the reed is 
bruised, therefore the rude man says he may break it. His argument in brief is this: 

“Tf the reed were strong, I should not touch it, but seeing that it is bruised, what harm 

can there be in completing the wound under which it is already suffering? I will even 

‘snap it and throw the sundered parts away.” This is the reasoning of the rude man— 

that is the vulgar view of the case. The idea of healing is the idea of a creator. To 
“destroy is the work of the brute beast; to gather up the poor little wounded child, and 
i it to a motherly breast, is a bit of God. That instinct comes out of the Creator; 

He who creates also heals. Herein we see God's estimate of human nature; if He 
cared only for the great, the splendid, the magnificent, the robust and the everlasting, 
why then He would indeed be too like ourselves. The greatness of God and the 
estimate which He places upon human nature are most seen in all these ministrations 
‘in reference to the weak and the weary and the young and the feeble and the sad. 
“Made originally in the image of God, man is dear to his Maker, though ever so 
broken. Oh! poor prodigal soul, with the divinity nearly broken out of thee, smashed, 

bleeding, crushed, all but completely damned and in hell—while there is a shadow of 

ee outside perdition, He would heal thee and save thee. Thou art a ruin, but a 
grand one—the majestic ruin of a majestic edifice, for knowest thou not that thou 
wast the temple of God? 

_ When I am weary, even in my weariness God sees the possibility of greatness that 
May yet take place and be developed and supervene in immortality. How do we talk? 
Thus: “The survival of the fittest.’ It is amazing with what patience and mag- 
Nanimity and majestic disregard of circumstances we allow people to die off. When 
we hear that a million of them have perished, we write this epitaph on their white slate 


- 


tombstones: “The survival of the fittest required the decay of the weakest and the 
poorest.” We pick off the fruit which we think will not come to much. The gardener 


be 


ja 


604 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 
lays his finger and thumb upon the tree, and he says, “This will not come to muc hrs 
he wrenches the poor, unpromising piece of fruit off the twig and throws it down a 
useless. In our march we leave the sick and wounded behind. That is the great littl 
the majestic, insignificant, the human contradiction. We go in for things that ai 
fittest, strongest, most promising, healthy, self-complete, and therein we think we ar 
wise. God says, “Not a lamb must be left out—bring it up; not a sick man must be 
omitted; not a poor publican sobbing his “God be merciful to me a sinner’ must 
omitted from the great host. Bring them all in, sick, weary, wounded, feeble, young 
illiterate, poor, insignificant, without name, fame, station, force—all in; gather up t 
fragments that nothing be lost.” I will go to that Shepherd—He will spare me ane 
love me. When my poor strength gives out, He will not set His cruel heel upon n 
neck and kill me; He will gather me up in His arms, and make the whole flock stan 
still till He has saved His weakest one. 
Oh! poor worn heart, didst thou but know the name for thy pain, thou woulds 

call it sin. What dost thou need, then, but Christ the Son of God, the Heart of Go 
the love of God. He will in every deed give thee rest. He will not add to the gre 
weight which bows down thy poor strength; He will give thee grace, and in Hi 
power all thy faintness shall be thought of no more. Poor soul, I can well feel fo 
thee, for I know how dark it is when the full shadow of our sin falls upon our life, 1 
I know how all the help of earth and time and man does but mock the pain it canne 

reach. Say not that Christ will not go so low down as to find one so base and vi 

as thou; I heard Him calling for thee; I heard His sweet voice lift itself up in the wi 

wind and ask whither thou hadst fied, that He might save thee from death and brin 

thee home. My yearning, silent one, I see thine upstarting tear, and I know what 

means, for I too, have had baptism of that same dew. My life, for it, if it be 

every whit the very truth of God, that Christ wants thee, and will save thee. I will g 

with thee, step by step, as far as man may go, for I have been there before and OY 

the way of Christ with men. There is no wrath in His face or voice, no sword 

swung by His hand as in cruel joy, saying, “Now at last I have my chance with ou. 

His eyes gleam with love; His voice melts in pity; His words are gospels, every on 

Let Him but see thee sad for sin, full of grief because of the wrong thou hast don 

and He will raise thee out of the deep pit and set thy feet upon the rock. I wait f 

thee, poor, poor soul, that we may go hand and hand to Christ this night. Iho 


knowest that I am no fierce preacher of malediction and curse upon the poor tremblit 
penitent. I search my heart for tender speech, for gentle word, and I ask heaven | 
bless me with the gift of the persuasive tone, that I may call thee by name, sweetly z 
a mother might call a runaway child back to her side. Say, poor black soul, 
stains upon thee like wounds, say, “I will arise and go to my Father.” I cannot 
How can I? Try: the saying of it will do thee good. Oh, if I could get som 
throats so to open as to express this prayer, “God be merciful to me a sine 
very cpening of the throat, the very opening of the lips would do that soul good. TI 
saying of it will be like the first breath of the spring wind, melting the bands of fro 
and bringing up flowers and birds—flowers that cannot die, birds that bring their ow 
light with them. 

Many a time I should have sunk right down without hope of rising again but fe 
this sweet couplet— 

“Christ is strong to deliver and good to redeem 
The weakest believer that hangs upon Him.” 

I am not triumphant always, sometimes much broken, and the darkness is rout 
about me like three-fold, seven-fold night. God I have none, nor Christ, nor hog 
nor heaven—nothing but a memory black as the darkest night. What can I do, the 
but remember that the Bible was made for the weary, and the poor, and the sick, a! 


A Word in Season to Him That is Weary—Parker. 605 


the lame, and the halt and the blind, and the maimed—for the infirm, for those that 
have no friend and no helper; a book for the wilderness, not for the garden. You 
know you will fall back again if you do come? Well, still come. Do we not all 
I] back? 
“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, 

Prone to leave the God I love; 

Take my heart, Lord, take and seal it, 
Seal it for thy courts above.” 


What said He? He said, “If my brother turn again, saying, I repent, forgive him, 
even until seventy times seven.” If He laid down that measure for us, what must be 
the measure of His own pardoning mercy? I want victory tonight, surrender-on the 
_ part of human hearts. If I could take thee, sinner, with me now, I should feel like a 
king who has won his last battle, and thou wouldst feel like a slave breathing the first 
breath of the living air of liberty. 


[Joseph Parker, D.D., was born at Hexham-on-Tyne, April 9, 1830. He was 
educated at private schools and University College, London. He was Independent 
n inister at Banbury, Oxford, 1853-58; Cavendish Chapel, Manchester, 1858-69; and 
City Temple, London, from 1869 to present. His literary work is prodigious; his 
People’s Bible and Pulpit Bible alone would have been a great life work, but his other 
volumes represent as much more, 

This sermon is from the Complete Preacher, and it was preached in the City 
Temple, London, in 1877.] 


606 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


EVERY ONE THAT LOVETH. 


CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. 


“Every one that loveth is born of God.”—I John 4: 7. 


In the midst of all the preaching that is being done, and all the efforts along tha 
and kindred lines that are being put forth, we cannot keep too distinctly shaped before 
our mind the object toward which we are laboring, the particular result we are attempt- 
ing to see realized. Now what is that result? Here is a church: what does it stand for? 
What is the meaning of it? You are a Christian. If so you-are trying to make your 
Christianity tell; tell in what way? Tell upon yourself in what way? Tell upon others 
in what way? What is Christianity for? Paul says that the Gospel is the power of 
God; power exercised for what purpose? We should know how to answer such < 
question as that. Even the children ought to know how to answer it. 

And it is not enough to be able to answer it, unless at the same time the answer 
means so much to us and is such a present factor in our Christian doing, as to give 
shape and direction to our doing. You stand before a manufactory and see printed 
upon its front in large showy letters, ‘“Carpet Manufactory.” But suppose that after 
you have gotten through the door and into the midst of tie operatives you ask one 
of them, ‘““What are you weaving here?” and the hesitant reply should come back to 
you, “Well, I don’t know as I could tell you exactly what I am weaving.” A pheno- 
menal grade of tapestry such operatives would turn out, and every bale of product 
delivered at the rear door would probably give the lie to the sign emblazoned over 
the front door. There would probably not a great deal come out of the rear door any - 
way, and what did come it would be difficult to tag in a way to make it intelligible to 
the general market. * 

Now the Church, a church is, or is presumably, a kind of manufactory, that is, it 
exists for the purpose of yielding some form of product. And it is as evident as it needs 
to be that only a few peoplc, comparatively, have any simple and distinct idea what that 
product is. That is shown in the fact that so many, who are as good Christians as 
any here, do not care to associate themselves with the Church. The meaning of 
Church is not so clearly felt by its members and therefore is not made so apparent by 
its members, as to lead outsiders to care to become identified with it or be made 
responsible for it. You do not need to have it pointed out to you what a contrast there 
is between that and the agencies that are operating to turn out material products. And 
if you see an ordinary manufacturing corporation that knows what it is doing and that 
is turning out a first rate article of its kind, and an article that lists well in the market, 
you are glad to invest in its stock and become part of the concern. ‘ 

That is why so many have disposed of the stock that they held a few years ago in 
the Presbyterian Church. While some were doing their best to make it contoraa 
and prontable for Christians to come into the Presbyterian Church, others were work-— 
ing a good deal harder to make it uncomfortable and unprofitable for them to stay 
there, and between the two sets of performance an impression of miscellaneousness . 
was left upon the mind that has been a great godsend to the Episcopal Church and 
that has established for it a sort of position of ecclesiastical retreat. 

But Presbyterianism has by no means the monopoly of this kind of thing, for in 


‘the old days, at least, Anglicanism used to be a hundred times worse than American 


eS a 


Every One that Loveth—Parkhurst. 607 


ir even New York Presbyterianism has ever been. And in your reading of Church 


an acute and intelligible purpose toward which the aims of the Church at large 
rere directed. Sometimes one part of the Church would be doing one thing and 
mother part another and a contradictory thing; and sometimes no part would be doing 
anything to speak of. At one date one branch of the Church would be making saints, 
ad another would be boiling and broiling them. One bishop spending his life translat- 
ing the Bible, another tinkering creeds, a third hoarding ducats, a fourth working the 
tack and kindling the fires at Smithfield. And it is this working at cross-purposes and 
his constant production of contradictory results (that cancel each other) that accounts 
for the slow gains that the Church makes in the world. The Church grew fast enough 
‘s0 long as it could be said of its members what is related in the fourth of Acts, that 
‘the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul.” 

_ Coming back to our question, we might say that the commodity that Christianity 
} intended to produce in the world is character. “Character,” however, is an uninter- 
ing word, too abstract to impress the mind, too juiceless to saturate the mind, and 
is not a Bible word, at least I do not find it in my concordance. It is a little 
gular, at first thought, that such a teacher as Jesus or as Paul should not have had 
asion to use the word. But there is a certain warmth about Bible terms, and there 
s none of that about the word “character,” any more than there is about that phrase 
vA thical culture.” To talk to a child about character would probably produce upon 


theorem or logarithms. It is one of those terms that mean so much and in such an 
“unparticularized way that the intelligence does not take kindly to it nor the heart 
snuggle up to it. 
_ We might well substitute, then, by saying that Christianity aims to make human 
hearts as much like God’s heart as possible, and when I say ‘“‘God’s heart” I mean 
for it is in Him that we see what God’s heart is. It is sufficiently orthodox for 
practical purposes to say that Christ is God's heart uncovered to us. Christ did 
‘not come to let us understand all that God knows, but to let us understand as far ag 
‘possible what God feels, and the heart is the place in man or God where the feelings 
ubsist and move. 

It will be proper then to say that the thing Christianity is here to do is to make 
en right in their feelings. It may not always make people wise; it may not give 
lem correct understanding of things, nor attempt to. That quality of heart that 
Christianity aims to induce is something that correct understanding has almost 
nothing to do with. You know how much a child can love his mother without under- 
: tanding his mother, without having ever in any way thought nicely and accurately 
about her. Indeed it is his love for her that helps him to understand her a great deal 
‘More than it is his understanding of her that makes him love her. 

4 But all I wanted to say just now was that Christianity does its work for us in that 
art of us where we keep our feelings, our sentiments, our loves. We want to be 
-like, and we are if our loves are like God’s loves. It is important that we realize 
t what that is in us that Christianity is concerned with. Bible and Holy Spirit are 
cerned only to have us feel right. It is not mind that needs to be converted, nor 
Y, nor actions, nor pocket. We sometimes say of a man that his pocket is con- 
ed, meaning by it that he has become generous. Such expressions are well enough 
a way, but they do not mean a great deal and what little they seem to mean is not 
te true. The only thing that can be converted is the heart, that part of us where 
he impulses spring, the place where we keep our affections and hatreds, loyalties and 
ousies; in a word, our feelings. So we might, in rather a random way, say of a 
tan who was an atheist and has become a Christian, that his mind, his brain, is con- 


608 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


verted. Probably it is a suspicion that something of that kind takes place that leeds 
us so often to try by some argumentative process or other to change the workings ) 
a man’s brain and to create a little revival of religion all on the inside of his cranium. 
We have all done that, and then after reasoning with our man for half a day, have been 
surprised to find that he is just where he was to commence with. Christianity doe 
not work directly upon a man’s brain to change the character of its conclusions an 
more than it will work directly upon a man’s body to correct its temperature or 
improve its digestion. If a man’s heart is right, that is, if its impulses are like t 
impulses of Jesus Christ, his purse will be right and his thinking will be correct, so far 
as there is any religious necessity for its being correct. 

My intent in all this is to keep our thoughts upon that one place in us upon whic 
everything else depends. We have got to be agreed as to the spot at which our wor 
is to be put. I am not authorized to say that a certain amount of Bible truth 
judiciously presented may not be necessary in order that the heart itself may be 
reached and Christlike impulses started, but that is not for the sake of the truth or f 
the Bible in itself considered. Considered in its purely religious and Christian refer 
ences, Bible truth, though it come directly from God, is worth only what it will doi 
making the heart right, in making our loves like Christ’s love, in making us have th 
feelings that God has. If we feel as He does we shall do as He does, that is, to th 
extent that our finiteness admits of our doing. A man does not act according to hi 
opinions, but he does act according to his loves. Knowing that a thing is the right 
thing to do will not make a man do it. We act counter to our best judgment an 
distinct conscience every day we live. But loving the thing that is right will guarante 
our doing it. ‘The issues of life are from the heart.” That is the fundamental fac 
in the matter and was understood by candid and wise men thousands of years ago. 3 

If there were any other way by which a man could become perfect in his feelings 
and absolutely Christlike in his loves besides using the Gospel and preaching Jesus 
Christ, then we might throw away the Bible and dispense with Jesus Christ. I do not 
know of any other way; and certainly, if the question be subjected to the test of 
history, it is something to which we should all agree, I am sure that the sweetness 
and Christlikeness that were in men before Christ came is hardly to be mentioned by 
the side of the like qualities evinced since He came. At the same time it wants to be 
understood that Christ's Gospel is for the sake of man and not man for 
the sake of Christ’s Gospel. The importance of the Gospel in its relations to us is 
not in what it is, but in what it can do, in what it can do for us, and in what it can. 
do for us in the way of making our feelings right and our loves like Christ’s loves. It 
is like the medical appliances employed by the physician. Those appliances exist 


- respectively for the producing of specific results. The only real meaning they hava 


for us is their ability to produce those results. So it is with the Bible, for instance. 
Revealed truth is a means chosen by God to cure our hearts of the malady of bad 
impulse, and to make us Godlike—Godlike in what concerns our affections and 
passions. 

So that the amount of truth, even Christian truth, that you have succeeded in 
lodging in your child’s mind, is no indication in itself that you have Christianized your 
child. Your child is a Christian child if he is a Christlike child, and likes and loves 
the things Christ likes and loves; and the Gospel truth you have been able to acquaint 
him with is not something that you can reckon in as a part of his Christianity any 
more than the tonic that a patient swallows is to be counted as part of the patient's 
recuperation. It all turns in the last case on whether the tonic has made the patient 
alive again, and in the first case on whether the Christian truth you have administered 
has made the child’s heart a beautiful heart, bubbling up with holy impulses, passion- 
ate with the sort of affection that Christ’s heart was impassioned with. 


Every One that Loveth—Parkhurst. 609 


In the old days, as we saw a few minutes ago, men did not keep these things 
distinct. Wicked men, men with coarse lives, foul hearts, beastly affections, were not 
hindered thereby from becoming accredited bishops and distinguished cardinals. A 
“man’s heart didn’t count. To be a Christian meant to assent to certain propositions, 
ch as the authority of the Pope, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, acceptance of 
“The Six Articles,” etc. If aman, woman, lad or girl wouldn’t make such subscrip- 
tion, the Church would burn them and commit them to eternal damnation. The fact 
‘that a lad was as holy as a young St. John or a girl as sweet as an angel didn’t signify. 
J And that has been the character of the Church, off and on, ever since a time not 
long subsequent to the departure of Jesus Christ; that is, it has not centered its first 
thought on a beautiful heart, but on something else. The first question it has asked 
ont a man is not, Has he got a heart like the heart of Jesus? but, What does he 
believe? Does he subscribe to the Creed? Is he orthodox?’ I am not making light 
of creeds nor belittling orthodoxy, but all that creeds and orthodoxy are worth is 
what they can do toward making a man to be in his heart what Christ was in his heart, 
and, if they are that, I don’t care whether they get it by being orthodox or by being 
heterodox, by being Lutherans or Wesleyans, by being Calvinists or heretics. The 
_best doctrine is that which does most to make men Godlike, and the best denomina- 
‘tion is the one that will graduate the finest saints and the most of them. 


f 


v 


Now, this idea that Bible truth or Christian doctrine has an importance of its own 
independently of what it can do in the way of making the heart sweet and beautiful, 
‘is an idea that almost all of us have become unconsciously impregnated with. When 
I commence examining a candidate with reference to uniting with the Church, I start 
in by asking him what opinion he holds as to this or that point of Christian doctrine. 
I do not believe in proceeding in that order, but I do all the same. The emphasis of 
the Church has settled down so heavily, and for so long a time, upon the thought side, 
the brain side, of the thing, that almost in spite of ourselves we are swept off our feet 
by the current of usage and tradition. I ought to begin by questioning a candidate 
about his heart, what kind of a heart he has gotten, whether it is a pure one, a tender 
and forgiving one: whether it is like what the Bible tells us God’s heart is. Perhaps 
he can tell me a good deal about the Trinity, but I ought to want more to know about 
his loves, whether he loves others as well as he does himself, and whether those beati- 
tudes that Christ laid down as fundamental in commencing His ministry have become 
in him experimentally a part of his own tone and temper of heart. 


In the last chapter of John is an account of Christ’s examining Peter for the 
ministry. That, of course, was long prior to the adoption of the Thirty-nine Articles, 
so the Lord could not have questioned the candidate upon them. It also antedated 
the sessions of the Westminster Assembly, which relieved Peter from the necessity of 
being quizzed upon any one of the hundred and seven questions of the Catechism. 
There was no New Testament at that time, so that no inquiries could be put to him 
touching its plenary inspiration. There was the Old Testament, though, but even so, 
Christ asked him nothing as to his views of it, whether the days of creation were 
‘twenty-four hours long, whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch, how many Isaiahs 
there were, and whether the Jonah story was historical or mythical. It is along that 
line that examining bodies regularly interrogate their candidates. I am not denying 
that some questions are put to them touching their religious experience, etc., but it is 
understood by ministerial councils in the Congregational Church and by presbyteries 
in our Church, that the examination proper has not really begun till the questioners 
have commenced to grill the candidate on the conundrums of the Bible, and to dis- 
locate his intellectual joints upon the rack of dogmatic theology; and it is the simple 
fact in the case that a man need not in such circumstances be greatly concerned about 
the haziness of his Christian experience and the general condition of his heart, if he 


610 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


can unstammeringly confess to a distinct and certified theology, and is prompt 
answer his interrogators in the way that they want him to answer them. : 
Nor any more did the Lord admit Peter to the ministerial office without an exaft 
nation, and an examination more searching than I ever heard conducted before 
Congregational council or a New York presbytery. As recorded in the last chap 
of John he asked Peter three questions. The first was, “Peter, do you love me 
Peter answered, “Yes.” And the Lord said, “Feed my lambs;” go to preachin 
But the Lord questioned him again, put the second question, but the second questi 
was simply the first question over again, “Peter, do you love me?” Peter said, “Ye 
The Lord said, “Feed my sheep;” go to preaching. But the divine examiner 
not through with His candidate yet. And so He asks him a third question, wh 
however, was only the first question again repeated. “Peter, do you love me?” A 
Peter said, “Yes.” And the Lord added, “Feed my sheep; go to preaching. A 
the candidate was licensed. That is the way Jesus Christ conducted the examinati 
of a candidate for the ministry; and it is no more like the way in which most ce 
temporary bodies conduct examinations than heaven is like—almost any other ple 
It is as though the Lord had said, “Peter, I want to know what kind of a he 
you have got. I want to know the passions that it is filled up with, the intense lo} 
ties with which it is supremely actuated. I want to know whether your heart 
knitted to mine with those ties of a wholesale devotion such that no peril you may 
exposed to will operate to relax those ties; and not only that, but whether the Ie 
that is between us makes us so one with each other that you are become entered i 
the mysteries of my being and so can preach me in a way to make people hear ; 
listen and respond.” 
Now I beg of you to be just enough to what has been spoken not to go away ¢ 
say that I have made light of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy means sound thinking, and 
make light of sound thinking is to make fun of intelligence and to mutiny against 
own brain; but the thing that makes a man a Christian is the love that is in his i 
not the phosphorus that is in his head, and the consummating qualification for 
Christian ministry is Christ-begotten and not school-begotten, 
The trouble is that we have taken the same two elements that existed in Chr 
day, love and wit, but we have reversed them. We are saying that out of the a 
the issues of life. We do not ask, “Do you love?” but “What do you think?” 
tianity ought to be in some measure intelligent, but intelligence isn’t Christianity, 
intelligence about Christian things isn’t Christianity. The supreme fact about bein 
Christian is to have a heart that is full of love to God and man. That is the pe 
upon which the grand emphasis of the Bible falls all the way through. Luther ha 
great, big, warm, loving heart toward God and man, but he never could have b 
ordained as pastor of this church, for he tore out of the Bible the whole Book 
James. But Calvin could have come here, bony, eagle eyed, unlovely and unloy 
Calvin could have come here, even if he were the occasion of sending Servetus 
heaven on a chariot of fire kindled at Champel, a couple of miles out from Genev: 
Now I have said these things because the Christian Church cannot progress 
it comes out distinctly on the higher and sweeter ground. Why, in the old apost 
days the common people loved the Church and flocked into it. People are 
changed, the Church is changed. They would love the Church now if they thot 
the Church was lovely. If hearts were trumps we would win. In Christ’s day | 
was the determining qualification both for the Church and for the ministry. Ev 
thing was fitted up with a lot of doors and they were all open. Now the Church ke 
in its employ men whose distinct function it is to nail up doors. Your heat 
all right, they say, and we love you and all that sort of thing, and shall be gla 


Every One that Loveth—Parkhurst. 61 


leet you in heaven, but we are a little more particular than the Lord is and must 
bid you “‘au revoir” till we meet on the other shore. 
14 Iam not rebelling against orthodoxy, I am not rebelling against Calvinism, 
ie I dislike the word, but I am rebelling against any system that calls itself 
hristian but that makes the principal part of the matter to turn on a hinge that the 
ord never contrived but that He distinctly reprobated both by word and example. 
By all the stress that we properly can upon indoctrination, the final proof and fruit 
of it all is a pure heart and a loving spirit and living sympathy with the mind of Jesus. 
ind if the Church has lost the confidence of the people, as it certainly has, by setting 
tests upon which the Lord never insisted, it will just as certainly recover that 
sonfidence when it comes back distinctly on to Christ’s ground, when it becomes pure 
is Christ is pure, tender as Christ is tender, and when Church life is understood to 
sonsist in the inbreathing of God's Spirit of holiness and loving kindness in order 
hat we may breathe it forth again into the atmosphere of a world that needs not so 
7 ch to be enlightened as to be loved. 
fs {Charles Henry Parkhurst was born at Framingham, Mass., April 17, 1842, and 
pees from Amherst in 1866. He studied theology at Halle and Leipzig for four 
s. He was pastor of the Congregational church at Lennox, Mass., 1874 to 1880, 
and since then pastor of Madison Square Presbyterian church. He became president 
of the society for prevention of crime, and his efforts led to an investigation of the 
olice by the New York legislature. He has published a number of volumes of 
sermons, The Blind Man’s Creed, Three Gates on a Side, etc. 
_ This sermon was preached in the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, Feb. 3, 
(901, and was revised by the author for The Christian Work.] 


~ 


612 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


; ‘BE STRONG.” 


THEOPHILUS PARR, M. A. 


Deut. 31: 6, 7, 23; Joshua 1; 6, 7, 9, 18; Haggai 2: 4; Zech. 8: 9, 13; 
Acts 1:8; Eph. 6: 10. 
There is no foolish tautology in the Bible. The repetition of this phrase h 
significance to which we shall do well to take heed. Observe the places where 
repetitions of this phrase occur and you see that they group themselves at three ef 
in the history of God’s people, namely, the conquest of Canaan, the return from 
Exile, and the establishment of the Christian Church. 
It is this fact that makes the exhortation of special fitness for the present ocee 
We are on the eve of the twentieth century, a century which you young Chri 
Endeavorers may specially call your own. To some of us the greater part of i 
behind. But life is before you in all its possibilities of usefulness and blessing; you 
the grand inheritance. We venture to say that the twentieth century marks an € 
in the history of the Church and the world. 
In the world the nations have been brought more closely together. The a 
of steam and electricity in railways, steamships, and telegraphs has wrought wot 
in this century. Then the development of the power of the press has brough 
thought of the world together. 
With this there has been the remarkable growth of the sentiment of huma 
We say this notwithstanding the painful fact of war now being waged; for neve 
the misery of war been so vividly realized by the community as in this one. It 
social life the better treatment of the sick, the weak, and the poor indicates the pro; 
in the minds of men of the principles of Christ. : ; 
Inside the Church the signs are clearer still. By the Church we mean the 
company of followers of Christ, in every denomination and of every nation, wh 
in living union with their living Lord. These are coming together and manifestin 
real unity of their common life in Him. To change the metaphor, the great ar 
the Church of God at the bidding of this Commander-in-Chief is being mobilized. 
units are brought together, the regiments are wheeling into line, and the vast 
has been brought into readiness for action. 
As surely as the providence of God prepared the way for the people of Isr: 
take possession of Canaan, as surely as the hand of God prepared the wa 
the re-possession of Palestine by the Jews returning from the Exile. as sure 
the world was prepared for the advent of Christianity, and the Church of Gor 
fitted by the baptism of Pentecost to take possession of the world for Christ, so‘ 
this nineteenth century has been one of preparation, and the call of God comes 1 
Church to set up the Kingdom of God amongst men. For this the exhortat 
given with renewed force—‘Be strong in the Lord.” ! 
Not the least of the signs is that there is a clearer perception amongst Us | 
real work of the Church. 
THE CHURCH NOT AN EMIGRATION SOCIETY. 
The old idea largely prevailing years ago was that we were a great emig 
society, whose mission was to proclaim the glories of the heavenly world, and I 
grace of God to prepare men for it. 


Be Strong—Parr. 613 


v ‘e do not minimize the value of the hope of heaven. It cheers us along the path 
It sheds a glory on the struggle and the toil. But our read work is here. The 
of our Christ is to set up His kingdom on earth, and to rid the world of 


kly we can emigrate to a happier sphere, but to labor and to strive to make the 
il emigrate to his own place, and let Christ have His own. 

Ve do not shut our eyes to the greatness of the task before us. It means largely 
ansformation of the government of the world. How powerful are the vested 
s of evil, and how governments may be influenced by them, is seen continually. 


so small a measure of reform as the protection of young children from part of 
¢ temptations of the drink traffic, Christian men may well take heed. We may do a 
tle by our votes, but our great work is to change the voters of the community. 
nie y must be transformed, which means in the ultimate that human nature is ‘to 

ransformed. There are giants to be conquered, great walled cities to be taken. 
ii may He say, “Be strong.” From anyone else the command would be a mockery, 
our natural strength is small. But He who gives the order gives the power to 
ite it. He is the Creator, the Regenerator, the Inspirer of the souls of men. 


WHERE SCIENCE IS IMPOTENT. 
The work is pre-eminently one for spiritual power. Mere intellectual strength by 
li is as helpless as physical. Place the mightiest of our men of intellect, the most 
‘ned of our men of science, before a poor outcast of the slums, and bid them 
siorm that poor creature into a man and make him what God would have him to 
and they would be as helpless as the cleverest doctor by the side of a corpse. It is 
ritual change that is to be wrought, and this requires spiritual power. The 
ength, then, by which we are to work is that of spiritual life—life that has its origin 
ist, and that He promises to give to us. The keywords of physical strength in 
gin and development are health, diet, exercise and judgment. So in the spiritual 
the first requirement is health. 


PURITY IS POWER. 


sligion, the heart must be clear of sin. We must commence right here. The first 
of the Holy Spirit, whose power is vouchsafed to us by the promise of the Lord, 
renew the soul in holiness. For this there must be on our part a full surrender 
im. Many here can testify with abounding thankfulness that we have some 
ure of the Spirit, we have realized somewhat of His blessed influence, but we 
more, we earnestly desire the fulness of power. That fulness is promised unto us. 
go everything of self and sin, and by faith do ye receive the Holy Ghost. The 
rd “receive” might even be better rendered “take.” The Spirit of the mighty Lord 
p es nt with us this morning, and the word to us is, Take ye the Holy Ghost. 
Oh, fill me with Thy fulness, Lord, 

5 Until my very heart o’erflow. 
_ Oh, blessed strength that comes of full surrender and full endowment of the Spirit 

30 d! The peace of God so possesses the soul that poverty and pain alike fail to 


dg t in his crop of flax to save it from being spoiled by the rain. His answer was, 

have no flax; it is God’s flax, and if He likes to wet it He can.” Frances Ridley 

tgal smiled in her sufferings, saying: “I take my pain, dear Lord, from Thee,” 

er soul was strong in peace. The drudgery of arduous toil becomes transfigured 
abiding glory of the Lord. 


a 


_ by the united earnest prayers of twos and threes! In the early days of our Church 


614 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


CONSECRATED CULTURE, 


The development of strength is on the lines of rightful diet and exercise. But ot 
us never lose sight of the main principle of spiritual power by living union with 
Christ. “Be strong in the Lord.” If the channel of life is to grow there must be 


God. Caramels and sweets may be very nice in their way as an occasional luxury, but 
the strong man knows that a diet of these would be fatal to his strength. So let us 
be careful of our spiritual food. A little wholesome fiction or light reading may b 
useful as a recreation, but if we would grow strong we must have the wholesome die’ 
of the daily study of the Bible and of books that make us think. 

What we could desire in our Christian Endeavor Societies is a development ol 
consecrated culture. The world will never be converted by twaddle and inanity, how 
ever well-intentioned. We want the highest possible learning and mental power, 
all filled with the Spirit of God—all bred in humble dependence upon Him. 

BE A SPIRITUAL ATHLETE. 


Then, further, be strong by using your strength. As the athlete in his trainin 
seeks to bring out the strength of all his muscles, and so adopts a variety of exercises 
so let us not be content always with the work to which we have been accusto ed 
Let us attempt unusual things. The phrase “I can’t” is often but an excuse that really 
means “I don’t want to try.” Paul said to his son in the gospel, “Exercise thyself t 
godliness,” the word exercise being exactly the word we use in athletics, gymnastize 
In all these things we shall realize the value of true fellowship. In our efforts in th 
outside world for the bettering of humanity we may be ready to co-operate with an 
and all that will work with us. In the Church we have a circle somewhat narrower 
but the fellowship is closer. We may become stronger by union with all those 
love the Lord Jesus in sincerity and truth. 

Again, in an inner circle, still in fellowship with the members of our own society 
we may greatly help one another. But there is a fellowship closer still, the fellowship 
say, of two kindred souls that enter fully into each other’s deepest longings and desires 
The memorable example of the friendship of David and Jonathan will be in your mind 
It is said of Jonathan with his friend that “he strengthened his hand in God.” 

THE FOWER OF UNITY. 


Surely it was in view of such fellowship that Jesus gave the promise “That if twe 
of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be don 
for them by My Father which is in heaven.” There is power in unity. The closer th 
unity the greater the spiritual power. What glorious achievements have been wrough 


when open-air preaching was not so common as now, two of our missionaries wert 
engaged in evangelistic work in Berkshire, working in separate districts. They m 
with opposition in every place. They preached the gospel in the streets of the village 
and towns, and were pelted and persecuted in every place. One night they me 
together for consultation; the prospects were dark indeed. At the close of their tal | 
one said, “Let us have a turn of prayer before we go.” They went into a field, anc 
there poured out their souls to God. As the night wore on they became desperate it 
their pleadings, until one rose to his feet in the holy victory of faith, exclaiming 
“Brother, Berkshire’s taken! Berkshire’s taken!” They parted. But from that hou 
the tide turned in their favor, and success attended their efforts. Oh, for the strengtl 
of mighty faith! ; 
CONSECRATED COMMON SENSE. : 

In the application of this strength let us not forget that we must use wisdom an 
prudence. We need first of all spiritual power, but we need also consecrated commot 


sense to direct it. As illustrations of this see the work of Mr. Moody, the social worl 


; 
‘ 


4 


Be Strong—Parr. 615 


the Salvation Army, and now, most vividly before us today, the great Christian 
ndeavor movement, a splendid example of the right use of means to ends. 
Let us learn a lesson of the politician who strives to capture an election, or the 
mmercial man who strives to capture business. Our work is to win the election for 
irist, to capture the custom of men’s hearts and lives for Christ, and for this we need 
I gth of mind and heart. There is no room in the Christian Endeavor movement or 
‘the Church for dudes and dolls (Lord save them!); we want strong men and 
omen: the mens sana in corpore sano. 

Look up this morning to your King and Lord. He, the Great Captain, is calling 
‘in the advent of this new century to take the world for Him. 
In the dark days of Italy’s struggle for freedom the patriot leader Garibaldi 
ithered together a multitude of the people and addressed them: ‘Men of Italy, I cail 
ju to follow me to the fight. It may be to hardships, poverty, rags, wounds and 
sath; but it is for Italy, for freedom!” And they responded: “Viva I'Italia!’”’ They 
c follow him, they did find poverty and hardships, many of them found wounds and 
ath; but Italy was free! 

So our Captain calls us today; not to ease and Juxury, but to follow Him. It may 
e to hardships and to suffering; yea, to some it may be even to death itself, but it is 
t liberty! Liberty for the world! It is for Christ, for His eternal kingdom. What 
shall we say? O Lord, we will follow Thee now—and forever! 


: [This sermon by Theophilus Parr is said by a London newspaper to have been 
ich that Hugh Latimer might have delivered it at St. Paul’s Cross. Mr. Parr is of 
sw South Wales.] 


616 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE GOD THAT ANSWERETH BY FIRE. 


MARK GUY PEARSE. 


“The God that answereth by fire.’—I Kings 18: 24. 

It was Elijah himself who proposed the test. The people readily accepted it. 
On the summit of Carmel, withered and scorched in that long drought, there gathered 
the host—in front the robed priests of Baal and behind them the men of Israel. And 
up against the sky that never a cloud had dimmed for so long there rose the stern 
prophet; lifting his arm appealingly to heaven his summons rang out upon the stillness 
—How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God follow Him; but 
if Baal, then follow him.” 

Not a voice made answer from the other side. Then again Elijah speaks and 
challenges the people to take a bullock and lay it upon an altar and put no fire under, 
and he will take another—and the Lord that answereth by fire let Him be God. 
From priests and people came the ready response accepting the challenge. “Thag 
well spoken,” they shouted, and began at once to make ready. 

Here are some lessons suited to aii times, certainly not least to our time. The 
God that answereth by fire. 

I. The religion of God must bring the proofs of its Divine origin. 

Elijah stands as the very type and emblem of the religion of God; it is always in 
the world as a daring intruder; a stern reformer; a troubler and a disquieter of 
Israel; crashing unsparingly upon ‘sin everywhere, however rich or respectable; th 
plague of the easygoing. Such a disturber of the peace must carry his credential: 
with him. This religion is a hurler of lightnings and @ protest of thunder agains 
dead forms, however beautiful; against dead creeds, however orthodox; against dead 
Churches, however old. It cannot live without being met with the angry question 
“Who made thee a Judge and a Ruler over us?” It comes like its Master, overthrow 
ing the tables of the moneychangers and scattering the seats of the dovesellers, and 
driving out the sheep and the oxen. Then up start the stalwart defenders of the 
faith, alarmed about their vested interests, and demanding, “By what authority does 
Thou these things?” 7 

Look at the very nature of this holy religion. It comes with a demand so 
lofty, so searching, and yet so humiliating. It tells the man in all the pride of his 
intellect that he has no power to see the kingdom of God, much less to enter into it, 
until he is born again. It makes light of all his round of outside-ism—the meats 
and drinks, the robes and services—and tells him that his heart is full of murder an 
adultery and lies, and that no toiling agony of his own can make it clean. It heeds 
not the costliest and most splendid services, and tells him if ever he is to be save 
it must be by the merit of Another. Its language is so imperative,—thou shalt. 
demands the innermost will of man,—thou shalt love. It claims every faculty an 
power of the man,—thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and min J 
and soul and strength. It claims the man in every relationship and round of life,— 
and thy neighbor as thyself.. This religion is so pure and spiritual. No beauty of 
service, no kind of worship, no profession of faith avail anything unless the spirit 
worship Him, the heart love Him, the life glorify Him. Its demand for faith is so 
peculiar and apart from all our ways of seeing and suspecting. Perhaps every 


The God that Answereth by Fire—Pearse. 617 


itterance of the Lord Jesus as we dwell upon it opens and unfolds an infinite 
freasure of wisdom and truth and tenderness; but none is more amazing than those 
strange words spoken when the Baptist had sent to enquire whether He were indeed 
the Christ. Jesus healed many of their plagues and infirmities and cast out many 
evil spirits, and then He bade the messengers go again and show John the things 
which they had seen and heard. Then He Whom the angels worship, Who upholdeth 
al things by the word of His power, looked forth upon the crowd and added, Blessed 
is he whosoever is not offended in Me. 


_ Further, Christianity by her very triumphs gives the challenge of the world a 
greater force and urgency. These are two blessings which Christianity has brought 
to many lands and is surely bringing to all—liberty and light. The more perfectly 
en are brought into freedom the more naturally will they ask the ground of claims 
ke these. And as the light of education spreads the more thoughtfully will they 
ask it and the more intelligently must they be answered. Let no one be so utterly 
foolish as to sigh over this, confounding enquiry with doubt. Because the slave is 
ained to an unquestioning obedience, is liberty therefore a peril? Because light 
ets men thinking for themselves, is light therefore an evil? Do not let us talk as if 
were in any degree possible. Thank God for light; it is the wise men who when 


myrrh and frankincense. It is the freest men who can render the most worthy 
because the most willing service. Christianity is lost when it takes to coercion. 
But let us be well assured that light and liberty do make it more than ever needful that 
‘the Church of God should carry in the forefront the unmistakable proof of her 
Divine origin. Rome, ever quick to discern the signs of the times, sought to meet 
the growing demand with a growing proof of authority by voting the Pope infallible. 
The need is as real for us as for Rome, the need of a manifest authority. Science 
happily does not necessitate doubt, but science does beget and must beget a spirit of 
‘imvestigation. And that Christianity must ever be the first to welcome and rightly 
Satisfy. The gracious Master’s invitation to be the first disciples is still the Church’s 
_imyitation to all—Come and see. And that which satisfied the first disciples shall 
‘Satisfy the simple seekers of every age,—the living Christ. 
Every age must have its own proof. The Church cannot inherit the evidences, 
‘slie must create them. The prophet does not stand and tell the people of the wonders 
that God had wrought for their fathers in Egypt and the Red Sea. He does not remind 
‘them of the wilderness and the manna, of Jordan and Jericho. The past is dead and 
‘buried, and knows no resurrection. All that might only swell the triumph of the 
enemy. “Where is the God of Israel now?” they might have asked in derision,— 
“What can you show in these enlightened days?” For every age claims a monopoly 
of wisdom; they were the dark ages until we came upon the scene. We live now; 
in former times there were only other people. The early triumphs of Christianity 
do not greatly concern the mass of men and women now. They were ignorant people, 
easily imposed upon. There were ghosts then, and witches, and no gaslight, But now 
the schoolmaster is abroad, where is your power? In these intellectual and scientific 
days your poor superstitions have lost their charm; their spell is broken; your 
words fail to cast out the devils. 
And the world is right, quite right. If the Gospel cannot do today what it did 
-aforetime it is a failure. What is it to tell me of Bethesda’s ancient fame, if I come 
and find no expectant crowd, and no sign of the angel, and no cripples healed, and 
mone laughing in the gladness of new life? I conclude naturally enough that 
Bethesda is a failure: that it may do for an ornamental fish-pond, but the less it is 
| talked about the bettter. The only evidence of Christianity that ean satisfy me is that 
‘it does as much for me as it has ever done for others. If the Church of God lives 


618 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


at all, she lives by the breath of the Almighty. If that inspire her she can do as 
great wonders as ever. If that be not in her then in spite of tradition she is dead, dead 
—a corpse only, a thing to be got rid of as speedily as possible, a thing of which God 
and man alike may say,—Bury the dead out of my sight,—and the sooner the better. — 

II. The appointed proof. 

Now the priests of Baal make ready their sacrifice. The bullock is slain and 
stretched upon the altar. This, too, was all that Elijah was to have. Until the fire 
came the religion of Baal and the religion of Jehovah were alike. The religion of 
God has nothing but the fire to mark her off from the false religions of the world. 

And of the two all the advantage is on the side of Baal. The royal patronage - 
and the popular favor, the priests of Baal, and the glittering attractions are with the 
false god. Let the religion of God lack the fire from heaven, and she is but a poor 
thing and can be beaten at every point. She must call in the State to prop her up with 
purse and power and Acts of Parliament, or she will faint and die. When early 
Christianity lost her fire she borrowed from heathenism her altars and priests, her 
festivals and some of her foremost doctrines. She was born in the fire, and in the 
fire only can she live and thrive. 

The priests of Baal had all the further conditions of success. Theirs is the 
passionate earnestness, the furious persistent prayer, the fierce self-denial, the agony 
of entreaty. ‘“‘O Baal, hear us!” rings their cry; and they cut themselves with knives 
and leap frenzied on the sacrifice. In these matters, too, heathenism may often put the 
worshippers of God to the blush. So poor a thing is our religion without the fire— 
alike in pomp and imposing array, in earnestness and self-sacrifice. Are not the three 
Hebrew children a picture of the Church of God in all ages? Three of them amongst 
the thousands of assembled idolaters; the air filled with the cries of the heralds and rol 
of drums and blare of trumpets. Above all. towers the glittering image of gold and 
all the hosts of people are prostrate before it. Then the three, bound hand and foot, 
stand before the angry king. Is this the religion of Jehovah, with but three helpless 
representatives,—and they strangers in a strange land? But look again, they are 
in the fire. The flames play about them; now the cords are consumed and they are 
free and walk triumphantly. And lo! in their midst is a Presence more radiant than 
the furnace glare: there walks with them One like unto the Son of God. The king 
gazes with awe; the people are fixed in wonder. The image of gold is a for- 
gotten idol, and every heart yields its homage to Jehovah. He is supreme. And 
the heralds ring out the new decree,—There is none like unto the God of Israel. 

But now comes the time of the man of God. Baal’s priests have spent themselves. 
The prophet stoops to repair the altar of the Lord. One man repairing with rough 
stones a ruined altar. Ah, look again. See what the religion of our God can d 
without. She can do without numbers. Kingly favor, princely patronage, troops Of 
followers—her strength is not in these. One consecrated heart is more than the hun- 
dreds of robed priests and the thousands of noisy worshippers. Wealth? All that wa’ 
on the side of Baal: silver and gold went for little that day. The wealth of Ahab and 
the lavish hand of Jezebel were worth less than one poor prophet whom the ravens fed 
or who had to beg a cake of a poverty stricken widow. No good work of God ever 
yet stood still for the want of money when the Church had the baptism of fire. And 
what a plain service it was! No ritual and stately ceremony. Architecture and 
sublime music and lofty intellectualism and impassioned oratory—the victory of that 
day depended no jot or tittle upon these. It depends no jot or tittle on them now. 

Then out rang the bold words of the prophet—“Fill four barrels with water, and 
pour it upon the sacrifice and upon the wood.” And up from the sea they bring the 
barrels toilfully and splash the water forth upon the altar, drenching: it and filling all 
the trench. It is good to look upon this prophet, to see his sublime faith in his God. 


f 
re 


a 


The God that Answereth by Fire—Pcarse. 619 


Brother, fear not, the religion of our God can stand any amount of cold water. The 

devil always keeps those four barrels full, and there are always ready hands to fling it 

‘over sacrifice and altar. There is the contempt of the haughty, there is the scorn of 

the worldling, there is the indifference of the ignorant, there are the sharp criticisms 

and attacks of the clever people. Let them pour on. Why, timid soul, art thou 
scared, fearing that all hope of the fire from heaven is gone forever! Surely thou 
knowest not what the fire from heaven is like. 

‘ But hark! It is the time of evening sacrifice. The great sun goes down to the sea, 

reddening all the earth and sky. And*now the man of God prays, “Lord God of 

_ Abraham, Isaac and of Israel, let it be known this day, that thou art God in Israel and 

that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O 

_ Lord, hear me, that this people may know that Thou art the Lord God and that Thou 

“hast turned their hearts back again.” Then forth from the reddened sky there fell the 

fire of the Lord and consumed the burnt sacrifice and the wood and the stones, and 

licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it they fell 

2 on their faces, and they said, “The Lord, He is the God,—The Lord, He is the God.” 

~ This is ever the proof appointed by God, and this is ever the proof accepted by 
-men—The God that answereth by fire. 

- Look at the sacrifice stretched on the altar. It is dead and beyond all power of 
life;—a thing blood-stained and repulsive. What can you do with it? Bring your 
robed priests with chanted hymns and mystic sign—and what shall that avail? Bring 
the orator and let him declaim about it—what difference shall that make? Bring your 

arguments and strong reasons, collect the opinions of the greatest intellects of the 
ages,—shall that check for a moment the corruption to which it is hastening? Bring 
your groups in agony of earnestness, frenzied and leaping,—yet it is all unchanged. But 
there comes the fire—then all is transformed. As if a thing of life, it goes leaping 
heavenward. Purged and purified, now is it upborne as on wings. No longer hushed 
in death, it sings with a hundred tongues of flame. Helpless no more, now is it 
inspired with a force that is resistless, and the stones melt, and the water that would 
quench it is “licked up.” There is no withstanding a proof like thatthe force that 
transforms from death to life, the power that unlooses the hold of earth and bears the 
earthy heavenward; men everywhere believe in that religion, and it is the only religion 
that men do believe in. Find a force that can make bad men good and drunken men 
sober and greedy men generous,—that brings into the vain and frivolous a sense of 
life’s tremendous import; a power that makes the proud brotherly, and teaches even 
the grumbler to sing: you may be sure that such a religion will do its own arguing 
and will carry its own conviction everywhere. Mr. Wesley tells us that at Epworth 
On one occasion a wagon-load of Methodists were brought before the magistrate. 
“What have they done?” asked the magistrate. That was a point which the prosecution 
had not considered. Then said one, “Please, sir, they converted my wife. Before she 
went amongst them she had such a tongue! But now she is as quiet as a lamb.” 
“Take them back,” said the magistrate, ‘take them back and let them convert ail the 
scolds of the parish.” Forms of worship, arguments on the evidences of religion, 
-oratorical disquisitions,—what are they beside a woman whose ill-temper has been 
cured. 

Look at the sacrifice and see when the fire comes the completion of the work. 
There is not just a bit touched here and there, so that with many it should be a 
doubtful matter if the fire had fallen at all. There was not only a fancied smell of 
something burning, and the singeing of a hair. It fell upon the sacrifice, and it con- 
sumed the dust and the stones and it licked up the water of the trench. We must 
have the fire that not only lays hold of the man, but of all about him; the transforming 


fire that not only goes to the innermost heart of the man, but that reaches the outer- 
’ 


FF 


620 _ Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


most doings and relations of his life. The religion that fails to transform the whole 
life is sure to be suspected, perhaps even scorned. Whatever theories the churches 
may hold, the world has for the Christian but one standard and that is entire sanctifi- 
cation. It trips and stumbles over the defects of Christian people and makes no 
allowance for them. The world’s conviction and the world’s conversion depend upon 
the holy lives of religious people. And here the world is one with the Word of God, 
—“Thus saith the Lord, Then shall the heathen that are left round about you know 
that I am the Lord when I am sanctified in you before their eyes.” We want the fire — 
that comes upon the man to reach to the stones and dust of his house, and to the 
stones and dust of his office, and to the stones and dust of his workshop. The fire 
must purify all his dealings And not a consuming only is it,—we want a fire that will 
be available for the shivering world, to warm and bless and gladden it. The church 
needs above everything else and the world demands this completeness and thorough- 
ness—that alike in business and in home, in master and in workman, in mistress and 
maid, in pleasure and politics, all shall be true and pure and honest and faithful. 

Do not mistake warmth for fire. There may be a glowing enjoyment of religious 
services; a delight in some Christian enterprise and service; an earnestness that mani- 
fests itself in many forms, but warmth cannot take the place of fire. Warm feelings 
and warm desires are a poor substitute for the fire from heaven. Warmth does not 
master; it does not transform and consume. Warmth gives no light; warmth has no | 
power to create new sources of heat and light. Our warmth may be carried up to 
blazing point, yet without the fire from heaven it shall avail nothing. 


Preaching cannot secure this. All religions and irreligions can preach. It is not 
even preaching the Gospel. Are we not sometimes beaten down with the sense of the 
feeble instrument that is placed in our hands for such a great work? The foolishness 
of preaching—what is it? What are the words that any man can utter against the 
forces of evil? What are words against the might of evil begotten in the blood, 
wrought into the nature, holding men captive as with chains of iron? How can our 
words cast out the devils of selfishness and pride, or cleanse the foul leprosy oi lust, 
cor raise those who are dead and buried in sin? Do not think only of the great 
masses of people that lie outside our reach, bu: of the men and women who come 
and listen to us Sunday after Sunday, who believe all that we can tell them and yet 
are not transformed! What can we do against this mysterious lethargy? How 
arouse these from their sleepy indifference? Thunder at them and blaze in your 
fierceness,—and they thank you for your earnestness, praise the sermon and go com- 
fortably home to dinner, and tomorrow are as they were yesterday, with no new ~ 
aspiration, no new vision, no fresh girding of themselves for God. What is lacking? 

Everything, if preaching be all. We must have the fire from Heaven. The Gospel is 
the truth applied by the Holy Ghost. The truth on fire alone can burn its way into. 1 
the heart, glaring in upon the unconcerned and making him horribly afraid; wrapping 
about the place of the sinner’s false security and leaving it a blackened mass; falling 
upon him who thinks himself in need of nothing,—rich, robed, respectable—and lo, ’ 
he is poor and naked and miserable and blind, groping his way shivering to the Lord 
of heaven, crying for the white robe and the gift of sight. Our preaching is a 
‘dreary failure without the fire from heaven. j 

How may we get the fire? This is surely the great question which concerns every 
disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. For this to be within our reach and yet not to be 
secured is an awful responsibility, and awful condemnation. The want of the world 
is this—men and women who will be God’s lightning-conductors, lifting their heads. 
above the clouds and bringing down the fire that can set earth ablaze. There is a fable 
of one of old who stole from the altar of the gods the sacred flame and brought rie 
down to earth, That fable is to be the simple and sober reality for all disciples of 


The God that Answereth by Fire—Pearse. 621 


Jesus Christ. Do let us rouse ourselves, every one, and make this the matter of our 
most eager thought and deepest longing,—how can I get this fire of God? 


The incident teaches us the power of one man. It was no time of great and gen- 
eral revival such as the Church of God has known—a time when all the tides and 
currents of men’s thoughts seem to set heavenward; when spiritual influences seem 
to pervade the air and meet us everywhere. Far otherwise was the condition of things. 
All was dead, utterly dead. We have seen how that Ahab and Jezebel had set them- 
selves to make the worship of Baal the national religion. On every side the people 
had yielded to this abomination. Here was one man, thinking himself the only one 
left on the Lord’s side, yet this is he who brings down the fire. One man—we cannot 
transfer our responsibility. The church with which we are connected may be very 
dead; the people about us may be swallowed up in money-making or luxurious living; 
or they may be utterly dispirited; those who could help us may be our greatest 
hindrances. Well, that may sadden us,—yet may we not find in these very circum- 
stances that which brings us into a kinship with the prophet? If we have something 
like Elijah’s opportunity, let us seek Elijah’s victory. Of this be quite sure—no 
circumstances can excuse us. Do you complain further that you have no influence, 
that you are not rich, that you have no gift of organization, that nobody takes any 
notice of your suggestions, and nobody takes any interest in what you try to do? 
Well, Elijah was poor, poorer than most of us probably, since he had to beg a crust 
of bread from a widow woman. “But alas,” you sigh, “I am not an Elijah.” Perhaps 
we might ask ourselves honestly whose fault that is. But the question is this—what 
are you going to do? Putting your circumstances at the worst, and putting yourself 
at the weakest—what are you going to do? Give up in despair? Let things drift in 
the hope that somebody may come to mend matters? 

Why should you not be that somebody? 

Is not this God of Elijah yours—the God that answereth by fire, is He not within 
your reach? The blackest form of atheism is to believe in God and yet to despair 
of doing any good. Things are never at such pass but that one man with God to 
help him can do a great deal to mend them. Accept your position and put the matter 
to the test. The God of Elijah can do as much for you as for the prophet of old and 
is as glad to help you. Seeking as Elijah sought we shall surely find what Elijah 
found. 

See further that this power does not depend upon office. Not as a prophet nor 
as a priest does Elijah stand that day. As a matter of fact he was neither prophet 
nor priest. It does not seem that he was ever anointed with holy oil or ordained to 
any office. The word of the Lord came to him,—that was all. He heard the word of 
God and uttered it. He brought no new revelation of God nor any great prediction 
concerning Israel. No poetry filled his soul like that of David and Isaiah and Ezekiel; 
‘no visions of the future glowed before him. Nor was he a born leader of men like 
Moses and David and Gideon. He stands before us a man with one gift that made 
him what he was—the power to pray. This privilege is ours as much as his. It is not 
limited to the prophet’s office nor to the priest's anointing; this is the gift that all 
alike may claim. This is the holy calling wherewith we all are called; the one thing 
with regard to which we do all stand on the same ground; wise and simple, high and 
low, have here a like position and an equal responsibility. When on the day of Pente- 
cost the fire fell from heaven it fell alike on each of them. Not just on St. Peter, 
and then as he might choose to bestow it in orderly succession and according to exact 
priority, the grace flowing in its appointed channels. Water is easily led, but fire | 
has very little regard for appointed channels and is no respecter of persons. Here 
Office is nothing. Let us everyone take it to himself, layman as much as minister, 


622 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


poor as much as rich, low as much as high,—I am responsible—as responsible as any 


living man—for this fire from heaven. As surely as I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, 


so surely is every promise of this power made to me; and every condition of receiving — 


it is one that can be fulfilled by me as much as by any. Here office counts for nothing. 


It is one man given up wholly to God. There is a phrase that is almost peculiar 
to Elijah and his successor Elisha. It leaps from their lips as their watchword. As 
the Lord liveth before whom I stand,—that was the secret of this man’s strength. It 
is with these words that Elijah comes, startling Ahab at his first appearing at the 
gate of Naboth’s vineyard. This man lived in the presence of God. He stood 
waiting, hearkening unto the voice of the Lord, then went forth girt with the might 
of the Most High to fulfil it. This made Elijah the man he was—this waiting to 
know and this resolute going forth to obey. The man belonged to God, and his life- 
service was to do to the letter what God bade him. That is ever the man who brings 
down the fire from heaven. , 


Do we turn from it lightly, certain that such a life is impossible in a condition 
like ours: that it would quite unfit us for business and the thousand claims of daily 
life? How could we attend to the trivial things of earth and yet live a life of such 
high communion with heaven? Well; if it be so, and we are disciples of Jesus Christ, 
why such a hasty decision on that side? If one of these must be given up, why should 
the voice of the world instantly prevail? Is the Most High God to be so easily set 
aside? Can we find any place for Him other than this,—that He be supreme and 
always first: that His will be always considered and His word always obeyed. Shall 


we dare to set a limit to His claims and say, Thus far will we yield to God, but no ~ 


further? But there is no conflict here. Be quite sure that nothing but this innermost — 
surrender of ourselves to God can put us in our right place towards Him. And 


nothing but being in our right place towards God can put us in our right place towards 
anything else. The work of the world will be undone or overdone: we shall be slayes ~ 


or tyrants in the world except as God Himself do hold the very throne of the heart — 


and sway us by His will. The only true life possible for us is a life of absolute surren- 


der to Him. God can do great wonders with any man who is given up wholly to 
Him. But what can God do with less than this? What grace can flow through chan- 
nels that are choked; or what is it that we dutifully keep this end’ clear if the other 
end fall short of the river of God which is full of water? There are thousands of 


Christians who might each one be as an Elijah of God, and they are drifting indolently 


through life muttering idle excuses and bitter complaints. 

Here was a man with a great faith in God. How marked is the contrast between 
the calm confidence of the prophet and the fierce desperation of the priests of Baal. 
“‘And they took the bullock that was given them and they dressed it and they called 
on the name of Baal from morning until noon saying, O Baal, hear us. And they 
leaped upon the altar which was made..... And they cried aloud and cut themselves 
after their manner with knives and lancets till the blood gushed out upon them.” 
“And it came to pass at the time of the evening sacrifice that Elijah the prophet drew 
near and said, Lord God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Israel, let it be known this day 
that Thou art God in Israel.’ How restful is this confidence! It is the quiet trust of 
one who talked to God face te face as a man talketh to his friend. Only in a life of 
communion with God is this placid faith found. He rests in the God of Abraham 
and of Isaac and of Israel. All that God has ever been to any, all that He is to us. 
His resources are available for us today. We too have a great God, the Almighty. 
Nothing is too much to ask of Him; nothing is too much to expect from Him. The 
great miracles of the past are not written to mock us. The wonders that He did in 
our fathers’ days and in the old time before them are put within our reach. 


The God that Answereth by Fire—Pearse. 623 


e And this faith was seen in the further plea,—‘‘Let it be seen that I am Thy servant 
and that I have done all these things at Thy word.”’ Obedience is the outcome of faith, 
yet it is also true that faith is rooted in obedience. The man has faith in the great law 
___ of seed-time and harvest, therefore he goes forth with the plough expecting a harvest. 
But he expects a harvest also because he has complied with the conditions. If I go 
forth and do what God bids me in a simple dependence upon His help I may come 
back without the shadow of a doubt that God’s purpose shall be accomplished. The 
Gospel of the blessed Lord is entrusted to a human ministry, and from the first has 
been entrusted to the ministry of very simple people. It needs no subtlety, no 
splendid skill. It asks only whole-hearted obedience and the blessing of God must 
come. “I am Thy servant,” said Elijah. “This is no experiment of mine. If it were 
I might be very doubtful. But, O God, this is Thy bidding and it cannot fail.’””’ The 
Gospel is no experiment. It is God’s infallible remedy for the sins and sorrows of 
the world. And if we set forth that Gospel in the strength of God, be sure that signs 
~ and wonders must follow in the name of the Holy Child Jesus. 


The fire comes when the sacrifice is laid on the altar. So was it of old and so is 
it still. The live coal that purged the lips of Isaiah was taken with the tongs from 
off the altar. It was when Christ had died and risen and ascended to the Father that 
there came the gift of the Holy Ghost. Our resting-place and standing-ground is 
beside the cross of Jesus Christ. There is the great manifestation of God’s love; the 
measure of His desire for the world’s salvation is there. There is the power of God 
for the salvation of men. There is the awful proof of the world’s sin; there is the great 
declaration of the righteousness of God for our forgiveness. It is only when we 
preach Christ and Him crucified that we can claim the convincing power of the Holy 
Ghost. ‘He shall testify of Me,” saith Christ. So was it in the days of the apostles; 
while they testified of Christ the fire of God fell upon the people. Here let us take our 

- stand with a new resoluteness beneath the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us 
give up our whole being, our soul and mind and strength to this, making it our ambi- 
tion and our passion, by the utter surrender of ourselves to God, by the life of com- 
munion with Him, by earnest prayer and by -estful faith to claim for our own this 
gift of the fire of God, the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. 


Let us dwell upon the greater assurance of triumph which is ours. 


: The appeal of the prophet i: to the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob. 
For Abraham's sake God would hear the petition and deliver the people. They lay 
within the holy covenant which had been established by God with His servant, and 
the God of Abraham bends to bless the children of Abraham. But ours it is to plead 
an infinitely greater name. Not the servant but the Son, the Well-beloved and Only- 
begotten is our plea. We draw near to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
Much more shall we for His sake expect and claim the fire from heaven. Have you 
seen where the Lord Jesus Christ has set the Church, His bride, for its keeping? At 
His cross there stood the mother, watching through her tears His dreadful agony; her 
own heart pierced and torn. And looking on her pitifully, Jesus saith to John, “Behold 
thy mother,” and to her He saith, “Behold thy son!” But for the Church, His 
bride, no human eye is watchful enough; no human arm is strong enough; no human 
love and wisdom can suffice. St. Peter cannot be to the Church what St. John is to 
the mother. Therefore He saith, “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those 
whom thou hast given me. .. . Neither pray I for these alone, but for all of them 
that shall believe on me through their word.” So hath He entrusted the Church to 
the sacred keeping of the Almighty Father. Little wonder now that the pledge should 
be ours: ““Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name it shall be done unto you.” 

“If of old, when Elijah prayed to the God of Abraham, there fell the fire, how much 
more shall your Father which is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. 


Lord, we believe to us and ours 
The apostolic promise given; 
We wait the Pentecostal powers, 
The Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. 


Behold, to Thee our souls aspire, 
And languish Thy descent to meet: 
Kindle in each the living fire, 
And fix in every heart Thy seat. 


4 £ ahaa a | 
‘ Be 
624 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. am 
} 
| 


\ [Mark Guy Pearse was born at Camborne, Cornwall, educated privately 
Wesley and Dodsbury colleges; also studied medicine. He entered Wesleyan m 
in 1863, serving a number of churches, until ten years ago he became missio 
St. James Hall, in connection with the West London Mission. He has writ 
dozen or more novels of religious life, and several volumes of his sermons have b 
published.] q 


\ 


* 


t 
t 


=e 


> 


GOD’S CHILD, THE CRIMINAL. 


or W. B. PICKARD. 


; “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. 


_ For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust.”—Psa. 103: 18, 14. 


“a “Our Father which art in heaven..... thy kingdom come, thy will be done on 


earth as it is in heaven.”—Matt. 6: 9. 


It is not difficult to conceive of the race in its infancy, as incapable of any knowl- 
edge of God. In stages, the measure of which cannot be taken, man under the 
brooding of the Spirit slowly progressed to a point where God became a fact in his 
conscious life. Of necessity, man’s vision of the Deity is colored by the media 
through which the light falls upon his eyes. The God of primitive man was a primi- 
tive God, for man can see only so much of the Infinite as he is capable of seeing, for 
the same reason that a child can know only so much of his mother as his own growing 
mind is capable of knowing. ‘For the natural man receiveth not the things of the 
Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them because they 
are spiritually discerned.” Beginning at zero the human thought of God rose by slow 
and oft hindered degrees till it reaches the high level of the Old Testament song, 
“Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.’’ The 
distance is immeasurable that separates such a view of the Almighty from the one in 
which He appears as a powerful tribal Deity, a passionate, revengeful, and irresponsible 
Oriental monarch, who elects without reason to exalt some to the place of highest 
honor, and decrees without justice, to debase others to lowest serfdom. High as is 
the thought of the Hebrew singer, God's child is capable of still loftier ascent. The 
Psalmist in his “Like as a Father,” gives an early glimpse of the sublime revelation 
made to man, the Fatherhood of God. From the lips of the Son falls the prayer that 
floods the human heart with that highest and last conception, “Our Father.” This 
vision is not qualified. He is not “like as a Father,” for Jesus bids you think of Him 
and speak to Him as “your Father.’”’ He teaches men that God thinks of them as His 
children. “Your heavenly Father” is the Master’s designation of God. This is no 
empty figure of speech but a term that sets forth a relationship actual and vital. 
Humanity turns its face to the skies and with filial spirit cries “Abba Father,” and 
from the opening heavens comes the answer of divine parenthood, ‘““My Child.” Great 
as is this truth it is but half the truth. The brotherhood of the race is the eternal 
corollary of the Fatherhood of God. ‘‘All we be brethren” is the golden hemisphere 
that added to “Our Father” completes the circle of revelation. 

Clear as seems the meaning of the Gospel message, it has required ages of retarded 
growth for the followers of Christ to understand its fullness. Like children learning 
to read we have skipped the hard words and misunderstood the easy ones. Surely the 
Christian world, with a blaze of light falling upon the page, will never dare to rise in 
judgment against our pagan brothers who have tried to decipher the mystery of being, 
standing through the ages in the dim light of earliest dawn. Nor will we forget, while 
we think of the debased and desolate creatures about us, the Master's command, 
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” 

In opening the direct discussion of the theme, God’s Child, the Criminal, we 
need to remind ourselves that fatherhood is not dependent upon the character 9. the 


“ 


a; 


626 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


child. The good boy has no monopoly of relationship. The bad boy is his father’s i” 
son, and may even bear in striking degree his father’s likeness. He may resist, rebel, 
and run away, he may dishonor the family name which he bears, he may cut himself — 
off from his home and heritage, but he is still a son. He may be born deaf, dumb 
and blind, or idiotic, or he may be crippled in life’s struggle, or bear in his body some 
loathsome disease, he may never have known that he had a father, but none of these 
things annul relationship. Herein is the supreme message of Jesus to the’ world. All © 
men, in all ages, of all conditions, of all colors, are to be taught to pray, “Our 
Father.’ God has never disowned any child of His. No headstrong prodigal has — 
ever gone so far into the far country that the Father’s love has not pursued him, — 
He may be shut within prison walls and bear the stigma of crime, but God is his 
Father and Jesus Christ his elder brother. The most dangerous character, the most q 
hardened “repeater” is God’s child, the criminal. To deny this is to cut ourselves — 
off from all hope. ; : 

Fatherhood involves obligation. The common law recognizes the responsibility — 
of the parent to his child and of the child to his parent. But always the obligation — 
of parenthocd precedes the obligation of childhood. The fact that we are in the 
world carries with it our right to a share in our Father’s care and love. By no theo- 4 
logical fiction can a good God be excused for hating any child of His. God is under 
eternal obligations to be a Father to every earthly child. To prove this Jesus Christ 
lived and served and died and lives again. God’s child, the criminal, is no exception 
to this universal rule. Prison walls cannot be made thick enough to shut out God’s 
care for His own. He loves men not because they are good but because they are His 
children. 

It is a function of fatherhood to sympathize with the weakness, ignorance and 
sufferings of childhood. No child has ever lived who did not need the compassionate 
care of parental love. The poet of the Psalms tells us that God is like a human 
father because He pities us. What child of grace is so favored, so good, that he has — 
not felt the need of this divine compassion? What foolishness, what blundering, what — 
wickedness have we not been guilty of? How near we have come to crossing that 
invisible line that separates the criminal from his brother and yet have escaped. “We > 
ourselves were sometimes foolish, disobedient and deceived,” is the confession of Paul, — 
a confession the best of us need to make. Surely we cannot deny to our less fortunate 
brothers the pity of divine Fatherhood. God pitieth His criminal children, “for He 
knoweth their frame, He remembereth that they are dust.” Man is only taking his — 
first lessons in the great volume of heredity and environment. God reads the book © 
from the beginning. He knows, He never forgets, the influence of birth and early © 
training on His child the criminal. Adelaide Proctor sings the sad story of multitudes — 
of earth’s children when she says: } 


“God gave to earth a gift; a child, 
Weak, innocent, and undefiled,— 
Opened its ignorant eyes and smiled. 


It lay so helpless, so forlorn, 
Earth took it coldly and in scorn, 
Cursing the day when it was born. 


wie Cpey Feat oe 


She gave it first a tarnished name, 
For heritage a tainted fame, 
Then cradled it in want and shame.” 


Had you been born amidst the squalor, hunger, blasphemy and drunkenness of — 
the slums would you be in God's house today? If your only lessons in ethics had 


mM 


4 ‘ 
“ae 


God's Child, the Criminal—Pickard. 627 


a 
_ been disregard of law, human and divine, would you now be a reputable citizen? If 
you had begun your career where was printed upon your yinched and hardened 
features the official notice that you had been “mortgaged to the devil before you were 
born,” would intelligence and purity now beam from your face? Let each one in this 
‘presence say to his own heart, “Who maketh thee to differ from another and what 
hast thou that thou didst not receive?” God knows that all of His criminal children 
_do not come from the slums and He remembers that a home of luxury without disci- 
pline is a dangerous place in which to be born. God pities the poor children of rich 
parents who give to their offspring nothing but gold, the very spending of which lays 
the foundation for future criminality. 
One of the darkest-and most pathetic stories in the history of the world is the 
treatment accorded those who go astray. The criminal treatment of criminals is a 
topic that can never be discussed except in barest outline. Society, by its theological 


motions, its false standards, its cruel practices, its penal laws and methods, has made 


it easy for men to do wrong and hard for them to do right, and when once they have 
gone astray, impossible for them to reform. Society licenses schools of crime in 
greatest numbers where the people are least able to resist; it calls the victims of its 
Own institutions into a court room where hover criminals who feed on crime; the 
guilty one is thrown into jail, often a moral pest house, from which none ever emerge 
without a contagion of crime he did not take with him. At last society turns God’s 
child out again, branded as a felon, the only place open to him, the saloon, and the 
only company willing to receive him, men who like himself are passing through the 
grades of the school of crime. Letourman utters a stern denunciation, but one whose 
truthfulness we dare not challenge, when he says: “The criminal would not exist, or 
at least very rarely, if he were not produced by society itself.’ God knows that the 
wonder is not that criminals exist but that the number is not far greater than it is. 


God could not be a true Father to His earthly children if He were not interested 
in their recovery from sin and its consequences. Hence we have a right to look for 
the inauguration of movements, the ultimate end of which is the restoration of the 
wanderer to the character and privileges of sonship. There must be born in him from 
above a new desire, a new purpose, a new hope. He must have a chance to make a 
new beginning. Jesus commenced His ministry by preaching, “Repent ye, for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The repentance of the Gospel is a very different thing 
from the penance of the theologian. It is not a call to suffer self-inflicted pain that we 
may render an equivalent for our sin and thus escape torment, but rather it is a call 
to re-think—to change our minds concerning sin, as a preparation for promotion into 
the kingdom of Christ. Forgiveness is not a way to keep out of hell but an open door 
into a higher life. The foundation of the appeal is in the fact that no man is either 
so bad or so good that he may not improve. Jesus taught the same doctrine to the 
man of lofty character and to the woman of degraded habits. Science restates this 
old Gospel when Fiske declares that the improvableness of man is his distinguishing 
characteristic. The kingdom of heaven is always at hand. Here is inspiration for 
the highest and hope for the lowest. Shall we accept this opportunity for ourselves, 
but deny it to those less favored? Is God’s child, the criminal, to have no chance to 
repent that he too may enter the heavenly kingdom of honesty, purity, faith and the 
service of his fellow men? Is the old dogma of despair, “Once a criminal, always a 
criminal,” to hang like the pall of night over the 750,000 persons annually convicted 
of crime in the United States? Are the 100,000 persons, largely young men, now 
within our prison walls, beyond all hope? Surely no lover of his God and of his 
brother will accept a notion so destructive of the foundations of the Gospel. 

For two thousand years men have prayed “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done 


on earth as it is in heaven.” That the answer has been long delayed is only seeming. 


628 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


The path of progress is one of evolution rather than of revolution, Those who look 
for an answer to that prayer in some cataclysmic catastrophe have been and are sure 
to be disappointed. But to those who read aright the great movements of God in 
history there have appeared proofs indubitable that the kingdom of the Father has 
come upon the earth. Such an organization as the Prison Reform Association is a 
specific answer to the Lord’s prayer. It is evidence of the establishment of the king- 
dom of our Father’s love among men, for man’s pity for his fallen brother is proof 
of man’s likeness to his divine Father. Such an institution is an expression of 
remedial grace that shows the coming of the heavenly kingdom. All who are pre- 
pared enter joyfully therein. 

The principles of prison reform are not new. It is the application of them that 
is a novelty. In fact the divine order of procedure is followed so exactly that one 
wonders why it has not always prevailed. Today, enlightened society deals with 
its ward, the criminal, as God deals with His child, the sinner. To some of these 
striking analogies we now direct attention. 

The beginnings of the criminal instincts are early seen. The first offense occurs 
during youth. The criminal is a child in years, in judgment, in self-control and in) 
moral sense. He is not the powerful brute of popular tradition, whose very grossness 
is the occasion of his crimes, tabulations of anthropological statistics show him to be 
under-sized and under-vitalized. He became a criminal, not because of strength but 
because of weakness. It is a defect and not an excess, arrested development and not 
over-development, that are the occasions of criminous outbreakings. Crime, like 
insanity, is associated with certain well-defined, abnormal "physical conditions. In the 
light of modern science the criminal is a sick child. He isa patient and the reforma- 
tory is a hospital for the cure of his malady. 

How like the old teachings of Scripture do these new findings sound! The sin- 
ner is sick. His rebellion is the delirium of sin, for when he comes to himself he 
comes to his Father. ‘‘Forgive them, they know not what they do,” is the prayer of 
profound: insight and compassion which the dying Savior offers for His guilty 
murderers. God pities His sick children. With increasing emphasis we read the 
Gospel of wholeness preached by the Master. There is new meaning in the fa 
that Jesus paid so much attention to the mental and physical conditions of mem. 
With some, healing preceded forgiveness; with others, forgiveness came first im 
order. In either case healing and pardon were granted that sin might be conquered 
Jesus laid startling emphasis upon the duty of His followers to minister to the bodies 

of men. The hungry must be fed, the naked clothed, the sick healed and the insane 
restored to reason; and all this in the interests of the higher life of humanity. The 
power to do this was a part of the “greater works’ He prophesied for His followers. 
Thus the work of the Great Physician was but the forerunner of the modern scientific 
movements which are helping men to holiness by helping them to health and sanity 
It is an established fact that certain abnormal physical conditions tend to certain 
types of crime. It is equally true that by careful attention to hygiene, nutrition, exer 
cise and mental occupation, structural changes take place which, by restoring the 
physical to normality, reform the criminal and cure the patient. Every soul begins 
in and is shaped by a human body. Why should it be thought a thing incredible to 
re-shape the moral nature by obedience to the laws of God? Prison reform is but a 
concrete expression of the Father’s love, who in pity seeks to heal His sick child, the 
criminal, and thus restore him to his place in the divine family. “Arise and walk,” 
“Go, sin no more,” is still the message of Christ to a palsied humanity. 

The old idea in punishment was retaliation and vengeance. It was an eye for ar 
eye, and a tooth for a tooth. This primitive notion is fast giving way to the saner an¢ 
more divine conception that sees in all penalty a method for the protection of society 


oF 


God’s Child, the Criminal—Pickard. 629 


and the reformation of the wrong-doer. It is inconceivable that the pitying Father of 
the Psalm and the loving Father of the Gospels could punish sin with any other end 
in view than the good of His children. Love seeks not her own. To administer 
penalty as a vindication of the majesty of government is unrelieved barbarism. A 
good government does not need such vindication, nor do such methods produce the 
expected results. God is not seeking to save His dignity but His children. He is not 
willing that any should perish. 

On the other hand this idea of the ends of disciplinary justice has nothing in 
common with that sickly sentimentality that coddles the sinner and insults God by 
calling Him an indulgent parent. This is gush and not Gospel. God's pity is not an 
exhibition of weakness but an expression of the saving strength of the Holy Father, 
whose pity for the sinner is but the other side of His righteous wrath against sin. 
The discipline of life is real. The way of the transgressor is hard. He that will not 
work neither shall he eat. The wages of sin is death. All this is a definite expression 
of a divinely ordained disciplinary process, the object of which is to teach every child 
of God to pray, “Father, thy will be done.” Punishment may be administered in 
implacable-anger: discipline is the specific effort of love to transform the ignorant 
child into the likeness of the Father. Of Jesus Himself it was said that “He was made 
perfect through suffering.” It is enough that the servant be as his Lord. 

Here again is a striking picture of the motives and methods of modern criminolo- 
gists. For the state to administer punishment as vengeance is a barbarian phase. 
To carpet with velvet the cell and spray with rose water the idle and unrepentant 
criminal, while he leisurely dines upon the luxuries of the season, is a morbid senti- 
mentality, akin to the criminality it encourages. Human justice is nearest the divine 
when it seeks to protect the innocent and reform the vicious. Society must be saved 
from the contagion of its sick members, hence it builds a reformatory, a hospital, in 
which they may be detained while a cure is taking place. The vicious need protec- 
tion from society to whose errors so much of the world’s wrong doing is primarily 
traceable. Many a drunkard seeks relief from the saloon by voluntarily taking 
refuge behind prison walls. The criminal often needs protection from his friends, 
whose mistaken treatment and false ethics make a cure impossible. The criminal, like 
the delirious patient, needs protection from himself. The insane left to themselves 
and their friends, seldom recover, but placed in charge of experts in a hospital, their 
chances for restoration greatly increase. Yet no judge who commits a patient to 
the care of such an institution ever thinks of vengeance or feels that the majesty 
of an offended law has been vindicated. The only thought possible is the true one in 
dealing with crime, the desire to protect society and cure the criminal. The universal 
prevalence of this spirit, which is the spirit of the Lord’s prayer, is that for which the 
prison reformer ever prays. 

In dealing with His child, the sinner, God makes use of time as a factor in the 
process of salvation. No child who has lived long in the far country can develop 
instantly the ability to appreciate the full privileges of sonship. It requires something 
more than quick repentance to make a saintly character out of a riotous sinner. The 
hungry prodigal may appreciate the fatted calf but it will take a life time to teach him 
to appreciate the Father’s love. Men may be converted instantly but transformation 
is a process limited only by the duration of the immortal life. Continuous liberty is 
the fruitage of continuous obedience. The divine Father cannot give His child a 
character, for character is a growth in which choice is a permanent factor. ‘As 
many as receive Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God.” There 
is no man so good that he has not had reason to say, “Before I was disciplined I went 
astray but now have I kept thy law.” On the other hand the unthinking and rebellious 
child may hear love’s entreaties, and see love's sacrifices and suffer love’s discipline 


630 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


without being in the slightest danger of repenting. No plan has ever been revealed 
by which God proposes to make bad people good without their own consent; and 
who shall assume to measure the utmost depths of the abyss of human resistance to 
divine grace? “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life” is a solemn judg- 
ment that will be true so long as the child prefers swine-herding to sonship, 


The central point in the present day movements for prison reform is the determi- 
nate sentence. In the ideal plan criminals are committed not for some specific term 
of months or years, but until they are genuinely reformed. This method rests upon 
the broad foundation that the ends of justice and the protection of society are fully 
met when the criminal so changes his mind that he becomes a self-respecting and 
self-supporting citizen. Society’s first duty to the insane patient and his friends is to” 
place him in a hospital. Its second duty is to adopt those methods of treatment which 
experience has shown to be miost likely to cure. A third and equally imperative obli- 
gation is to release the patient as soon as he is cured, but never till then. This is 
the divine method of discipline that underlies the modern methods of dealing with 
the vicious classes. The convicted criminal should be imprisoned; while in prison, 
every effort should be made to cure him; when his record gives evidence of a disposi- 
tion sufficiently reformed so that he can be trusted with liberty, parole him; if the 
cure proves permanent, forgive and release him; if he prove incapable and incorrigible, 
after long and patient efforts to save him, detain him for life, no matter how slight his 
first offense. Our right to keep a man in prison stops when he ceases to be a criminal, 
and while he remains a criminal we have no right to turn him loose to prey upon 
society and insure his own destruction. The practical workings of this system have 
revealed the startling fact that the average criminal dreads the indeterminate sentence, 
He revolts against any plan that suggests reformation. By years of training in 
wrong-doing his heart is fully set in him to do evil. He refuses, at first, to join in a 
campaign against himself. He does not want to be good. But the indeterminate sen- 
tence sets before him an open door. He sees everywhere the inspiring promise, This 
do and thou shalt live. The majority beginning to do, slowly begin to live. They 
come to themselves at last. After discouraging failures and inspiring victories they 
walk forth, free men, ready to testify, ““All chastening seemeth for the present to be 
not joyous, but grievous; yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have 
been exercised thereby, even the fruit of righteousness.”” But some are incapable and 
incorrigible. No motive appeals to them. They wax worse and worse. Deliberately 
and repeatedly they condemn themselves to a hell of life imprisonment at hard labor, — 
their only companions, rebellious spirits like themselves. The statistics of the reform-— 
atories that are being operated upon this scientific and therefore divine order, show 
conclusively that as high as eighty per cent of the persons so treated do really reform 
and go out into the world honorable and useful members of society. In many ways 
the old ideals and methods involve a criminal treatment of crime, actually hindering — 
reformation rather than helping it, and increasing crime rather than decreasing it, 
That only is a method worth saving which saves. r. 


Ideas must become incarnate to influence humanity. Abstract notions of good- — 
ness are impotent to save. The Word must become flesh and dwell among us. Fath-— 
erhood can only be revealed through sonship. He that hath seen the Son hath seen 
the Father. God’s revelation of Himself finds its consummate expression in the man 
Christ Jesus. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. When God 
would teach His children a great truth He first pours it into a great heart. Voltaire 
says, ‘“When God wished an idea to make the circuit of the world he first kindled it . 
in the heart of a Frenchman.” The secret of every reform is an incarnation. 

Again, the movement we study bears the imprint of the divine. From every side 
comes the testimony that the success of prison reform is in the embodiment of its high 


z- 


a 


God’s Child, the Criminal—Pickard. 631 


ideals in a strong, pure and sweet personality. A theory of reform is as futile to save 
men as a theory of nutrition is to feed them. The machinery of a model reformatory, 
with corrupt political henchmen to manage it, will be a source of peril. Every reform- 
atory that does not need reforming, must have at its head and among its workers, 
persons qualified by spirit and special training to exemplify the essential elements of 
a redeemed manhood. God's child, the criminal, can only be saved by the transform- 
ing power of direct contact with God’s child, the righteous. Prisoners, like children 
and animals, read character at sight. They feel goodness and reality and detect cant 
and hypocrisy with intuitive swiftness. Alas, when persons with base hearts are set 
to make good men out of the weak and wicked. Mrs. Ellen C. Johnson, for many 
years the devoted and successful superintendent of the Sherborn reformatory for con- 
vict women in Massachusetts, relates an incident in her experience that teaches its 
own lesson. A woman was committed to her care who resisted all the influences 
brought to bear upon her to induce her to obey the rules of the institution. She 
remained obdurate and indifferent. Mrs. Johnson had had painted for the chapel a 
life-sized picture of Jesus forgiving the sinful woman. It was a striking work of art, 
and when properly placed and lighted, its figures stood out with realistic effect. On 
the evening that the picture was to be unveiled, she had the rebellious creature seated 
in a position where she would have the best possible view of the painting, and then 
seated herself near the patient that she might watch the result. After briefly telling 
the story, the lights were turned on and the veil gently drawn aside, revealing the 
figures of the kneeling penitent and the strong, but tender Savior in the act of saying, 
“Neither do I condemn thee; go thy way; from henceforth sin no more.” The effect 
was magical. A subdued applause burst from the audience which quickly subsided 
into a profound hush. The leaden face of the incorrigible woman suddenly flushed 
and lighted up as though a flame had been kindled within the depths of her being. 
With eyes suffused with tears and with gaze fixed upon the scene, she did not heed the 
signal for retiring, but remained riveted to her place by that vision of the forgiving 
love of the Master. A new era had dawned in her life. There was begun in her that 
hour a reformation that broadened into a transformation. Under the sweet spell of 
a vision of love her deprived and depraved heart was changed until later she was dis- 
charged, cured. Blessed is the one who so incarnates his Heavenly Father's saving 
and health-giving grace that his criminal brothers and sisters may be won thereby to 
a life of virtue, purity and service. 

We come to the crowning fact in the program of Fatherly grace. God’s remedial 
love is primarily preventive. It is no part of the divine plan that men should be 
thrown into the fire that the goodness of God may be displayed in their rescue. We 
are not to sin that grace may abound. Nay, rather, grace most abounds in the life 
that has been saved from the necessity for such salvation. It is no part of our ritual 
to worship the prodigal son, even though we rejoice with heaven over his return. 
The occasion for rejoicing would have been greater had he never gone astray. 
Christianity sets a child in the midst and says, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” 
There are those who have never been conscious of living in any other than filial rela- 
tions with God. This is the highest point of Christian experience. When this experi- 
ence becomes universal the will of the eternal Father will be done in earth as it is 
in heaven. 

All advocates of prison reform plead for such modifications of our present social 
conditions as will make it impossible for God’s children to become criminals. Divine’ 
as is the work of restoration, the work of prevention is more divine. The father who 
with criminal carelessness permits his children to contract a contagious malady has 
poor claim to paternal love because he succeeds in nursing back to life one of the 
Stricken group. We are praying with new emphasis the old prayer, “Lead us not into 


632 .Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


temptation.” This prayer will be fully answered when every child born into the world 
has an even chance to be good. It is the teachableness of the young that makes the — 
perpetuation of the criminal possible. It is the teachableness of childhood that makes 
the salvation of the criminal classes a possibility. Here is a bit of carbon. Which | 
shall it be, soot blacking the white walls of the city, or, diamond, sparkling with brill- 
iancy upon the finger of the king? The elements are the same. Charcoal, educated 
and disciplined, becomes diamond. Charcoal, neglected and untrained, is common 

soot. Our Father pities His children for He remembers that they are dust; and pity: 
ing He seeks to inspire us to give every lump of common carbon a chance to become: | 
a diamond of dazzling purity. The children born in the slums do not become crim- 
inals because they were born there, but because they live there. The startling state- 
ment is made that not ten per cent of the criminals now in a large penal institution 
are the children of criminals. Environment is far more potent in shaping character — 
than heredity. The duty of society is not simply to rescue occasionally one from the 
slums but to save the slums by making them impossible. : 


be half done. Then offer to young Ne fier same protection and training outside 
the reformatory walls that are given within, and the work will be finished. Alas, as it 
now is, the number of criminals is daily increasing. Prisons can scarcely be built fast 
enough to receive the recruiting army of the vicious; and all this, not because th 
world grows worse but because we are not wise enough to follow the divine order of 
prevention and cure. If one half the annual expenditure entailed by crime in the 
United States could be spent in scientific methods of prevention, a sweeping stride in 
the forward movement would be taken. Let us pray for grace to do our duty. 

The great Howard, good as he was great, dying in 1789, said: “Lay me quietly 
in the earth, place a sun-dial over my grave and let me be forgotten.” But such lives 
can never be forgctten. No good life is ever lost. It lives again in the larget move 
ments of the next generation. Let us thank God that the shadows on the old dial 
above Howard’s grave announce that the day is hastening forward. There is no 
power that can halt its onward march. The world’s golden age is in the path of th 
rising sun. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Let us by Christ-like devotion to 
our God and our brother, hasten forward the slow-moving hours. Brothers, be nc E 
impatient. The sun-dial has no message for us save as the shadows fall upon its” 
silent figures. Shadows are children of the sun. Therefore, for sunshine and shadow . 
we devoutly give thanks as we hopefully await the coming of high noon, when in 
God’s family there will be no criminal children. 


[Ward Beecher Pickard, D. D., pastor Epworth Memorial Church, Cleveland, 
born in Rochester, N. Y., June 1, 1853. His ambition for a college education was ne 
realized, and began saute ina printing one Several years later he was called to 1 


$300. He was given degree of D. D. by Mount Union College. 
This sermon was delivered before the National Prison Congress, and ae 
great deal of attention among a large audience of men who have to do with criminals] 


(633) 


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4 
¥ > 


THe BELIEVER’S UNION WITH THE LORD. 


ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D. D. 

Daniel Webster, when asked what was the greatest thought that ever impressed 
his mind, replied, “The greatest thought that ever took possession of my intellect is 
‘my personal responsibility to God.”’ If I were asked what is the greatest thought that 
ever took possession of my own mind I think I should say, that it is my personal 
union with Jesus Christ. The thought that possessed Webster was the thought of 
‘duty and of danger. But the thought that most overwhelms me is one of transcendent 
privilege and delight—heaven on earth. 

We talk a great deal of consecration. But, in the highest sense, there is not a 
living man or woman that can consecrate himself or herself. There is just one thing 
we can do: We can separate ourselves unto God, but His must be the work of 
consecration. And I would, by God's grace, bring to you a refreshing word of God 
that may be an antidote to wounded spirits that winced under the sharp sword thrusts 
of the morning, an uplifting and healthy thought—one thought that may assist you in 
your own separation, and give you increased faith to count on God to add the conse- 
cration. 

In the first Epistle to the Corinthians, sixth chapter and the seventeenth verse, 
are these words: “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit,” that is, one spirit 
with God. The analogy is drawn from the marriage relation. He that is joined 
unto his wife is one flesh; but he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. That text 
possesses to my mind a very great importance and beauty for two great reasons. In 
the first place, because it is the key to both of the two Epistles to the Corinthians. 
It introduces every thought of any consequence from the opening verse of the first 
chapter to the closing verse of the last chapter. And the second charm that this text 
has is, that, in those ten words, ‘He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit” (eight 
words in Greek), there is more sublimity, of magnificent and inspiring truth, than 
in almost any other equal number of words in the New Testament, and, especially, the 
climax of all representations of the unity of the believer with Christ. May God help 
us to follow the lead of the Holy Ghost for a little time, in considering this text. 

It is a great thing to get hold of the key that unlocks one of God’s inspired books. 
For each one of these books is itself a House of the Interpreter, and, if you can get 
the Interpreter Himself to go with you through His house and unlock all the various 
apartments of it, and show you the beauties that are in them, there is perhaps no 
more transcendent privilege given to the sons of men. 

I. Take this conception, “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit,” and 
consider it as, first, an expression of our unity with the Lord. There are seven forms 
of figure which, in the New Testament, set forth this union of Christ with the believer, 
and they run through the whole range of possible figures of speech. There is one that 
is drawn from the purely animal kingdom,—the sheep and the shepherd (John 10). 
There is one that is drawn from the vegetable kingdom,—the vine and the branches 
Qohn 15). There is one drawn from the mineral kingdom,—the building and the 
living stone (Ephesians 2). There is one that is drawn from the human form,—the 
body and its members (Ephesians 4). There is one that is drawn from the family 
relation,—the family and its members, or the state or commonwealth and its citizens 


. 


634 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


(Ephesians 2:3). There is one that is drawn from the marriage relation,—the brid 
and the bridegroom (Ephesians 5). But you go through all these representations, 
and touch the climax only when you get to this sixth chapter and seventeenth verse. 
of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, ‘He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit’ 
You will see that all the other figures of speech suggest a union of which it is at leas 
conceivable that such union may be broken. The sheep may be separated from 
shepherd, the branches may be cut off from the vine, the stones may be taken out of) 
the temple, the family may be scattered and its members alienated, the members of the 
body may be severed from the body, even the bride and the bridegroom may 
divorced, but how are you to separate spirit? Where is the line of cleavage whe 
you are to part or divide spirit? In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, when we reac 


chapter he shows the Holy Spirit penetrating a believer’s life, teaching the believer 
to talk to God, and say, “Abba Father,” teaching him to walk with God, and breath 
out his prayers to God, teaching him he is one with God in the holy harmony of 
eternal plan and purpose, then he ends by. saying, “Who shall separate us from the 
love of God? For, if the Holy Ghost abides in me, I am the Lord’s, and we two are 
one spirit. Who, then, is going to separate us?” This sixth chapter, seventeen 
verse, of first Corinthians, is a commentary on the eighth chapter of Romans. 
II. Now look at this text as a key to these two epistles. The train of thoug 
is profoundly beautiful and yet divinely simple, and the references in these two epistles 
are so scattered at regular intervals that they may be easily remembered by the slig! 
est effort,—for example: There are seven great points of light in these two epistl 
and they all have to do with this one central text. The first is in the second chapt 
of the first epistle, the next is in the sixth chapter, the next is in the twelfth chapter, 
and the next is in the fifteenth chapter,—you see they are separated by convenient dis- 
tances through the body of the epistle, as though it were not safe to mass ali these 
magnificent truths in one place, or concentrated light. You have got quite a littl 
space to get over the impression of the first great blessed truth before you c 
under the power of the next. When you come into the second epistle you find t 
more of these points of light: the first in the third chapter, the second in the sixth 
third in the twelfth, so that the location is easy to remember without even taking 
note. tL a 
These seven great blazing points of light all are reflections of the glory at the 
one saying: “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit;” and all that I shall tty 
to do is to give an outline of this thought as the Lord has opened it to my mind. 
has been so great a blessing to me, the greatest blessing I think I ever got out of 
New Testament, that I yearn to impart the blessing to others. “He that is joine 
the Lord is one spirit.” 
Observe, first of all, that this is literally true. There is a fashion that people 
of saying, “‘such and such statements are only figures of speech.” But do you know 
that, w Hee the Holy Ghost uses figures, the figurative means more than the litera 1? 
It is because the literal terms do not grasp or convey the grandeur of God’s thought, 
that He resorts to figures which appeal to the imagination and bring in a whole 
world of suggestions in order to give us some more adequate idea of what oi 
means. He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit, is literally true. When 
Holy Spirit comes into the believer and takes possession of him, the Spirit of God a 
the spirit of the believer are wedded, joined in eternal union, in an inseparable union,— 
wedded, so that, in the sight of God, the two are henceforth one. That is the precis« 


& 
t. 


- 


” The Believer’s Union With the Lord—Pierson. 635 


os 
/ 


jought. And well may we ask God for the grace to consider and apprehend any 
ght so awful in its glory and grandeur. Now let us trace, one by one, the seven 
of development of this thought, the seven conspicuous points of light in these 
two epistles. The basal thought of the whole is, that, if the Spirit of God and the 
apis of man are united by faith in Christ, then of course there must be upon the 
spirit of the Christian a mighty impression of the Spirit of God. And moreover 
we can all see that something of the attributes that belong to the Spirit of God must 
reproduce or, at least, reflect themselves in the experience of the believer, If, for 
instance, it were possible tonight that the spirit of Isaac Newton, or of Mendelssohn, 
or of Michael Angelo should take possession of men, and should, by some mysterious 
divine decree, wed my spirit in inseparable union, the proof and fruit of that would 
found in the fact that I would think philosophically as Newton did, that I would 
compose musically and perform instrumentally as Mendelssohn did, and would 
become skillful with pencil and chisel as Michael Angelo was. And it is incon- 
ceivable, if the spirit of any one of these great men should be wedded to my spirit, 
that the effect of that wedlock would not appear in my character and in the life that I 
lead. That is the great thought of both these two epistles,—the believer’s spirit and 
the Holy Spirit of God unite in holy wedlock and become one, and the Spirit of God 
in and through the spirit of man manifests godlike attributes and qualities. 


For instance, in the second chapter of the first Epistle, we are taught that the 
Spirit of God reveals to the spirit of man divine knowledge. In the sixth chapter 
we are taught that the Spirit of God puts the impress of God's patent right of owner- 
ship on the spirit of man that He thus unites to Himself, and even on his body. In 
the twelfth chapter we are taught that the Spirit of God working through the spirit of 
man uses man’s spirit and body for His purposes, conferring upon the human disciple 
divine endowments. And so the first verse of the twelfth chapter is this: ‘‘Concern- 
ing spiritual gifts I would not ye should be ignorant.” Then in the fifteenth chapter 
we are taught that the Spirit of God leaves His impression even upon the body that 
He makes His temple, so that, though that temple now has in it carnal elements and 
is going to be pulled down and dissolved in the grave, it is to be reconstructed 
entirely out of the spiritual elements in the resurrection, as God’s holy temple. That 
is the doctrine of the resurrection. 

If we go on, into the second Epistle, in the third chapter, we are taught that 
the power of the Spirit of God is seen in that mightiest exhibition of power,— 
transformation. Beholding as in glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into 
the same image. Then in the sixth chapter we are taught that the fact that the Holy 
Spirit weds our spirit, insures the holiness of the human spirit, which must reflect 
the holiness of the Spirit of God. In the twelfth chapter we are taught that, as the 
Spirit of God weds the spirit of man He imparts the bliss of God, so that one may 
hope for some such experience even on earth as Paul had, when he was caught up 
to the third heaven and while yet in the body saw and experienced unutterable things. 
Such is the line of thought, simple enough to be easily remembered, and yet un- 
locking all the grand apartments of the Holy Spirit in these two epistles. I will add 
that I have tried that key on every verse in the two letters to the Corinthians, and 
I have never experienced such an unlocking of any two books to my own mind as 
in daily studying those two epistles with that key in hand. 

Consulting brevity and simplicity, let us cast ourselves on the Spirit's help and 
for a little time look closely at what all this means. First of all let us remember 
that spiritual does not mean intellectual, pertaining to a man’s spiritual nature in 
contrast to his physical being, but in the Epistles to the Corinthians spiritual always 
means that which is possessed of, controlled and molded by, the Holy Spirit. A 
spiritual man is a Spirit possessed man, the spiritual body is a Spirit controlled body, 


636 Pulpit Power and Eloquence, 


a spiritual life is a life thrilled with the Spirit of God, a spiritual mind is a mind t 
responds to the thoughts and aims of the Holy Spirit. This is the force of the wi 
spiritual, which occurs in the two Epistles to the Corinthians sixteen times out 
twenty-six, or more than half the times of its use, in the entire New Testament, 
1. Now what is the doctrine of the first Epistle, second chapter? That a 1 

of this world, the natural man, though he may be a prince of this world, who. 
been trained in the best of its colleges, though he may have the greatest endowm 
by nature, and the greatest attainments by culture, is still a fool as to the t 
knowledge of God. Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, and the thought of m 
hath not conceived,—notice,—not one eye, or ear, or heart, but, if you take t 
all together, all that the eyes of men have seen, or the ears of men have heard 
that the thoughts of men have conceived, from Adam until now,—if you put 
results of human observation and imagination together,—_that would not repre 
the equivalent of one drop of the essence of the true knowledge of God which th 
Spirit can impart. 
On the other hand, take a little babe in Christ, that knows nothing about hui 
learning, has been through no schools of human culture, and that little child, tat 
by the Holy Ghost, will penetrate the deep things of God,—for, what the eye or 
or heart hath never known, God reveals unto the disciple by his indwelling Sg 
The whole of the second chapter is occupied with this thought; in that chaptei 
are told that the spiritual man discerneth these things, but he himself is discet 
of no man. If you are a spiritual man or woman, you are a stranger to every wo! 
man or woman; they do not understand your nature, or character, or motives 
purposes. The very people to whom you come to bring a blessing from God 
turn from you, because they do not discern or understand you or your message. 
natural man is as insensible to the higher truths of God as a blind man is t 
glory of a sunset, or as a deaf man is to the music of the cathedral; and the first 
of all is to acknowledge that I can know nothing definitely of the mysteries of 
until I am taught by the Holy Spirit; but, if my spirit and the Spirit of God ai 
wedded in eternal and inseparable union, the first proof and fruit of it will be th 
the Spirit will take the things of God and show them to me. “I thank Thee 
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the 
and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes.” I remembered that Dr. Doddrid 
said, that when he came to any passage of scripture that he did not understand, 
on which he found no light in commentaries, he used to go to one of the humbl 
men of his congregation, entirely unlearned in schools of men, but taught 
school of God, and he would say, “What do you think of that passage?” 1 
never once failed to get light on the obscurest mysteries of the Word of Gc 
Therefore, if you want to understand the Bible, get on your knees and read it 
your knees, or, if you do not literally search it on your knees, let your soul be 
down before God, and you will learn more in one hour of prayerful communi 
with the Spirit than in all the schools of human culture in a thousand years. a 
One of the mistakes of modern criticism is this: that men are taking 
Bible as though they could understand the mysteries of it as ‘readily as they 
understand Homer, or Milton, or Virgil, or Shakespeare,—that is a funde 
misconception, and leads to fundamental mistakes. 
2. The second great lesson we are taught in this first Epistle is in the si 
chapter, namely, that the Holy Spirit abiding in us leaves on us the stamp of Go 
proprietorship. We are here reminded that our body becomes, by the Spirit's 
dwelling, His temple. There are two things which pertain to the ownership 
a house: The first is the purchasing of it, and the second is the inhabiting ot 
In this case, the owner is God, and He has paid His price for the house, and th 
1.4 

x 


4 


The Believer’s Union With the Lord—Pierson. 637 


“moves into the house, and claims it as the occupant, so that there is no disputing 
s ownership. These two thoughts are what the Epistle presents in chapter six, 
are bought with a price,” etc. The body of the believer is the house of God, 
for first He purchased the believer's body and soul, and then the Holy Ghost moved 
3 and took possesion. And you are to think, not of your soul, mind, heart, will, 
md conscience only, as God’s house, but of your body as His temple. There never 
as a grander, a more awe-inspiring thought that ever took possession of me, than 
at, while I am speaking to you, this body is actually the occupied habitation of 
‘Holy Spirit. If I say a word that is wise and spiritual, the Spirit speaks in me,— 
pugh these eyes He sees, through these ears He hears, through these hands He 
, and through these feet He walks. How can a man give his body to the pur- 
s of sensuality and sin, when he feels it to be the actual residence of the Holy 
frit, the Spirit’s consecrated temple? ' 
_ There are some beauties of the Word of God that only Greek students can see, and 


nc the latter means the Holy of Holies. And when the Spirit says your body is the 
temple of the Holy Ghost, He uses not the former, but the latter and more sacred 
of those words. He calls your body His Holy of Holies. In the second chapter 
of the Gospel of John, when the Son of God says, “Destroy this temple, and in three 
- I will raise it up,” the word is the same ( vadv). The Holy Spirit calls the 
jody of a believer the Holy of Holies, as Christ called His own body, because the 
Holy Spirit is within the believer as He was in Christ. The sacristan (or sexton) 
of such a temple must be careful to keep the dust from accumulating there, and permit 
nothing to enter that defileth or worketh abomination, or maketh a lie, anything that 
will dishonor that unseen and divine Spirit who inhabits that body as His temple. 
Tf you can find any more sanctifying thought than that, I know not where. 

3. What is the third of these great conceptions? Look at the twelfth chapter 
and read about spiritual gifts. There the ruling thought is that the Spirit abiding in 
every disciple distributes spiritual gifts and spheres of service. You are to look upon 
every gift you possess as of God, and as bestowed for His uses and glory. In the 
seventh chapter the kindred thought is presented with regard to the secular callings 
of life, as here, of spiritual service. If a man is a master or servant he is to regard 
himself as so placed of God in his worldly calling, and to be content where he is, 
and as the Lord hath distributed to every man, so let him walk, and in whatsoever 
calling he is found, therein abide with God. Taking the two chapters together (7, 
12). we learn that both our worldly and spiritual spheres of life represent divine 
vocations and imply divine gifts or qualifications. Those who see that truth in the 
light of such teaching will never more call anything about their life “secular” and, 
by the grace of God, I for one never henceforth will. If this body is taken possession 
of by the Holy Ghost, whatsoever I touch is thereby sacred. When you sit down to 
a meal, it ought to be a sort of sacramental meal. For what are you eating, but to 
keep this house in vigor and strength for the Holy Spirit’s uses? If you write a letter 
what business have you to write a letter in which you cannot honor God? Is not the 
Holy Ghost moving the hand that pens the letter? If I expect the Spirit to anoint 
‘and use this tongue for the proclamation of the message of salvation, how can I 
use this tongue for any purpose dishonorable to that message, or to Him that 
inspired it? How can I pervert any member of Christ to the service of Satan or 
sin? Such a conception of the Spirit’s distribution of work and spheres and tools 
of service makes all toil sacred. 

_ A friend went one morning into Sir Robert Peel’s apartments when he was 
prime minister, and found him with the great despatch box of Parliament before 


a 


638 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


him, bowed over it in prayer. He apologized, begging pardon for intruding 
his private devotions. Sir Robert said, “These are not my private devotions, th 
are my public devotions. I was just giving the affairs of state over into the h 1¢ 
of God, for I couldn’t manage them alone.” There was a man who in the 
office of state abode therein with God. 

A friend of mine went ‘nto a hardware store in Philadelphia, to get a coal shor 
and said, as he tried the temper of one, “Is this a first-class shovel?” The propri 
said, “You would better look at it. I do not think you know much about shoy 
Notice whose name is on that shovel—it is his make. He is a first-class Chri i 
man and he makes a first-class Christian shovel.” That maker of shovels is 
superintendent of a large Sunday-school in Philadelphia, and an elder in a Pres 
tian church, but he prays about the quality of wares that go out of his factory 
well as about the quality of the words that go out of his lips, in teaching a Sun 
school. He abides in his calling with God. 

I believe we have not begun to know what the deep meaning of the Spit 
God is, in such teaching. In the book of Zechariah we read that the poets in th 
Lord’s house shall be as sacred as the bowls that receive the blood of the vi tim: 
offered on the altar, and that every pot in every house in Jerusalem shall be as sacre 
as the pots or bowls around about the Lord’s altar. This means simply this: ‘Th 
you as inhabited by the Holy Spirit, to whose spirit the Spirit of God is joine 
eternal wedlock, shall regard everything you touch as sacred,—shall no more 
out the duties of the kitchen from the circle of holy toil, than the duties of the puly 
and shall regard nothing to which God calls you as menial drudgery, as unwo 
the child of God. When we get that conception, everything we touch will be sa 
and we shall “‘practice the presence of God,” which Jeremy Taylor calls the “ 
instrument of holy living.” 

4. In the fifteenth chapter we have another conception connected with 
union with the Lord, namely, that the Spirit leaves His stamp of proprietorshi: 
this body. The other day, in conversation with Dr. W. G. Moorehead, I heard 
say that there was no place in the Bible where it teaches that the Spirit of 
having once taken possession of a believer’s body, ever leaves it; and he sugg 
that even when that body is lowered into the grave the Spirit of God still poss 
it, and that is the secret of its glorious destiny, when, leaving corruptible eleme 
behind, it shall come forth a spiritual body, perfectly fitted for the Holy Spiri 
residence. And he adds that, if anybody is disposed to dispute this theory, he v 
still maintain that the Spirit at least hovers over that grave, until that day wh 
suddenly at the voice of the archangel he shall instantly bring that temple out 
its apparent ruins in the beauty and glory of resurrection life and power. 

When the great Dr. John M. Mason buried his son from the hall of Lafane 
College, and the young men went to carry the body out through the aisle of 
church, he said, “Young men, walk softly; you bear the temple of the Holy Ghost.’ 
My brother; the Holy Spirit having once left on your body the stamp of God’s 
prietorship and ownership, that body forevermore belongs to God. It is the te 
of God that He is going to look after and bring forth in beauty when the a 
process is complete, whereby all carnal elements are purged away. 

5. We now come to the fifth of these great lessons, as found in the second 
Epistle, third chapter: God’s Spirit abiding in Me assures My transformation into 
God’s image. We read that “where the Spirit of God is there is liberty,” liberty not 
for us to do as we please, but liberty for Him to accomplish the things that He will. 
Take the figure of a camera as an illustration of the transforming process. How do 
you get a picture? You put a sensitive plate in the camera, with a cloth thrown over 
the front, then you place before it the object you would photograph and let in ‘the 


as 


The Believer’s Union With the Lord—Pierson. 639 


ght. You must have four things in order to take a photograph: the sensitive plate, 

he camera, the object to be photographed, and light to assure an impression. So, if 
fou are to be changed into the image of God by the Spirit of God, you must have a 
livine object or image—the Christ; you must have the light—the Spirit; and the 
ensitive plate—the receptive human spirit made sensitive by the Spirit of God to 
livine impressions; and then the camera of the Word, the medium between the divine 
mage and the human soul. Thus beholding and reflecting that image more and more 
rou take the impression of the image until by and by you represent permanently that 
mage in your own spiritual character. The spirit of man brought thus into contact 
vith the likeness of Jesus Christ as seen through the Word is impressed by it, until, 
yy and by, the spirit of man incorporates that likeness to Christ into itself. Let me say 
ight here that there can be no real growth in grace except so far as the Word of God 
s used. You may just as well try to get a photograph without a camera. You might 
lave your sensitive plate, the light, the object, you cannot get your picture without 
hat camera. There is a neglect of two things in these days which is very alarming: 
yrayer that makes and keeps the soul sensitive, the study of the Word of God, that 
ransmits the image of God into the soul. 


Nothing shows power like transformation of worthless material into beautiful and 
aluable products. Take the Stradivarius violin. He went out in the forests around 
bout him and selected more than forty different kinds of woods; he had trained him- 
elf by the eye and touch so that he could detect the density of the wood, its age, and 
iber, and estimate its resonant faculty, so that he knew just where to put each of those 
lifferent kinds of wood in the violin. The belly and back, the sides, the bridge, the 
yottom, the neck and head, the keys, all made of different kinds of wood, so that the 
oper equilibrium might be maintained in all parts of the violin, and the most perfect 
armony and responsiveness. I have no hesitation in saying that the violin is the 
nost perfect instrument ever made, upon which there never probably will be any 
urther advance in the matter of perfection, as for a hundred years there has not been 
_ change made in its construction by way of essential improvement. The glory of 
Stradivarius was that he could take ordinary common woods and make them into an 
nstrument that most perfectly resembles the human voice and responds most sympa- 
hetically to all the moods of the human soul. So God takes human beings with their 
Irunkenness and sensuality, and blasphemies and lying, and all forms of wickedness, 
ind makes them without blame or blemish in His sight, unreprovable even in His 
ight, responsive to His Spirit. 


6. Now in the sixth chapter of the second Epistle, we are brought to that central, 
il-controlling thought, Separation unto God. How is this thought brought before 
is? Look at the last part of that sixth chapter. “Be ye not unequally yoked together 
vith unbelievers; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and 
what communion hath light with darkness? What part hath he that believeth 
vith an infidel?” and so on. Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. Paul 
ises five words from the Greek tongue to express the one idea of separation: what fel- 
owship; what communion; what concord; what part; what agreement, All these words 
1e uses. There are five questions, and their one answer is the same: there can be no 
0ssible union between such contraries. And what is the grand conclusion? ‘‘Where- 
ore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the 
inclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be 
My sons and My daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.” And now look at the opening 
of the seventh chapter. Is there a grander exhortation in the New Testament? 
‘Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all 
filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” He bids us 


640 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. ~ 


to separate ourselves so completely unto God, that there shall be no filthiness of the 
flesh (outward), or of the spirit (inward), and that holiness shall be complete. : 
How searching are these words! Think, for instance, of the filthiness of the 
spirit—how the memory, which should be a storehouse for the honey of the Word, 
a treasure house of evil, polluted with the unholy relics of the past; how the imaging 
tion, which should be God’s own artist, aiding faith by the representation of divine 
realities, is perverted to be the tool of Satan; how the conscience itself, God’s court on 
earth, is bribed and silenced in the interests of sin, and the will weakened and para- 
lyzed by habits of evil. How sublime is the truth, that the Spirit, dwelling in 
makes spirit, soul, and body His own, so that the body is a house of God with God’ 
name on the door-plate, and being God’s we are to be separate unto God in every: 
thing, and touch no unhallowed thing, but be cleansed from all filthiness of outward 
and inward life. 
7. The twelfth chapter presents the closing lesson of the seven; the Holy Spiri 
indwelling makes the believer capable of heavenly bliss even on earth. 
Paul, because united to the Lord by the Holy Spirit, had even while on earth 
actual foretaste of heaven, a vision of Paradise. And so far as we can discover 
reckoning back “fourteen years ago,” that ecstatic trance seems to locate itself at th 
time of the stoning at Lystra (Acts 16.) What a thought! that, just at the time wher 
he virtually suffered martyrdom for Christ, and was stoned and left for dead, he ¥ 
caught up to the third heaven! ; 
This whole question of getting possession of the Holy One is just as simple 
A, B, C, to the man or woman who actually wants to be holy. If you are ready to 
indwelt and separated unto God, as the temple of the Holy Spirit, in everything y 
do to ask what the will of the Holy Spirit is, to look upon your eyes as too sacreé dt 
be appropriated to the unholy look, to look upon your ears as too sacred for unhol; 
hearing, and to look on your hands and feet as too sacred to be appropriated for am 
purposes of the devil; and if you will constantly hold yourself before this blesse 
image of Christ, and:commune with Him through the Word of God, God will B es 
you with Himself—you may even know somewhat of the experience of Paul during hi 
celestial visions, when he was exalted to the third heaven. Are you willing to b 
stoned for Christ? It may be that in that stoning comes your translation to that thir 
heaven. Are you willing to be reviled, and revile not again? Are you willing to hav 
your own friends turn against you, and even traduce and defame you—are you wil 
to accept this for Christ’s sake? The Spirit is willing to make you holy—the imag 
of holiness is before you for contemplation, the camera by which holiness is to b 
reproduced in your life is in your very hands. But you must have silence alone wi 
God. And he who submits to the separation unto God, which is our part, will fin 
God faithful. He will accomplish the consecration, which is His part, and perfect u 
in holiness. Bb 


[Arthur T. Pierson was born in New York March 6, 1837; graduated Ha milto 
College. He served churches at Binghamton, Detroit, Indianapolis; Bethany Chure 
Philadelphia, and Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, and it was thought that 
would succeed Spurgeon. He is editor of Missionary Review of the World and 
considered the leading authority on missions. Among his published works are th 
Life of George Muller, numerous volumes on missions, Many Infalliable Proofs, et 

This sermon was reported for The Northfield Echoes and is reproduced here b 
permission. ] % 


if . 

4 

‘ THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE. 

5 HENRY C. POTTER, D.D. 

c “And the Lord came and stood and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. 


Then Samuel answered, Speak, for thy servant heareth.”—lst Samuel 3: 10. 
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of 
God. The powers that be are ordained of God.’—Romans 13: 1. 

The antithesis here, as you will see, is between the individual and what I suppose 
we must call society, or the state. And this is one eminent value of the volume in 
which we find it. The earlier pages of that volume, however archaic their style, can 
never be outlawed, for they are the eternally impressive story, in many guises and 
under many forms, of the way in which the soul awakes to consciousness. A country- 
man of your own, to whom I am glad, here, to own my indebtedness, has said in his 
Essays on The Limits of Individual Liberty, that: “The dawn of conscious life in 
society, as in the man, is the beginning of a new era. To some societies, as to some 
men, this dawn never comes. Continuing to be merely physical organisms they 
develop passively and blindly. In some societies, as in some men, conscious life 
never seems to pass certain bounds. Of the one class we have examples in nations 
which have never been civilized; of the other in those oriental nations whose brilliant 
civilizations have never emerged from childhood. But in no instance does either the 
man or the society become fully conscious.”* Now the verse which I have read from 
the book which bears his name, brings us to the moment when the youth Samuel 
became fully conscious. It is not hard to imagine what his life must have been until 
that moment. He was, by birth and lineage, an inheritor of that thing which often, 
singularly enough, seems to have a subtle power to stifle the spiritual instinct and 
consciousness—an ecclesiastical routine. Day by day this boy, dedicated to the 
ministry, as we should say, returned to the sacred place, was busied about the holy 
furniture and paraphernalia of religion—trimmed the lamp, doubtless, in the temple 
and wondered why it was kept burning—followed the footsteps of his aged master, 
the priest, Eli, and marvelled, as he saw the feebleness and senility of the old man— 
marvelled, with that fine and instinctive acuteness which is so often the unsuspected 
gift of youth—whether the functionary and his august duties had any vital relation— 
yes, and wondered more—what it all meant—what God was like, whether He ever 
really spoke to men—whether He would, some day, speak to him?—wondered and 
strained his soul to catch some note out of the all-encompassing silence—wondered 
and waited, and hearkened, until he heard! 

There can be no more supreme moment in any human history than such a 
‘moment. . The things with which most of us are ordinarily concerned are, essentially, 
so secondary and secular, that I suppose there are few of us here who, amid the 
dryness and the drudgery of it all, have not ached for the hour when to us, as to 
Samuel, there might come the Voice that singled us out of all the world, calling us by 
name and making us sensible of that paramount, solitary, august relation which binds 
together the parent and his child! 
| It was the office of the religion of Israel, first of all, to reveal that relation—to 
emphasize, and to illustrate it. The august and solitary figures of Abraham, of Moses, 


*The Limits of Individual Liberty: Montague, p. 90-91. 


642 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


of Joshua, of the great teachers and preachers whose clear note of warning or 
command rings through the pages of Isaiah and his compeers; these are what a 
us first in that story of how a race of bondinen found their way to be the rule 
their time. These men, with Samuel, had heard God speak to them. Alone, 
Samuel was alone, they had waited for his fuller disclosure of Himself—alone they 
discovered the evils of their time, confronted them, denounced them, and pre 
for them their sure and inevitable result. They were men who, in one sense, sti 
much apart from, and above their time; and whose power, doubtless, resided lars 
in a certain lofty isolation from their generation, which was itself a unique element ir 
the influence which they exerted. 2 
And at the first thought, nothing could be in more perplexing contrast with 
attitude than those other words which I have just read and which St. Paul ser 
his letter to the infant Church in Rome. Contrasted with earlier and scarcel 
imperial states, the Empire of Rome presented much the same forms of evil that 
threatened them and which had ultimately destroyed them. There were in 
assembled in that city of the seven hills which rivalled, if they did not exceed, 
that had gone before them from Sodom onward. And worst of all, the throne, 
visible authority, the scepter and the armies of a king, stood sometimes for cr 
as monstrous and for wickedness as rank and wide-spread as any that had stain 
histories of Ninevah and Babylon. “And yet,” writes one to whom all this 
and corruption must have been as much more revolting than to any prophet o 
older time, as his vision was clearer and more unerring, “Let every soul be sw 
unto the higher powers. There is no power but of God. The powers that be 
ordained of God.” 
Of course, the primary explanation of such words is to be found in the imn 
situation that provoked them. The men to whom they were written, we must fr 
ber, were Israelites mainly, to whom the Roman yoke was doubly hateful and 
rent. They were no brutal pagan captives, of servile lineage, and of godless nurt 
They were already the subjects of a sovereignty at once supreme and all-encomp 
ing. Because Israel was a democracy they could not be, save in a limited 
secondary way, the subjects of any other than God. And when the next relig 
came, and the Messiah, long promised and long waited for, dawned at last upo 
world, when the new message of hope and spiritual emancipation broke upon 
souls, it was no wonder that the chain, the oath, the allegiance that bound them to 
Caesar’s throne, galled and chafed them almost beyond endurance. ; 
“But no matter,” says the apostle, “you may not break or disown it. Here yo 
are, after all, in Caesar’s territory. Here you live, surrounded by Caesar’s govern 
ment; honor and obey it. Government there must be—the governing powers ther 
must be—recognize and respect them, “For there is no power but of God. Th 
powers that be are ordained of God.” Or in other words, the alternative of civ’ 
order, just as it is with the alternative of any other order, is chaos. Society stef 
up out of barbarism into the realm of social, municipal, imperial law, by an instin 
so sure and unerring that it reveals its divine origin. The peoples that hate lav 
and that irk against rule and order, are the peoples that stay savages. You are | 
have and enjoy your spiritual liberty, but you are to have it under those extern 
restrictions of individualism which, even in their most harsh and corrupt furms, ha’ 
not quite lost the lineaments of that divine source from which finally all authori 


comes. 
The subject thus stated sets before us the relations of the individual and 


society, in all our life of today, to authority. Apparently, the question of those rel 
tions, under the different forms of rule or of authority which prevai: in our time, is 
warious one, but essentially, it is identical. No despotism has ever been so absolute 


The Individual and the State—Potter. 643 


and it is certain that it never will be—as to ¢xtinguish that longing for the freedom of 
the individual, the story of the struggles for which makes up at once the pathos and 
he tragedy of history. We have come, indeed, upon days when the continuance of 
that struggle, in view of all that has been conceded to men in the way of personal 
rights and individual liberty, seems to be hardly any longer necessary. 

But the question still remains whether the constitution of our modern society, 
as most of us here today, whether living on one side or the other of the line that 
divides you and me know it, has, by all this various progress and emancipation, 
attained to its highest and best development. 

- It is this question of which I wish to speak for a few moments this evening. 
Here is one who cries with Samuel, “God has spoken unto me.” In silence, in visions 
of the night, as to one chosen and singled out; God has shown to me his mind,— 
concerning my own duty, concerning the social order, concerning great evils and 
injustices; and I must be free to own His voice and to do His will, as I understand 
them. That is the passionate note of the social reformer ever since the world began. 
Yes, and as of old, here, over against such an one is the civic authority, the inherited 
order, the slow-moving custom and tradition of the state. It is the problem of our 
generation, I venture to think, to strive to reconcile these two. 

But first let us strive to understand the problem. I have endeavored to set it 
before you in the person of the solitary Samuel hearkening for a voice which comes to 
him as the voice of God; and in the person of the apostle St. Paul, bidding his Chris- 
tian converts be obedient to the law of a heathen state. We may approach more 
nearly to the substance of the question which here challenges us, if we recognize the 
antithesis in the men. The first of them stood, undoubtedly, for a society, a state, 
a national life in almost its most elementary form. The other stood, on his human 
side, for that marvellous development of civic order which we know as the Roman 
empire. But what had made that empire was the coherence of rule, the sovereignty 
of authority, the triumph of law. And St. Paul, statesman as well as apostle, was able 
to recognize that such a result could have been achieved in no other way. He, too, 
had heard a voice. He, too, had owned a call,—solitary, singular, sovereign—which 
had chosen him out and bidden him 2way, as personally and as wonderfully as 
Samuel had been called. But it had not bidden him to break with his time. It had 
not summoned him to renounce his Roman citizenship. Still less had it bidden him 
to raise his hand against its social order. He came to his generation, rather to 
breathe into it a new spirit, to transform it by a new life; but not to disown its 
organized forces and powers, nor to destroy them. He came, in one word, to reveal 
to men, by all his life and ministry, the harmony of the individual freedom with the 
triumph of a righteous civic authority. 


It is that great struggle and endeavor, men and brethren, in your England and 
in my America, which has been the glorious story of these later centuries of the race 
to which we both belong. If there are countrymen of my own within the sound of 
my voice this evening they will not need to have me remind them that this fourth day 
of July is an anniversary in our American history which no one of us can ever be 
willing to forget. If I speak of it in this place, hallowed to us by love and precious 
memorials of our greatest and best, and in this presence, I venture to believe that I 
do so with the entire approval of the venerable and venerated scholar and divine, as 
whose guest, and by whose invitation, I stand in this pulpit this evening. He would 
not have me to forget, nor to hesitate to recall to your memories, that on this day, 
one hundred and twenty-one years ago, a young nation sprang out of your English 
lives, which, though she wrenched herself resolutely away from her mother’s con- 
rolling hands, had, nevertheless, already learned at the knees of that mother the great 
| nd enduring traditions which have made of her a free people. The right of popular 


644 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


representation;—the concept of an authority tempered and informed by a com 
consent;—the unity of liberty of action with oneness of allegiance to the chief 
tive of the people, whether he be king, or prince or president,—all these were th 
which she did not invent;—they stood for ideas which she did not discover, bu 
principles which had their root in free England and took their rise among your 
people. But what now was the one great problem with which, whether in 
methods of illustrating these principles, or in ours, that young nation was confror 
It was, I maintain, the problem of reconciling the instinct of individualism an 
of the need of a common subordination. Believe me, it is the problem which cone 
us both today. Human society in its best estate, whether here, in England, or él 
where, but supremely, I think, in your land and mine, divides itself into two class 
First there are those who, in the phrase of one of your own teachers to whom I 
already referred, *“have reproduced the brilliant paradox of the French Rev: 
that the individual is very good;—that society is very bad. Leave man, they 
the monitions of his own unprejudiced reason, of his own warm and kindly i 
These will guide him aright, while states and churches will only lead him astray 
.... Society exists in order to make the individual free. Once the individual 
himself free, he will develop everything that civilization requires. His unsal 
desires will constrain to industry; the multitude of workers will involve comp: 
and competition will stimulate to their growth all the virtues and all the facull 
man.” ‘ 
It must be owned that by this time we have had sufficient experience of the « 
of such a theory of life, and that it can hardly be contended that it has vindicated 
On the contrary, there is a large, and I am not sure that there is not a growin 
both with us and with you, that believes, often passionately, that the world is 
from too much individual liberty. The artisan and the laborer believe it; and 
to prevent freedom of action by their brother workmen. The capitalist be 
and combines with his brother capitalist to freeze out his smaller competitor; al 
along the line of human interests and activities it seems, sometimes, as tho 
dominant note were coming to be “You must not have your own way, and 
your own talk, and determine your own wage, nor seek to be free of your neig 
Well, in a very high and real sense, you must not. Our modern improve 
upon earlier forms of organized civic life—whether they take on monarch 
republican characteristics, is of only secondary consequence—must not fram 
selves for the good of the individual separately or independently of the goo 
whole. And just here it is that the words of our apostle run up into their 
meaning. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher power.” Ah, yes, O, 1 
woman, but what are the highest powers—whether above you or in you? For wt 
does the scepter of the ruler—whether governor, president, king—in the last analy 
of its force, stand, but for the voice of God—forever the highest power of all, 
in His law, speaking in His word, speaking in all human history, and most a) 
speaking in the person of His Son. And what is its message in Him but ¢ €! 
proclamation of His human brotherhood with all mankind, and yours and mine 
Him. But what are the laws of human brotherhood but these: “As free and t 
using your liberty as the cloak of maliciousness.” “If the truth therefore shall me 
you free, ye shall be free indeed.” “Took not every man on his own things, | 
every man on the things of others.” “Bear ye one anothers burdens, and so fulfill 
law of Christ.” These are the laws of the new era which, when men will both o 
them and live them, are destined to re-create human society by harmonizing indiv 
ual freedom and a beneficent social order, and so to usher in the kingdom that is | 
to be—the kingdom of God the Father and the dominion and republic of Jesus ‘Chr 


* Montague. Individual Liberty. Int. 3. 


The Individual and the State—Potter. 645 


In hastening the day of that millennial joy, men of Britain and men of America 
ay surely be glad to strive together and to prepare the way for it. It is not legislation, 
member, on your side of the Atlantic or mine, that is needed so much as the growth 
“i he fraternal temper. That temper, I maintain, is the temper of mutual gentleness 
‘ fairness, and what I may call, for want of a better word, hospitable-mindedness, 
ot contempt on your side, nor jealous resentment on ours,—not studied indifference 
ith you or studied misrepresentation with us, will build the better civilization that is 
be, but that temper of mutual right-mindedness which, going forward hand in hand, 
1S its keeping far more than any human force or forces, realm or realms in all the 


orld today, the better destinies of the race. Has it ever occurred to any of those 
f whom I speak tonight that there is a certain large and prophetic significance in a 


cent incident in our common literary history? The best account of you empire as 
sea power has been written, I believe it is admitted, by an American.* The best 
story of Democracy in America has been written by an Englishman. 7 These, 
rely, are triumphs in a mutual strife for excellence of which we can not have too 
any. 

May the spirit that has wrought in them prevail in all our future. There are 
me who would have it take form in more explicit alliance. But forms are, in 
ch a case, of very secondary consequence. Said a great statesman of your own, 
e other day, when I spoke to him of the recent marvellous extibition in connection 
ith the Queen’s Jubilee, of your colonial peoples and their achievements: “You 
k me if it will not draw us more closely together? Yes, I trust so, in many ways. 
ut not too closely, I hope. Large ships need to be anchored by long cables.” Who 
n tell whether there would have been any such day as we Americans are keeping on 
is fourth of July, if you had been willing to hold us with a little longer cable? But 
lat is written is written; and ours, now, may well be one common concern for our 
mmon future. May God teach us how to make it really great and glorious, and 
at we may, may He inspire us both, to weave anew the three-fold cable of a 
mmon faith, and law, and love, for all mankind, into a bond that nothing shall 
stroy. In such a hope let me borrow the words of your own poet, as he bids 
ngland sing them to her more immediate children: 


“Draw now the three-fold knot upon the nine-fold bands, 
And the law that ye make shall be law for the rule of your lands. 
This for the waxen Heath, and that for the wattle bloom, 
This for the maple leaf, and that for the southern broom. 


Now must ye —_ to your kinsmen and they must speak to you, 
After the use of the English in straight-flung words and few. 

Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your ways, 
Baulking the end half-won for an instant dole of praise. 

Stand to your work, and be wise—certain of sword and pen, 

Who are neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men.”’$ 


[Henry Codman Potter was born at Schenectady, N. Y., May 25, 1835. His 
ther was Bishop Alonzo Potter, of Pennsylvania. He was educated at the Episcopal 
cademy, Philadelphia; Theological Seminary, Virginia, and has taken degrees at 
nion, Harvard and Trinity, also Oxford and Cambridge, serving churches at Greens- 
irg, Pa., Troy, N. Y. and Boston; secretary to the House of Bishops for twenty 
ars and for four years coadjutor to his uncle, Horatio Potter, Bishop of New York. 
e is author of a number of works and his interest in municipal government and 
vic righteousness makes him the leading ecclesiastic in the east. 

This sermon was preached in Westminster Abbey, July 4, 1897, and is reproduced 
sre from manuscript. ] 

* Mahan. +Bryce. t Rudyard Kipling. The Seven Seas. p. 17. 


646 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE HEALING WATERS. 


WILLIAM MORLEY PUNSHON, D.D. 


“And it shall come to pass, that everything that liveth, which moveth, whithane 
soever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, 
because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and everything shall 
live whither the river cometh.’—Ezekiel 47: 9. 4s 

The last clause of the verse is that to which I especially direct your attention: 
“And everything shall live whither the river cometh.” Md 

I have somewhere seen a picture which, in brief words and from dim memories 
only, I will endeavor to describe. The scene is in the far East, the hour just when the 
earth is lighted up with that rare Oriental sunrise which we Westerns love to see; the 
time, the sultry August, when the fierce sun has it all his own way, and when the earth 
has a sickly cast upon it, as if it fainted almost beneath the intensity of the glare; the 
plain is scorched and arid, the river pressing within its sedgy banks seems to have 
hardly strength enough to propel its sluggish stream. There, on an eminence, beneal hh 
a group of ancestral palms, is a knot of Egyptian peasants, swarthy and muscular, their 
eyes strained wildly towards the south, in which quarter there seems to be an inde- 
scrible haze, forecasting the shadow of some atmospheric or other change. Why wait 
they there so eagerly? Why is their gaze fastened distinctly upon the point where the 
river glimmers faintly on the horizon’s dusky forehead? Because they are conscious 
from the experience of years, that the time has come for the inundation of the N 
They do not know how it will be swelled; they are not able to tell the source fro 
which the tribute is distilled, how in the far Abyssinia it gathers its volume of waters; 
but as certainly as if their knowledge was profound and scientific, they calculate upon 
the coming flood. And they know, too, that when the flood does come, that arid 
plain shall wave with ripening grain; there shall be corn in Egypt, and those blackened 
pastures will be gay with such fertile plenty that the whole land shall eat and be 
satisfied, “for everything shall live whither the river cometh.” So marvellous shall 
be the transformation that the Turkish description of the Egyptian climate shall almost 
hold good; that for three months it is white like pearl, for thee months brown like 
musk, for three months green like emerald, for three months yellow like gold. 


This picture has struck me as furnishing us with a very graphic representation of 
Ezekiel’s vision embodied in the experience of Eastern life. Nothing certainly can 
better image the moral barrenness of the world and the wilderness of sin than that 
plain upon which the consuming heat has alighted, withering the green herb and 
inducing the dread of famine. Nothing can better set forth the life and healing of the 
Gospel of Christ than the flow of that blessed life-giving river; and nothing can better 
show the attitude befitting all earnest Christian men than the attitude of these peasants, 
eager and earnest, watching the first murmurings of the quiescent waters that they 
might catch and spread the joy. 

There is, of course, a spiritual application of the vision, which appears to have been 
intended in the glowing language of Ezekiel, and that spiritual application is in the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ, made effectual by the Holy Ghost for the healing and for the 
salvation of men. You remember that, under the same similitude, the Gospel is 
frequently presented to us in the pages of the Word. After the similitude of living 


The Healing Waters—Punshon. 647 


water, its blessings were promised to the Samaritan woman; the stranger who lifted 

up his voice in the feast said that in the heart of each believer there should be a foun- 

tain springing up into everlasting life; and in identity between the seer of the Old 

Testament and the evangelist of the New, John saw a river of water of life, clear as 
_ crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. We do not err, there- 
fore, if we present to you these holy waters as emblematic of the scheme of perfected 
atonement, made vital by the Spirit of God, and adapted for the salvation of men. In 
this aspect of it, meditation for a few moments upon the source, the progress, and the 
efficacy of the healing waters, will not be out of place today. 

There is said to haye been a copious fountain upon the west side of the city of 
Jerusalem. At this fountain, which was called Gihon, Zadok and Abiathar, priests of 
_ the Lord, stood by the side of the youthful Solomon, and, with many holy solemnities, 
_ proclaimed him king. The prudent Hezekiah, foreseeing that in time of war its waters 
_ might be cut off by an enemy, conducted them by a secret aqueduct into the city. 
_ David found in the purifying virtues of-the fountain one of his choicest inspirations 

when he struck his harp and sang, ‘‘There is a river the streams whereof make glad 
the city of God, the holy place, the tabernacle of the Most High.” Now, it may be 
_ that there was some subtle connection of thought between this fountain and the vision 
which floated before the senses of Ezekiel, as the stream was from the foundations of 
the temple, and from the foundations of the holy house in the vision the prophet saw 
the healing waters spring. Be this as it may, the truth is significant to us that through 
the temple come to us the tidings of blessing, that the tidings do not originate in the 
temple, but have their source and origin that is invisible and afar. 


In God’s provision for the restoration of the fallen race there are both instrumen- 
talities and efficient agencies. He has appointed means, and although there is no 
innate power in means as God’s appointed channels of blessing, they are not to be 
despised. There is not now, as in the Jewish dispensation, any central spot where the 
holy oracles exclusively speak and where religion preserves its most precious and 

_ hallowed memories; the prestige and the sacredness of the old Jerusalem have passed 
away for ever, but the means of grace are invested with a sacredness that is peculiarly 
their own. There are special promises of favor yet for those who wait upon God and 
for those who call upon His name. They deprive themselves of a large inheritance of 
blessing, and are deeply criminal withal, who forsake the assembling of themselves 
_ together in the place where the ordinance of preaching is celebrated, where the sacra- 
A ments are duly administered, and where prayer is wont to be made. The ordinances 
i of religion may be, and very often are, observed only with external decorum. The 
song may be the formal verse, the prayer may be lip-service merely, and the whole 
service may be a Sabbath compromise with conscience and for a week’s indulgence in 
sin, but to the true-hearted and to the contrite it is from the temple that the healing 
waters flow. 

The heart, ignorant of God and of its own duty, dimly conscious that the recon- 
ciliation for which it pants must come to it through the merits of another, hears of 
Him in the temple, and is glad. The contrite one, loathing his former practices of 
_ iniquity, bows tearfully in the temple as he says, “The foolish shall not stand in thy 
sight, and thou hatest all the workers of iniquity; but as for me, I will worship toward 
thy holy temple.” Here, as in a spiritual laver sea, the polluted soul is cleansed by 
& the washing of water and the word. Here the poor children of sin smile through their 

tears as they are satisfied with the goodness of His house, and the lame halts 
“no longer as he emerges from this Bethesda of the paralyzed whose waters 
have been sent from on high. It is between the cherubim that God especially 
shines; it is among the golden candlesticks that God walks to bless His people. Here, 
as in a gorgeous and well-furnished hall of banqueting, believers eat of the fatness of 
% 
” aa 


‘is the only source of life, and that means, unless He vitalizes them, are but the letter 


648 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


His house and drink of the river of His pleasure; in the temple is at once the highest 
instruction, the sweetest comfort, the closest fellowship with God, and the amplest 
preparation for heaven. 

Brethren, your presence in the temple this morning proves that the way to it isa 
familiar road to you—but do you love its courts? are they homes to you—homes of 
endearment and of blessing? “The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than the 
dwellings of Jacob.” A gate more than a house—that is the Lord’s arithmetic in 
reference to the temples of His presence. ‘“The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more 
than all the dwellings of Jacob.” Are your likes like His? or like His servant’s—the 
holy psalmist—“that you may dwell in the house of the Lord, to behold the beauty of 
the Lord, and to inquire in His temple,” as the oracle where your eager minds may 
discover the perfection of truth, as a shrine where your enamored hearts may behold 
the perfection of beauty? Of! they who love the temple are the likeliest, standirg on 
its banks, to trace the source of it as it issues from the throne. So much for the 
instrumental agency. 

While we appreciate the advantages of the temple, while. we rejoice in the flow o! 
the healing waters, we must remember always that they issue from the foundations of 
the house, and that their springs are in the everlasting hills. In other words, that God 


that killeth—the shadow of good things to come. You are sufficiently instructed in 
the things of God to know that He has confided the great work of human redemption 
to no agency that is less powerful than His own; for, while the atheist cannot find 
God, while the deist is deaf to His revelation, and while the pantheist reduces Him to 
an abstraction, the heart of a good woman leaps up within her at remembering that all 
around her there is God—a living, personal, omnipotent, gracious God. 


One of the glorious beliefs which fence round our own individual faith, as with a 
rampart of impregnable strength, is this: that ever since the revelation of Christianity 
this tear-stricken world of ours has been not many days orphaned of a present God 
In olden time, God spake to the world in symbol, in vision, by thunder and by fire 
but even amid the comparative dimness of the Mosaic economy, the Son of God, as if 
impatient to begin His great work of redemption, paid preliminary visits to the scene 
of His future incarnation, and took upon Him the form of an angel, while yet the full- 
ness of time had not come for Him to take upon Him the form of a man. In the day 
of His flesh He perfected the work of atonement by one offering for sins for ever, n | 
ing no repetition, losing none of its rich crimson through the lapse of years. By one 
offering for ever, He gave the world at once its sublimest morality and its mo 
spotless example; vanquished death by dying, and gave the proof of the victory by 
resurrection out of a baffled tomb, and then, having furnished the instrument of propa- 
gation, and having promised the agent of propagation, He ascended up on high. 

Through the interval, heavy and trying to the expectant twelve, but not many da 
according to the calendar, the promise of the Father bridged over the chasm betwe 
the ascent of the Son and the descent of the Spirit. It was a solemn hush, like t 
stern silence that reigns along the line of battle between the hoarse word of comma: 
and the fierce onslaught upon the foe. The Savior had said upon the cross, “Tt 
finished,” and, as a token that it was finished—a token that neither men nor de’ 
could gainsay—He snatched up the thief by His side, and took him with Him as th 
first fruits of the Pentecost; and then, when He had chosen His disciples, and furnished 
them with every qualification for their great work, what was His language? Strange 
scene! “Go! but tarry. Do not march undisciplined and without a leader. Wai 
until, like the mysterious stranger that appeared before the camp of Gideon, the Caf 
tain of the Lord’s host shall come. Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be 
endued with power from en high.” And suddenly and richly that baptism of fine 


¢ The Healing Waters—Punshon. 649 


came—fell upon the anointed ones in the upper room, was kindled by their instrumen- 
tality in many hearts in Jerusalem, and has gone burning on until now. Oh! do you 
not see the fullness and the richness of the provision? The world could not be trusted 
without a God in it, and so, not many days after, God the Son went up, and God the 
Spirit came down. The issues pending were so solemn, the results of failure would 
have been so appalling to the universe of God, that there must be a present Deity in 
order to carry on the great work in the world; and so, while the atheist cannot find 
God, while the deist is deaf to His revelation, and while the pantheist deprives Him 
of His personality, here is God, the Holy Ghost, as the Christian’s living representative 
of God, as the great Inspirer, not of the ancient seers only, but of the modern truth, 
and as the great, constant, living Agent in the conviction and in the conversion of 
souls. 

Brethren, so soon as Christ had ascended up on high, the fullness of the Spirit 
came down. Is it not a comforting truth: ‘We believe in the Holy Ghost?” Is there 
any one who would wish us to blot that article out of our creed? Was there ever a 
time when it was more necessary for us to affirm it to the teeth of men, and in the face 
of hostile confederacies of error and of scorn? “We believe in the Holy Ghost.” 
What else would assure our confidence amid the insolence of error and the haughtiness 
of scorn, amid the craft of demon hate and hostile conspiracies of evil, amid the 
audacious wickedness of our own hearts, amid earth’s fickle people and earth’s banded 
kings? What else would fortify our trust in the Word, which has within it every 
element of opposition to ungodliness, but no element of triumph over evil? 


. 


Men say that truth is power. It is not: alone, it is as feeble as the pliant osier or 
as the bruised reed against the banded malignity of men; but let the Spirit come into 
it, and then it overcomes speedily, is brave, and is mighty to prevail. Brethren, that 
Spirit is in the truth which I preach in your hearing today. He has promised to apply 
the truth to every conscience and to every heart. Let us honor Him by asking for His 
presence. Prayer will be a profitless litany, praise will be a foolish tinklirng of cymbals, 
and our whole devotional service will be a bootless trouble unless He come down in 
the midst of us with His inspiration and with His blessing. We shall still dishonor 
God, we shall still be greedy to do evil, we shall still follow in the trail of the serpent, 
we shall still fall into a recompense of doom, unless the Holy Spirit inspire us. The 
prayer of the stammerer will be eloquent, the most tuneless strain a doxology, and the 
meanest offering an acceptable sacrifice, if only He inspire them; the darkness of the 
ignorant shall be enlightened, the distress of the contrite shall be soothed, the way of 
the perplexed shall be straightened, the wound of the apostate shall be healed, and 
visions of brightness shall break upon the dulled eyes of the dying, if only the Divine 
Spirit—God the Holy Ghost—be there. Here, then, are the instrumental and efficient 
agencies for the propagation of the Gospel of Christ—the flowing river, and the source 
of the river. “Everything shall live whither the river cometh.” It issues out of the 
temple; but its springs are away from the foundation of the house, far off in the ever- 
lasting hills. 

Let us notice, secondly, for a moment or two, the progress of the healing waters. 
You notice that in the vision the progress of it is presented to us as gradual and con- 
stant. The prophet saw the waters flowing first to the ankles, then to the knees, then 
to the loins, and then it was a river that could not be passed over; even a river for a 
man to swim in. The progress was gradual and constant. There was no ceasing of 
the flow; there was no ebbing of the waters; they gradually and constantly flowed in 
an ever-deepening stream. This is a description of the Gospel of Christ, small and 
feeble in its beginnings. Trembling but earnest fishermen were its first preachers; 
wealth, rank, patronage, and power were all arrayed against it; Czsars conspired to 
strangle it, and armies marched out against its fugitive sons. 


‘age in which we live. Here and there and yonder there have been manifestations of 


650 Pulpit Power and” Eloquence. 


Jerusalem filled with the doctrine; Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Athens 
Rome, all trembling beneath its denunciations of their vices within a century of its 
Founder’s death. “We are but of yesterday,” says Tertullian in his apology, “and we 
have filled your cities, islands, towns, and boroughs; the camp, the senate, and the 
forum.” Writers of the second century speak of the whole world of the Roman 
Empire as filled with the doctrine of Christ, and it is known that Constantine placed 
the cross upon the imperial banners, establishing Christianity as the religion of the 
state, and at the close of the fourth century, when Julian gasped out his celebrated 
dying cry, it was not the apostate only, it was the world that the Galilean had over 
come; and although after the establishment of Christianity there came an eclipse of 
faith, and blemishes disfigured somewhat the comeliness of the bride of Christ, yet its 
gradual progress among the nations did not cease. One after another they heard its 
tidings and submitted to its sway; insensibly it moulded the institutions of society and 
stamped upon them its own beauteous image; sanguinary codes were relaxed, unhol 
traffic was terminated, cruelty had its arm paralyzed and its sword blunted; fraud, lust, 
and drunkenness became no longer things of glorying, but things of shame; and there 
was a gradual uplifting in the moral health, as if men felt the bracing air-waves of a 
new atmosphere, and they wondered whence the healing came. , 
Oh! it was the river that did it all, flowing on, now in the gurgling brook, and now 
on the open plain, now fertilizing the swards upon its banks, and now rejoicing in the 
depths of its own channel, imperceptible almost in the increasing volume of its waters 
to those who gazed upon it every day, but to those who gazed upon it only at intervals, 
seeming to be widening and deepening every hour that it has rolled. And it is rolling 
still. Perhaps there never was an age of such quickened activity and privilege as the 


the healing power of the Gospel. You see the cloud rising and bursting over this and 
over that hill of Zion, in plenteous showers of blessing. Is it not so? Churches that 
for years have been languid have been quickened into a warmth of life which has 
astonished them, and the heart of old formalities has been smitten like the rock of 
Horeb, and the crystal waters have flowed forth even in the wilderness to rejoice the 
hearts of men. Ministers who have toiled disheartened, for years and years sowl 
the seed, as they fancied, upon the rock where it baffled the skill of the husbandm 
have been bringing their sheaves with the reaper’s bursting gladness, and everything 
has told that the moral summer of the world has been coming. And what is it all? 
Oh! just the flowing of the ancient river coming past our homesteads, its waters spark- 
ling in the healing sun, and the melody of the daughters of music on its banks making 
glad the city of our God. 

Now, brethren, if this be so, there are two solemn thoughts here.: Do not rej 
in the progress and forget the application: the one encourages our trust, the o 
reminds us of our responsibility. If it be really so that God has appointed that 
Gospel should spread and progress in the world, and if we get fastened into our spiri 
a conviction that this Gospel shall and must triumph, the only thing for us to mind 
that we are in the partnership, in order that, as workers together with God, we m 
be sure and have our share in the recompense when the sowers and the reapers shall 
rejoice together. Oh! if we could only get this thought fastened into our spirits, we 
should be preserved from unusual elation in the time of apparent prosperity, and from 
unusual depression in times of apparent languor. Opposition may crumble into dust, 
or, like mountains of ice, may melt before the warmth of the sun, while public ee 
changeful ever and always, may applaud the heroism or laugh at the fanaticism of the 
Church; legislation may benefit or may brand godliness (it has done both, and it will 
do both again with equal heartiness and with equal facility); the choicest of the 


: 


The Healing Waters—Punshon. 651 


| ~ Church's youth may press into the ranks of the ministry, with a holy emulation to be 
__ baptized for the dead, or it may leave the ministry to be recruited from the ranks of the 


comparatively mean and unlettered, themselves preferring opulence and lettered ease; 
the spirit of revival may spread like a beacon blaze from hill to hill, or it may be 
thwarted by indifference, or thwarted equally by the excesses of fanaticism of its 
votaries; good men may fall in quick succession out of Zion—but the Gospel goes on 

through all vicissitudes; it wins its widening way; it is never languid, although its 

_, advocates fail; it marches with the ages, or they wonder at finding it ahead of them in 
the great course of civilization, progress, freedom, and heavenly endeavor. Its 
doctrines never become antiquated, its face never shrivels up, and just as it was in the 
beginning, it is today. Time writes no wrinkle on its azure brow; there is immortal 
youth about it, and a fitness for the world of the nineteenth, as for the third, century. 
There is no modern error that can set itself up insolently without meeting the fate of 
Dagon before the ancient Ark. 


Christianity can be trusted by the world today as by the world of the early apos- 
tolic age; there is nothing can master it; there is nothing can retard or overcome it. 
It can gather its triumphs still, just as it was wont to do, from the very dregs and 
refuse of society; and if it wants its choicest apostle, it can take*hold of the blasphemer, 
the persecutor, and the injurious man, and lift him up into an apostleship, higher than 
they all. It saves sinners still; it comforts believers now; it shines with sweetest lustre 
in the chamber of affliction, and its praises are gasped from pale beds of death. Oh! 
you can trust the Gospel! If you believe that it is destined to prevail, and that the 
power of the Holy Ghost within it shall never suffer it to die, then, calm and free from 
tumult, catch somewhat of the spirit of the Master. All the troubles of the world do 
not affect Him. This man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat 
down.” Men do not sit when their work is going on; they are standing as long as 
there is anxiety about that. But “this man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, 
for ever sat down, expecting.” 


O the sublimity of that imperial quiet! “The heathen rage down below; it does 
not move Him.” He sits “expecting.” “The kings of the earth take counsel together 
against the Lord and against His anointed.” Nota muscle of His face moves; He sits 
“expecting.” “The people’ (worse than all external opposition), the people them- 
selves, “imagine a vain thing.” He that sits in the heaven still sits expecting until 
His enemies be made His footstool. He knows that the end will come; He has done 
His work, and He is satisfied; already He sees before Him of the travail of His soul, 
and the duty of imperial quiet which the Master has assumed should be the attitude, so 
far as the anticipation of the future triumph of the Gospel is concerned, of the Master’s 
people too. You will not be discouraged if your faith is strong, and if, with a living 
personality of consciousness, you believe in the Holy Ghost. 


Well, then, the second thought reminds you of your responsibility. How 
impressively it comes upon you! Being heirs of such a heritage as this, born in such 
a day of privilege, around which so many solemn associations and beliefs gather, 
surely there must be responsibility devolving upon us; for it is a law of God’s govern- 
ment that wherever there is power, there is a use and a mission for that power. Oh! 
it is a great thing to live in times like these, but it is a greater thing to be fit to live 
in times like these. It is impossible to live in such an age, an age when no ordinary 
privileges are enjoyed, when there is a special unction attending the ministration of 
the Word, where there are large and manifest workings of the Holy Ghost, without 
entailing an added responsibility to do anything which our fathers have done. We 
are the Chorazins and the Bethsaidas of the present in whom all God’s mighty works 

are done, and if the ancient Capernaum has a successor at all it will be surely in the 


652 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


nations where the light of Gospel truth has long been shining, and where the country — 
spreads her zegis over the worshippers, that none may dare to make them afraid. 

The question, then, presses itself upon all: Am I holier, am I more spiritually- 
minded, do I get heavenlier by my privilege day by day? The waters have been flow- 
ing past my homestead for years and years; am I perishing or thirsting by their side? 
Have I never stooped to drink them yet? Brethren, the waters wear the stones (that is 
a wonderful passage); but they are stones still, although worn. The waters do not 
change their nature, and what water cannot change it petrifies. Have you never heard 
of the dropping wells that have been outpouring continually for years, converting the — 
mosses upon the shelvy rock into the richest emerald that your eyes gazed upon? But 
what is the ground underneath? Cold, hard stone. And there are some consciences 
that have sat so long under the sound of the Gospel, that they shall never be broken, 
not even by the hammer of the Word. May God save us from such a doom! These 
thoughts have come, almost when I did not reck of them, in reference to the efficacy — 
of these healing waters. It is not necessary, therefore, for me at any length to enlarge. 
It has been almost impossible to avoid allusion to them in a former part of the 
discourse. The places, however, into which the waters flowed are very striking. They 4 
did not direct their course into spots that were very slightly defective, and, therefore, — J 
very readily healed; they did not impart a partial and temporary life under very 
favorable circumstances. They flowed into the desert and into the sea; into the desert — 
where no stream had flowed before; into the Dead Sea in whose sad, sluggish waters 
nothing which had breath could live. Thus their mission was to supply all that was 
lacking, and to purify all that was impure. : 

How complete and effectual the healing! ‘Everything shall live whither the river 
cometh.” And this is true of the Gospel of Christ. There is no desert of worldliness — 


which the Gospel cannot purge from its pollution and transform into a receptacle of © 
life. The completeness of the healing is one of the most agreeable of its characteristics, 
and furnishes to those who rejoice in it their loftiest materials of praise. The world % 
is a vast valley—a valley of the dead, without motion, without strength, without hope; 1 
but there is not one of those unburied corpses that may not be quickened into life. 
“Everything’—am I bold to affirm it?—‘‘everything may live whither the river 
cometh!’ The Gospel has life in it for all. Its voice can reach to the furthest wards — 
of the sepulchre, and there is no catacomb that is too remote, too crowded, or too 
loathsome to be visited and to be emptied; however long death may have had sway, 4 
the Gospel can chase it from the heart—ay, though time may have resolved the dust 
into dust again, and though the soul, like a mummy of the Pharaohs, may be swathed 
in its embalmment for many centuries of years, everything shall live whither the river Y 
cometh. ; 
Not only may each man be brought under the influence, but each part of each 
man may be redeemed: light for the understanding, that it may no longer be darkened 
by the clouds of speculative error; light for the imagination, that it may quench its — 
strange fires in the blood of the Lamb and snatch from the altar of His cross a brighter — 
and more hallowed flame; light for the memory, that it may be haunted no longer by 
the ghostly scenes and spectral thoughts of evil, but that it may hoard with miser’s 
care every fraction of knowledge and transform it into an argument for God; life for 
the affections, that they may spend the bloom of their intensity of love on an object 
upon which they can expatiate without fear of idolatry, and without fear either of 
treachery or change; life for the whole nature, that it may rise from the death of sin 
into the better life of God; life for the soul, that it may not be sullied even by the 
shadow of death, but that, in the pure white light of the Redeemer’s presence, it may 
go upward and upward into the sacred, high, eternal noon of heaven. “Everything 


fe 


ie 


The Healing Waters—Punshon. 653 


shall live whither the river cometh.” It shall flow into the desert, the life of God shall 
be implanted in the wilderness, and the whole nature shall be so turned about, that the 
barrenness shall become a bloom. ‘Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, 
and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree, and it shall be to the Lord for 
a name, for an everlasting sign which shall not be cut off.” It shall flow into the sea, 
_ and though the proud waters resist its influence, it shall overcome their frantic billows, 
and in spite of them shall heal it of its plague. 


Some of you may have seen what I conceive to be an illustration of this, as I have 
seen, in nature’s bounteous kingdom. I stood some years ago, on a bright summer's 
day, at the meeting of the waters near the city of Geneva, where two rivers meet, but 
do not mingle, the Aar and the Rhone. One with its beautiful water of heavenly blue, 
which it is almost worth a pilgrimage to see, and the other muddy, partly from the 
glaciers, of which it is largely composed, and partly from the clay soil which it 
upheaves, come meeting together from two several points. For miles and miles they 
go, with no barrier between them except their own innate repulsions; they meet, but 
do not mingle. Now and then one makes a slight encroachment into the province of 
the other, but is speedily beaten back again; like mighty rival forces of good and evil 
do they seem, and for a long while the struggle is doubtful; but if you will look far 
down the valley, into a quiet little nook, you find the Rhone has mastered, and covered 
the whole surface of the river with its own emblematic and beautiful blue. I thought, 
as I stood there and gazed, and there was a grand illustration of the ultimate triumph 
of truth over error; and in meditating upon this vision of Ezekiel, and reading that 
those healing waters shall flow into the sea and heal it, the scene rose up before me 
fresh and vivid, as if I had seen it yesterday, and as my own faith was confirmed, and 
my own apprehension quickened by the memory, I have sought in these few words to 
impart some of the vividness of the apprehension to you. ‘Everything!”,—oh! it is a 
beautiful thought, and I can rest in it because God has spoken it, otherwise the plague 
of my own heart would weigh me down; otherwise the great, the giant temptations 
that impart to my soul a struggling bitterness which no stranger may know, might 
well cause me to despond—“everything shall live whither the river cometh.” No 
impurity, no leprosy, no death which cannot be healed by the flowing of this life-giving 
river. 

There is hope for every one of you. Perhaps there has straggled into this room 
this morning some one whose life has been a treason and an outrage upon all the 
traits of humanity; some one who is looked upon even by society around him as a very 
Pariah, whom a high-caste Brahmin would hardly stoop to look upon, and would 
gather up the fringes of his robes as he passed him by, but to whom, as I speak this 
morning, the Holy Spirit has come, and has impressed upon him a strange, strong 
agony of desire to repent and reform. My brother, there is hope for thee, though 
thou hast far gone in evil; though thou hast blasphemed thy Maker, and trampled 
under foot the blood of the covenant, counting it an unholy thing; though thou hast 
gone so far that thou art almost standing upon the verge of the bottomless pit; though 
the ground is unsteady as if an earthquake slumbered beneath it; though the yell of 
demon voices sounds hoarsely in the distance, and the tramp of demon feet appears to 
be coming nearer and nearer, exultingly to claim thee as their prey—now in this crisis 
of your fate, one cry, one upward glance of penitence and faith, the silent whisper of 
prayer, and He who gives the penitence and imparts that faith will lift thee up out of 
the horrible pit, and out of the miry clay; He will set thy feet upon the rock of ages; 
will lift thee up higher that thou mayest sit in heavenly places in Christ, so that all the 
world, looking at thee and the Savior who has delivered thee, may say: “Is not 
this a brand plucked from the burning?” Who of you will accept this salvation 
now? “Everything shall live whither the river cometh.” 


654 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


you are to find some of their channels. By God’s blessing, those of you who love tl 
Lord, and have taken upon you the vows of discipleship, are here this morning t 
receive the tokens of a Father’s lowes in the Father’s house, at the Father’s table. 


ing hall—and His banner over you is love. 

The communion that you are to celebrate this morning is not a test of member 
ship in the Church; it is the feast of the faithful, when the Father spreads the board 
and all the sons and daughters come round, and feel the pleasure of His countenance 


the spoil. ” Come and renew your faith again; come and pay your vows again! 
David, in the olden time, was bewildered with the multitude of God’s mercies, and 
said, “What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits toward me?” how soot 
he came to the answer: “I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name | of 
the Lord. I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all His people. 
May He descend in the fullness of His real presence, and let us feel that the world i 
not today orphaned of a God! Amen. 


[William Morley Punshon, D. D., was born at Doncaster, in Yorkshire, May 28 ! 
1824, and spent his youth as clerk in a counting-house. At eighteen he exho te 
spiritedly as a local preacher, and soon received a pastoral charge. In 1851 he 
called to Sheffield, and a few years later his fame secured him a London pasto 
His discourses are carefully thought out and elaborated in all details, commi 
exactly to memory, and are delivered with a vim and magnetic power which captiva 
the feelings and entrance the wills of his hearers. He accepted the presidency of the 


the following year.] 


THE LONELINESS OF CHRIST. 


FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 


“Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now 
come, that ye shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone; and 
yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.”—John 16: 31, 32. 

There are two kinds of solitude: the first consisting of insulation in space; the 
other, of isolation of the spirit. The first is simply separation by distance. When we 
are seen, touched, heard by none, we are said to be alone. And all hearts respond to 
the truth of that saying, This is not solitude; for sympathy can people our solitude with 
acrowd. The fisherman on the ocean alone at night is not alone, when he remembers 
the earnest longings which are rising up to heaven at home for his safety. The traveler 
is not alone, when the faces which will greet him on his arrival seem to beam upon 
him as he trudges on. The solitary student is not alone, when he feels that human 
hearts will respond to the truths which he is preparing to address to them. 

The other is loneliness of soul. There are times when hands touch ours, but only 
send an icy chill of unsympathizing indifference to the heart; when eyes gaze into ours, 
but with a glazed look which cannot read into the bottom of our souls; when words 
pass from our lips, but only come back as an echo reverberated without reply through 
a dreary solitude; when the multitude throng and press us, and we cannot say, as 
Christ said, “Somebody hath touched me;” for the contact has been not between soul 
and soul, but only between form and form. 


And there are two kinds of men, who feel this last solitude in different ways. The 
first are the men of self-reliance—self-dependent—who ask no counsel, and crave no 
sympathy; who act and resolve alone, who can go sternly through duty, and scarcely 
shrink, let what will be crushed in them. Such men command respect: for whoever 
respects himself constrains the respect of others. They are invaluable in all those 
professions of life in which sensitive feeling would be a superfluity; they make iron 
commanders, surgeons who do not shrink, and statesmen who do not flinch from their 
purpose for the dread of unpopularity. But mere self-dependence is weakness; and 
the conflict 1s terrible when a human sense of weakness is felt by such men. Jacob 
was alone when he slept on his way to Padan Aram, the first night that he was away 
from his father’s roof, with the world before him, and all the old broken up; and 
Elijah was alone in the wilderness when the court had deserted him, and he said, “They 
have digged down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword: and I, even I, 
only am left, and they seek my life to take it away.’’ But the loneliness of the tender 
Jacob was very different from that of the stern Elijah. To Jacob the sympathy he 
yearned for was realized in the form of a gentle dream. A ladder raised from earth to 
heaven figured the possibility of communion between the spirit of man and the Spirit 
of God. In Elijah’s case, the storm, and the earthquake, and the fire, did their con- 
vulsing work in the soul, before a still, small voice told him that he was not alone. In 
such a spirit the sense of weakness comes with a burst of agony, and the dreadful 
conviction of being alone manifests itself with a rending of the heart of rock. It is 
only so that such souls can be taught that the Father is with them, and that they are 
not alone. 

There is another class of men, who live in sympathy. These are affectionate 


656 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


minds, which tremble at the thought of being alone: not from want of courage nor 
from weakness of intellect comes their dependence upon others, but from the intensity 
of their affections. It is the trembling spirit of humanity in them. They want not 
aid, nor even countenance, but only sympathy. And the trial comes to them not in the 
shape of fierce struggle, but of chill and utter loneliness, when they are called upon to 


found lodgment yet in the breasts of others. 

It is to this latter and not to the former class that we must look, if we would 
understand the spirit in which the words of the text were pronounced. The deep 
Humanity of the Soul of Christ was gifted with those finer sensibilities of affectionate — 
nature which stand in need of sympathy. He not only gave sympathy, but wanted it, — 
too, from others. He who selected the gentle John to be His friend—who found solace 
in female sympathy, attended by the women who ministered to Him out of their sub a 
stance—who in the Trial hour could not bear even to pray without the human presence, — 
which is the pledge and reminder of God’s presence, had nothing in Him of the hard, — 
merely self-dependent character. Even this verse testifies to the same fact. A ste 
spirit never could have said, “I am not alone: the Father is with me;” never wou 
have felt the loneliness which needed the balancing truth. These words tell of 
struggle, an inward reasoning, a difficulty and a reply, a sense of solitude—“I shall be 
alone;” and an immediate correction of that: “Not alone: the Father is with me.” 

There is no thought connected with the Life of Christ more touching, none that 
seems so peculiarly to characterize His Spirit, as the solitariness in which he live 
Those who understood Him best only understood Him half. Those who knew H 
best scarcely could be said to know Him. On this occasion the disciples though’ 
Now we do understand, now we do believe. The lonely Spirit answered, “Do ye mn 
believe? Behold the hour cometh that ye shall be scattered, every man to his ow 
and shall leave me alone.” 

Very impressive is that trait in His history. He was in this world alone. 

I. First, then, we meditate on the loneliness of Christ. 

II. On the temper of His solitude. 3 

1. The loneliness of Christ was caused by the Divine elevation of His chara ‘er. 
His infinite superiority severed Him from sympathy; His exquisite affectionatenes 
made that want of sympathy a keen trial. 

There is a second-rate greatness which the world can comprehend. If we take two — 
who are brought into direct contrast by Christ Himself, the one the type of human, the 
other that of Divine excellence, the Son of Man and John the Baptist, this becomes 
clearly manifest. John’s life had a certain rude, rugged goodness, on which w 
written, in characters which required no magnifying-glass to read, spiritual exc 
The world, on the whole, accepted him. Pharisees and Sadducees went to his baptis a 
The people idolized him as a prophet; and, if he had not chanced to cross the path of 
a weak prince and a revengeful woman, we can see no reason why John might not. 
have finished his course with joy, recognized as irreproachable. If we inquire why it 
was that the world accepted John and rejected Christ, one reply appears to be, that the 

life of the one was finitely simple and one-sided, that of the other divinely complex. — 
In physical nature, the naturalist finds no difficulty in comprehending the simple 
structure of the lowest organizations of animal life, where one uniform texture, and 
one organ performing the office of brain and heart and lungs, at once, leave little to | 
perplex. But when he comes to study the complex anatomy of man, he has the labor 
of a lifetime before him. It is not difficult to master the constitution of a single 
country; but when you try to understand the universe, you find infinite appearances of 
contradiction: law opposed by law; motion balanced by motion; happiness blende 
with misery; and the power to elicit a divine order and unity out of this complex 


= 


“ The Loneliness of Christ—Robertson. 657 


variety’ is given to only a few of the gifted of the race. That which the structure of 
man is to the structure of the limpet, that which the universe is to a single country, 
the complex and boundless soul of Christ was to the souls of other men. Therefore, 
to the superficial observer, His life was a mass of inconsistencies and contradictions. 
All thought themselves qualified to point out the discrepancies. The Pharisees could 
not comprehend how a holy Teacher could eat with publicans and sinners. His own 
brethren could not reconcile His assumption of a public office with the privacy which 
He aimed at keeping. “If thou doest these things, show thyself to the world.” Some 
thought He was “a good man;” others said, ““Nay, but He deceiveth the people.” And 
hence it was that He lived to see all that acceptance which had marked the earlier 
stage of His career—as, for instance, at Capernaum—melt away. First, the Pharisees 

_ took the alarm; then the Sadducees; then the political party of the Herodians; then 
the people. That was the most terrible of all: for the enmity of the upper classes is 
impotent; but when that cry of brute force is stirred from the deeps of society, as 

_ deaf to the voice of reason as the ocean in its strength churned into raving foam by 
the winds, the heart of mere earthly oak quails before that. The apostles, at all events, 
did quail. One denied; another betrayed; all deserted. They “were scattered, each 
to his own:” and the Truth Himself was left alone in Pilate’s judgment-hall. 


Now learn from this a very important distinction. To feel solitary is no uncom- 
mon thing. To complain of being alone, without sympathy, and misunderstood, is 
general enough. In every place, in many a family, these victims of diseased sensibility 
are to be found, and they might find a weakening satisfaction in observing a parallel 
between their own feelings and those of Jesus. But before that parallel is assumed, be 
very sure that it is, as in His case, the elevation of your character which severs you 
from your species. The world has small sympathy for Divine goodness; but it also 
has little for a great many other qualities which are disagreeable to it. You meet with 
no response; you are passed by; find yourself unpopular; meet with little communion. 
Well! Is that because you are above the world—nobler, devising and executing grand 
plans, which they cannot comprehend; vindicating the wronged; proclaiming and 
living on great prirfciples; offending it by the saintliness of your purity, and the 
unworldliness of your aspirations? Then yours is the loneliness of Christ. Or is it 
that you are wrapped up in self—cold, disobliging, sentimental, indifferent about the 
welfare of others, and very much astonished that they are not deeply interested in you? 
You must not use these words of Christ. They have nothing to do with you. 

Let us look at one or two of the occasions on which this loneliness was felt. 

The first time was when He was but twelve years old, when His parents found 
slim in the temple, hearing the Doctors and asking them questions. High thoughts 

were in the Child’s soul: expanding views of life; larger views of duty, and His own 
destiny. : 

There is a moment in every true life—to some it comes very early—when the old 
routine of duty is not large enough; when the parental roof seems too low, because 
the Infinite above is arching over the soul; when the old formulas, in creeds, cate- 

chisms, and articles, seem to be narrow, and they must either be thrown aside, or else 
transformed into living and breathing realities; when the earthly father’s authority is 
being superseded by the claims of a Father in heaven. 

That is a lonely, lonely moment, when the young soul first feels God—when this 
earth is recognized as an “awful place, yea, the very gate of heaven; when the dream- 

- ladder is seen planted against the skies, and we wake, and the dream haunts us as a 
sublime reality. 
: You may detect the approach of that moment in the young man or the young 
woman by the awakened spirit of inquiry; by a certain restlessness of look, and an 
eager earnestness of tone; by the devouring study of all kinds of books; by the waning 


| 


658 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


of your own influence, while the inquirer is asking the truth of the Doctors a d 
Teachers in the vast Temple of the world; by a certain opinionativeness, which is 
austere and disagreeable enough; but the austerest moment of the fruit’s taste is that 
in which it is passing from greenness into ripeness. If you wait in patience, the sour 
will become sweet. Rightly looked at, that opinionativeness is more truly anguish 
the fearful solitude of feeling the insecurity of all that is human; the discovery that life 
is real, and forms of social and religious existence hollow. The old moorings are 
torn away, and the soul is drifting, drifting, drifting, very often without compass, 
except the guidance of an unseen hand, into the vast infinite of God. Then come the 
lonely words, and no wonder, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must 
be about my Father’s business?” “4 

2. That solitude was felt by Christ in trial. In the desert, in Pilate’s judgment- 
hall, in the garden, He was alone; and alone must every son of man meet his trial-hour, 
The individuality of the soul necessitates that. Each man is a new soul in this wor 
untried, with a boundless Possible before him. No one can predict what he ma " 
become, prescribe his duties, or mark out his obligations. Each man’s own nature 
has its own peculiar rules; and he must take up his life-plan alone, and persevere in it 
in a perfect privacy with which no stranger intermeddleth. Each man’s temptations 
are made up of a host of peculiarities, internal and external, which no other mind can 
measure. You are tried alone; alone you pass into the desert; alone you must beat 
and conquer in the Agony; alone you must be sifted by the world. There are moments 
known only to a man’s own self, when he sits by the poisoned springs of existence, 
“yearning for a morrow which shall free him from the strife.” And there are trials 
more terrible than that. Not when vicious inclinations are opposed to holy, but wher 
virtue conflicts with virtue, is the real rending of the soul in twain. A temptation, 
which the lower nature struggles for mastery, can be met by the whole united force of 
the spirit. But it is when obedience to a heavenly Father can be only paid by disobe- 
dience to an earthly one; or fidelity to duty can be only kept by infidelity to some — 
entangling engagement; or the straight path must be taken over the misery of others; 
or the counsel of the affectionate friend must be met with a “Get thee behind 
Satan:’—O! it is then, when human advice is unavailable, that the soul feels what it is : 
to be alone. | 

Once more: the Redeemer’s soul was alone in dying. The hour had come—they 
were all gone, and He was, as He predicted, left alone. All that is human drops fro 
us in that hour. Human faces flit and fade, and the sounds of the world become co 
fused. “I shall die alone’—yes, and alone you live. The philosopher tells us that 
atom in creation touches another atom; they all approach within a certain distance 
then the attraction ceases, and an invisible something repels—they only seem to touc 
No soul touches another soul except at one or two points, and those chiefly external 
a fearful and lonely thought, but one of the truest of life. Death only realizes t 
which has been fact all along. In the central deeps of our being we are alone. 

II. The spirit or temper of that solitude. 

1. Observe its grandeur. I am alone, yet not alone. This is a feeble and sen 
mental way in which we speak of the Man of sorrows. We turn to the Cross, and # 
Agony, and the Loneliness, to touch the softer feelings—to arouse compassion. You 
degrade that loneliness by your compassion. Compassion! compassion for Him! 
Adore if you will—respect and reverence that sublime solitariness with which none 
but the Father was—but no pity; let it draw out the firmer and manlier graces of the 
soul. Even tender sympathy seems out of place. 2 

For even in human things, the strength that is in a man can be only learnt when — 
he is thrown upon his own resources and left alone. What a man can do in conjtinc- 
tion with others does not test the man. Tell us what he can do alone. It is one thing 


i 


The Loneliness of Christ—Robertson. 659 


‘to defend the truth when you know that your audience are already prepossessed, and 
‘that every argument will meet a willing response; and it is another thing to hold the 
truth when truth must be supported, if at all, alone—met by cold looks and unsympa- 
thizing suspicion. It is one thing to rush on to danger with the shouts and the 
sympathy of numbers; it is another thing when the lonely chieftain of the sinking ship 
sees the last boatfull disengage itself, and folds his arms to go down into the majesty 
of darkness, crushed, but not subdued. 

_ Such and greater far was the strength and majesty of the Savior’s solitariness. It - 
was not the trial of the lonely hermit. There is a certain gentle and pleasing melan- 
choly in the life which is lived alone. But there are the forms of nature to speak to 
him; and he has not the positive opposition of mankind, if he has the absence of actual 
sympathy. It is a solemn thing, doubtless, to be apart from men, and to feel eternity 
rushing by like an arrowy river. But the solitude of Christ was the solitude of a 
crowd. In that single Human bosom dwelt the Thought which was to be the germ of 
the world’s life—a thought unshared, misunderstood, or rejected. Can you not feel 
the grandeur of those words, when the Man, reposing on His solitary strength, felt the 
last shadow of perfect isolation pass across His soul:—*My God, my God, why hast 
Thou forsaken me?” 

Next, learn from these words self-reliance. ‘Ye shall leave me alone.” Alone, 
then, the Son of Man was content to be. He threw Himself on His own solitary 
thought: did not go down to meet the world; but waited, though it might be for ages, 
till the world should come round to Him. He appealed to the Future, did not aim at 
seeming consistent, left His contradictions unexplained:—I came from the Father:— 
I leave the world, and go to the Father. “Now,” said they, “thou speakest: no 
proverb:” that is, enigma. But many a hard and enigmatical saying before He had 
spoken, and He left them all. A thread runs through all true acts, stringing them 
together into one harmonious chain: but it is not for the Son of God to be anxious to 
‘Prove their consistency with each other. 
| This is self-reliance—to repose calmly on the thought which is deepest in our 
bosoms, and be unmoved if the world will not accept it yet. To live on your own 
convictions against the world, is to overcome the world—to believe that what is truest 
in you is true for all: to abide by that, and not be over-anxious to be heard or under- 
stood, or sympathized with, certain that at last all must acknowledge the same, and 
that, while you stand firm, the world will come round to you—that is independence. It 
is not difficult to get away into retirement, and there live upon your own convictions; 
Nor is it difficult to mix with men, and follow their convictions; but to enter into the 
world, and there live out firmly and fearlessly according to your own conscience—that 
is Christian greatness. 

There is a cowardice in this age which is not Christian. We shrink from the 
consequences of truth. We look round and cling dependently. We ask what men will 
) think; what others will say; whether they will not stare in astonishment. Perhaps they 
| will; but he who is calculating that will accomplish nothing in this life. The Father— 
the Father which is with us and in us—what does He think? God’s work cannot be 
done without a spirit of independence. A man is got some way in the Christian life 
when he has learned to say humbly, and yet majestically, “I dare to be alone.” 

Lastly, remark the humility of this loneliness. Had the Son of Man simply said, 
T can be alone, He would have said no more than any proud, self-relying man can say; 
but when He added, “because the Father is with me,” that independence assumed 
another character, and self-reliance became only another form of reliance upon God. 
Distinguish between genuine and spurious humility. There is a false humility which 
says, “It is my own poor thought, and I must not trust it. I must distrust my own 
reason and judgment, because they are my own. I must not accept the dictates of ‘ 


660 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


my own conscience; for is it not my own, and is not trust in self the great fault of ou 


fallen nature?” 
Very well. Now, remember something else. There is a Spirit which beareth 
witness in our spirits; there is a God who “is not far from any one of us;” there is < 
“Light which lighteth every man which cometh into the world.” Do not be unnatu 
rally humble. The thought of your own mind perchance is the Thought of God. Ti 
refuse to follow that may be to disown God. To take the judgment and conscience 
of other men to live by, where is the humility of that? From whence did their con 
science and judgment come? Was the fountain from which they drew exhausted « 
you? If they refused like you to rely on their own conscience, and you rely upon it 
how are you sure that it is more the Mind of God than your own which you have 
refused to hear? , 
Look at it in another way. The charm of the words of great men—those grand 
sayings which are recognized as true as soon as heard—is this, that you recognize th 
as wisdom which passed across your own mind. You feel that they are your 
thoughts come back to you, else you would not at once admit them: ‘‘All that floate 
across me before, only I could not say it, and did not feel confident enough to asserti 
or had not conviction enough to put into words.” Yes, God spoke to you what 
did to them: only they believed it, said it, trusted the Word within them, and you di 
not. Be sure that often when you say, “It is only my own poor thought, and I ar 
alone,” the real correcting thought is this, “Alone, but the Father is with me,”—ther 
fore I can live by that lonely conviction. 


There is no danger in this, whatever timid minds may think—no danger of mistak 
if the character be a true one. For we are not in uncertainty in this matter. It 
been given us to know our base from our noble hours: to distinguish between th 
voice which is from above, and that which speaks from below, out of the abyss of our 
animal and selfish nature. Samuel could distinguish between the impulse—quite ¢ 
human one—which would have made him select Eliab out of Jesse’s sons, and th 
deeper judgment by which “the Lord said, Look not on his countenance, nor on the 
height of his stature, for I have refused him.” Doubtless deep truth of character 1 
required for this: for the whispering voices get mixed together, and we dare not abide 
by our own thoughts, because we think them our own, and not God’s: and th 
because we only now and then endeavor to know in earnest. It is only given to 
habitually true to know the difference. He knew it, because all His blessed life 
He could say, “My judgment is just, because I seek not my own will, but the wil 
Him which sent me.” ; 

The practical result and inference of all this is a very simple, but a very deep oF 
the deepest of existence. Let life be a life of faith. Do not go timorously abo 
inquiring what others think, and what others believe, and what others say. It see 
the easiest, it is the most difficult thing in life to do this—believe in God. God is n 
you. Throw yourself fearlessly upon Him. Trembling mortal, there is an unkno 
might within your soul, which will wake when you command it. The day may co 
when all that is human—man and woman—will fall off from you, as they did fr 
Him. Let His strength be yours. Be independent of them all now. The Father 
with you. Look to Him, and He will save you. : 


[Frederick William Robertson was naturally permeated with the spirit of fear: 
lessness, manliness and ardor, having been the son and grandson of English militar 
officers. He was emphatically a Christian soldier—brave, impulsive, chivalrous, 4 
wholly unselfish. To these characteristics were added the gifts of great grasp 
thought, keen intellectual incisiveness, rare independence of character, acute sensibility 


fr | The Loneliness of Christ—Robertson. 661 


: to the beautiful, child-like purity of soul, and a tongue nerved with spiritual fire. 
Born in London, February 3, 1816; educated at Oxford; at first seeking, but after- 
wards declining, an army commission; repeatedly battling against a keenly sensitive, 
overwrought nervous temperament; a curate for four years in Cheltenham; a six years’ 

_ incumbency in Trinity Chapel, Brighton, ending with his death at the early age of 
thirty-seven, August 15, 1853. Such is his biography, in brief.] 


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- wise man says, “Money answereth all things,” and he never said a wiser thing than 


662 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


MONEY. 


A. F. SCHAUFFLER, D. D. 


My theme this morning is summed up in one word; and that is “Money.” 


Th 


that. 

I am not going to speak to you this morning about bimetallism, nor am I goin, 
to give any definitions with regard to what money is from the standpoint of the 
political economist. I have got a definition of my own that helps me, and perhap 
may help you, to understand a little of the importance and the blessedness of money 
My definition of money for my purposes this morning is simply this: Money is myse If 
I am a laboring man, we will say, and can handle a pickaxe, and I hire myself out fo 
a week at $2 per day. At the close of the week I get $12 and I put it in my pocket 
What is that $12.00? It’s a week’s worth of my muscle put into greenbacks ane 
pocketed; that is, I have got a week’s worth of myself in my pocket. Or, I am % 
clerk and hire myself out, being an intelligent clerk, at $20.00 a week. Saturda 
comes and I get my pay, and, when I put that in my pocket, I pocket a week’s wort 
of myself as clerk. Or, I am a merchant, and I have larger affairs; I have th 
handling of many clerks and require a higher brain power than that of the ordina# 
man. At the end of the week I strike my balance-sheet and find I am to the good $1,001 
That is a week’s worth of the merchant, a high grade of intelligence. But, my name 
is Edison and I toil with a brain of extraordinary power, and I complete an invention 
and at the end of the week I sell the invention for $50,000.00 and pocket the check 
That is a week’s worth of the highest inventive brain that there is. But it is all th 
same anyway. The muscle man, the mind man, the genius, when he gets his money, 
is really getting the result of his own labor in the shape of cash. 


Now, the moment you understand this you begin to understand that money 
your pocket is not merely silver and gold, but is something human, something 
is instinct with power, because it represents power expended. (If you are not earning 
any money of your own, and your father is supporting you, then you are carrying that 
much of your father around in your pocket.) Now, money is like electricity; it is” 


got my tremendous batteries with storage power, and say to myself, “Here is this” 
enormous potentiality stored up, doing nothing, but capable of marvels. What shall 
I do with it?” I want to illuminate my house, and so make my attachments, turn on 
the buttons, and the house is lighted. That is not what I want, perhaps; I want to rum 
a sewing machine or a pump. I change my attachments again, and from the same 4 
storage battery run my little machinery in my house, That is not what I want; my 
desire now is changed, and I want intercommunication. I change the sche 
and have my telegraph and my telephone. But that is not what I want, perhaps 

have got a tremendous crick in the neck, and the doctor says electricity will cure it. 
I change my attachments again, get my wet sponge and rub the cords of my neck, 
and electricity is imparted and the pain disappears. But that is not what I want. 
Here is a man guilty of murder and has been tried, convicted and sentenced to death, 
and I want to kill him. I set him in the chair, put on the bands, touch the button 
and he is dead. What a marvel, what a marvel, I say, is this storage battery for, 


i 


Money—S chauffler. 663 


illumination, for intercommunication, for therapeutics, for death! Vhat button governs 


the whole because it is the governor of a storage power. 

Money is stored power. It can do nothing simply as stored power; it is stored 
that it may be loosed again. How shall it be loosed? That is the only question!! 
Now, the young clerk who has got $20.00 as the result of his week’s wages, if he has 
heard an address similiar to this, so that he is instructed, says, “I have got a week’s 
worth of myself in my pocket; how shall I loose it?” One young man, being rather 
of an intellectual type of mind, goes up to the Y. M. C. A., buys a season ticket and 
looses that much of himself into the educational courses of the Y. M. C. A., that is, 
he is pouring his power back into his brain. That is good. 

Another young man has a mother up in the country, who has toiled for him while 
he was a boy, and she is now a widow and poor. Saturday night he writes to her 
and says, “I remember how you toiled and sacrificed for me when I was a boy. 
Enclosed you will find a ten-dollar bill. Please use it for some extra comforts for 


_ yourself.’ He is pouring a half-week’s worth of himself back into his mother’s lap. 


Blessed be that boy who looses himself on the hills of New England while he is toiling 
on the Bowery in New York! Another young man hears of the tremendous reduction 
in foreign missionary work, by reason of the decreased liberality of the Church at 
home, and he hears of some teacher in India or colporteur in China who can be kept 
up in his work by a moderate gift. He makes up his mind that he would like to 
loose a week’s worth of himself in China. He will never go to China, but by this use 
of money he can transplant a week’s or a year’s worth of himself to China and loose 
it there for the Kingdom of God. So he sends his money to the missionary board. 
And another young man comes home with a week’s worth of himself in his pocket, 
and he goes out on the Bowery, and Saturday night, in drinking and gambling and 
pool-playing, looses a week’s worth of himself to kill himself. He is committing 
suicide with the stored power that he has got. Aye! there are more suicides than those 


_who use pistols, poison and knife. There are those who are morally committing 


suicide, and they do it because they have stored power, self-power behind them, 
directed against their own heart, conscience and life. 

Now, if what I have said be true, you begin to see what a change comes over 
our view of money as we put our hands in our pockets and feel what there is there. 
My brother, it is power there is there; it is your power. And where are you going to 
loose that power? That is the only question. It is a very serious question indeed, 
because with the Divine blessing on this power that we store and then loose, there 
may come results as shall cause us to marvel here and to praise God through all 
eternity. There are ways and ways of loosing financial force. It is startling some- 
times to go behind the surface of things. 

The first man in New York State who was executed by electricity was a man 
by the name of Kemmler. He had murdered his wife. The state tracked him and 
tried him. The case went up finally to the Court of Appeals, and at last the end 
came. Kemmler was condemned, sentenced, and sat in the chair; the button was 
pressed and Kemmler was dead. I had investigations made to find out what the cost 
was to New York State from the beginning of that business until the day the button 
was pressed. All told, figuring carefully, the cost was $100,000.00. At the beginning 
of that business a dead woman, Kemmler’s wife; at the other end, a dead man. Two 
coffins, one at the beginning and one at the end, and between those two, $100,000.00 
of state money spent—my money, your money, the taxpayer’s money—and at the in- 


ception and the completion of it two coffins! Pretty expensive is justice! It is the 


most expensive thing I know of—pure unmitigated justice! It is terrific! 


Some years ago there came on to New York City a young man, who shall be 
nameless, but I personally know him. His sister had been ruined in California by a 


664. Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


young fellow, and on her deathbed she said to her brother, “He ruined me. You 
follow him; you kill him;” and she died. He came on to New York ready to kill th 
betrayer of his sister. One of our missionarics was preaching on the corner of the 
Bowery and Broome street, and this young man came along in that great Mississippi 
River of human flotsam and jetsam and stood and listened. He was touched by God’ 
grace, through the words of the missionary. He followed the missionary down to the 
church and, to make a long story short, he was converted from the crown of his head 
to the sole of his foot. I never tell a story of a conversion, my brothers, until years” 
have proved it; I never tell about a man converted yesterday. Let him run a year and 
then I will talk about him. This was some seven years ago. When the missionary 
at first began to talk to him he said, “It is no use. Dear me! there is the pistol, and 
will do it.’ That pistol never went off, and the betrayer of that man’s sister never wai 
killed. There was not a coffin at the beginning of this transaction. As soon as he 
was converted he went over to Germany to complete his education, because he wai 
not a bum, but an intelligent and well-io-do young man. From Germany he wrot 
that he had in Berlin started a little mission where, he said, “I am trying to do fo 
others what was done for me at the corner of the Bowery and Broome street.” Las 
spring this man came back to New York and came into the office. I said, “How ar 
you?” He said, “All right.” “Is your flag high still?” “Yes,” he said, “it is still high. 
“Well,” I said, “as you go out west, to the Pacific coast, nail it, and never let tha 
flag come down.” 
I made a little examination to see how much it cost to convert that man. I don’ 
mean of Divine grace, for that cost Calvary, and I cannot figure that. I was dealin 
with my little arithmetic of dollars and cents. Five dollars would abundantly cove 
all the proportion of expense for the conversion of my friend. Supposing that th 
gospel-of the grace of God had not been preached on Broome street and the Bowe 
that day? Supposing my friend that night had met the betrayer of his sister and tl 
bullet had flown and the man dropped? Then the state would have gone at its business 
of detectives, courts, juries, appeals, and then finally the electric chair; then a corpse a 
the beginning, a corpse at the end, $100,000.00 between, and hell fuller. That is what 
would have taken place, and that would have cost $100,000.00 to the state. But, b 
God’s alchemy, on five dollars given, and a consecrated man’s preaching, the state 
has saved $100,000.00, one man has saved his life, and another is converted and becomes 
a missionary at the close—and all because someone gave $5.00 and God’s blessin 
rested on that. Heaven alone can tell, and eternity only is long enough for the story 
of what the loosing of somebody’s individuality through a five-dollar note did for 
my brother on the Bowery! 
1 tell you, my brothers, it makes me feel tremendously serious when I underst 
what potency there is in a five-dollar bill with God’s blessing, and how the Chure 
of God, sending out its gifts, and adding to its gifts its prayers, can do miracles for 
salvation of the world. When I understand that, then I begin to say, “O Lord, wh 
a blessed thing is money! I will not call it trash; I will not call it sordid, or fil 
lucre. I will call it the gold and silver that belongs to Almighty God which, with 
blessing of Almighty God, can work the works of righteousness.” And I tremble when 
I think of this matter of a million. I don’t ask God to give mea million. If He sho Id 
give me a million I should feel more sober than I do today, because the longer I live 
the more I see it requires, not ordinary wisdom to handle your money right, but divine 
wisdom. If I had a million I don’t know what I should do with it. Without God 
blessing I should work ruin with it, though I gave every last penny of it away; because 
I haven’t wisdom enough to direct the channels into which one million or even” hall 
a million should go. What I am coming to is this—that this matter of the stor 
potentiality of myself in my pocket is so very serious that I need God’s Holy Spirit tc 


Money—S chauffler. 665 


guide me in it. See, I cannot loose a week’s worth of myself in one minute here in 
“personal effort. I have got to give minute by minute of personal effort. But when it 
comes to the matter of loosing my stored power in money I can loose my stored power 
of a year in one minute. That is a tremendous force, and I need, therefore, Divine 
_ guidance in the loosing of that which belongs to me. 
__ Now, when I went in the ministry, as soor as I had any money of my own I said, 
“O Lord! one-tenth shall be Thine,” and I thought I was doing all that I ought to 
do when I said that. I preached that, and I have practiced that all my life, but, dear 
me! that is a small thing. One-tenth is what Jacob gave, and are we not better than 
-: However, I met a consecrated Christian woman once in New York and asked 
; about this matter of money. She said, “I used to give one-tenth, but I have got 
beyond that, and now I ask the Lord, for every dollar that I have got, ‘Lord, what 
shall I do with that dollar?’” That is better than my tenth. I dropped my tenth like 
a hot iron that day, and I will never again take it up. Again, there is a larger liberty 
“than that of one-tenth, and that is the liberty of all that God calls for. Sometimes He 
will call for a fifth. Give it. Sometimes He will call for a quarter. Give it. What- 
ever He calls for, give it, brother. The gold and the silver is not mine; it is His. 
When He who is the owner of it calls for it, give it; don’t hold it. Oh, we need a 
change of view in this matter of money. We need to realize honestly and truly that 
* it is more blessed to give than to receive, that it is sweeter to say, “Lord, here it is,” 
than to say, “I will hold it.” 

The average idea of giving is expressed by what a New England deacon once said 
to me. He said, “Fred, why do they always play the organ while the collection is 
being taken?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I have thought of it a good deal 
I think it is to soothe the feelings of the people.” That used to strike me as rather 
funny; it doesn’t any more. Soothe my feelings when I am giving my stored-up 
wealth to my Jesus? No, I thank you, they don’t need any soothing when I am giving 
to Christ what Christ gave to me. Soothe my feelings when I am giving money here 
to be loosed in China, to be loosed in New York on the Bowery, to be used in Cleve- 
land in the Friendly Inn, to be used anywhere for the glory of Ged? No, thank you! 
I don’t need any music, unless you put on the full power of your organ to play a 
triumphal march that will give vent to my feelings. They need no soothing when I 
am giving to Jesus. 

Do you see what a blessed, what a solemn thing this giving is, this giving of my 
stored self to my Master? Surely we need, in the matter of giving, consecrated thought 
as to where to loose ourselves, earnest prayer in the guidance of the choice of where 
to loose our stored power, and earnest prayer to God to add His blessing to the loosed 
personality in this money that I have sent abroad, that there may come a tenfold 
increase of my personal power that I have sent. When we think of money that way, 
and pray about it that way, and give in that way, and tell others of it, then we will 
have the Church of God saying, “Hasten the collection in the church, quick, let the 
ushers pass down that we may loose ourselves for Jesus’ sake, and send our stored 
power the world around for the sake of Him who gave Himself for us.” That is 
consecrated use of money. 


[A. F. Schauffler was born in Constantinople, Turkey, November 7, 1845, receiving 
his early education there, graduating from Williams College in 1867; degree of D. D. 
from University New York. For some years superintendent of New York City 
Missions. 

This address is from the Student Volunteer Appeal, embodying addresses delivered 
at the conference in Cleveland six years since. It attracted as much attention as any 
address at that great gathering, and is reproduced here by permission of the Student 
Volunteer.] 


a 


666 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP. 


CHARLES M. SHELDON. 


“Tf any man would serve Me, let him follow Me.”—Jesus Christ. 

What is it to be a Christian? Paul says it is to be a new man. “If any man/ 
in Christ he is a new creature. Old things have passed away; behold, all things have 
become new.” Perhaps we cannot improve on that definition. Jesus himself taugh 
that obedience to His commandments would result in the transformation of a hum 
life so great, that nothing could designate it except the term Regeneration, or being 
born again. “Ye must be born again, or from above,” He said. If this definition 
of a Christian is right, namely, a new man in Christ, or a follower of Christ, it is w 
for us to ask what we mean by that. To say that a man must be Christlike in ord 
to be a Christian meets with no denial. To say that a man must follow Chris 
order to be a Christian does not meet with any opposition. But still a man has ff 
defined for himself what a Christian ought to be or do simply by saying: “I must. 
Christlike, I must follow Christ, I must be a new man.’’ What is Christlike? Wh 
is it to follow Christ? What is it to be a new man? These questions require 
answer. And it will be our attempt to declare something of the law of Christi 
discipleship. What constitutes a Christian? We look- into the law of Christi 
discipleship to see if we can truly add to the definition of Christian a definite a 
true conception of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. 

I. We will begin with this statement: : 

Christian discipleship means no less today than it did in Christ’s own lifetime: 
The discovery of electricity, the building of railroads, steamships, ocean cables, 
telegraph and telephone lines, the invention of gunpowder, printing presses and ty; 
setting machines, the modern life of humanity, with its daily papers, its wonderiu 
machinery, its high buildings, its gigantic fortunes, its scientific energy—all has n 
changed in any smallest particular the relation between Jesus and a human bei 
The world is not necessarily better spiritually because a railroad runs around it A 
man is not necessarily any nearer doing God’s will because he talks through a ele- 
phone or over an ocean cable. It is possible for a man who lives in a house lighted 
by electricity and warmed with gas and supplied with illustrated daily papers to be 
just as much in need of forgiveness of sins as Nero was. There is no magic in. the 
fact of material progress, inventions, or the power of civilization that can in itself de 
anything whatever to change the conditions by which alone a man must enter th 
Kingdom of God. If the President of the United States enters the Kingdom he mus 
enter as a little child. If Mr. Edison has cternal life, he must have it on the sam 


ein o 


you and I must do if we become Christians. ; 
There is no change in the terms of Christian discipleship, therefore. “If any ma 
would serve Me, let him follow Me,” Jesus said two thousand years ago. He wou 
say the same today. It is just as necessary now to follow Jesus if we serve im 
It is just as necessary now to take up the cross to be His disciple. “He is the sat 
yesterday and today—yea, and forever.” ; 
Once in Jesus’ lifetime a young man came to Him, asking what he must do 


gain eternal life. Jesus told him to sell everything he had and give it to the poor 


The Christian Discipleship—Sheldon. 667 


‘come and follow Him. It was a test case. I have no doubt Jesus today would say 


the same thing to any man who was loving his money more than his Savior. It 
would be the test of discipleship now as then. That called for the willingness to 
surrender everything to the Master’s service. And if Jesus today found a man or 
woman loving anything more than Him, he would tell them they could not be His 
disciples until they were willing to surrender all to Him. If the young man had said 
cheerfully, “Lord, I am ready to obey,” and had at once begun to do as Jesus said, 
I think it is highly probable that Jesus would have told him to use his money for the 
world’s good as a steward. He might not have demanded of him a literal giving away 
of all he had if he was entirely willing to do it. Jesus was testing the mans heart. 
He was applying a universal test of discipleship just as far as it covered a man’s 
willingness to give everything to God. Jesus did not command every rich man he 
talked with to give up all his possessions to the poor. But He would have done it 
in every case if every case required it. So today the same test of discipleship remains. 
The years have not changed it. “If any man renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot 
be My disciple,” said Jesus. He would say it just the same today. That is, if any 
one puts any possesion, any love and desire before his love or desire for Jesus, he 
cannot be His disciple. Unless he is willing to give up all he has, even if he does not 
do it literally, and go out into the world a beggar, like St. Francis of Assissi, even 
if he does not do that exactly and literally; if he would not be willing to do it in case 
Jesus demanded it, such a one cannot be His disciple. “And there went great multi- 
tudes with Him, and He turned and said unto them, ‘If any man come to Me and 


hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, 


and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.’ And whosoever doth not bear his 
cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” That is, Jesus first; all other 
affections secondary. Jesus will not take second place in a man’s affections. He must 
have first or none. The closest earthly ties, the most sacred human loves—father’s, 
mother’s, wife’s, children’s loves—must be less than the love we bear Him who makes. 
all these other loves worth having because of His redemptive and regenerative work 
for the world. 


Now we are apt to think in a rather vague, undefined way that the disciples in 
Jesus’ lifetime were subjected to severer test of discipleship than we are. And also 
that the test ought not to be as severe for us as for them, or at least not the same. We 
have perhaps come to think that to be a Christian means to have faith in Christ as a 
Savior from sin, become a member of a church, teach a Sunday-school class, contribute 
to the,expense of a church society and the needs of benevolent boards, and live a very 
comfortable, filled-up life, waiting for heaven to come after death. But the fact is that 
the test of discipleship is the same test in every age. If anything, it ought to grow 
more severe, more exacting as time goes on. We ought perhaps to expect Jesus to 
demand more of us than He did of Peter or Paul. We have more advantages. We 
look back on two thousand years of Christianity; they looked into its first century. 
We have greater opportunities to reach humanity with our railroads, electricity and 
printing presses. We can live more in a month than Paul could in a year. If Jesus, 
said to the first disciple right out of paganism, “You must give up everything for 
Me,” He certainly will say no less to us to whom so much has been given. It is 
impossible to imagine Jesus announcing a new test as a new law of discipleship. 


What made a man a Christian in the times of Tiberius Caesar makes him one in 
the times of President McKinley. “If any man would serve Me let him follow Me,” is 
a statement of a condition to discipleship that is capable of no change. A man cannot 
be a disciple unless he follows Jesus. He cannot enter the Kingdom except as a 
little child. He cannot be a Christian without placing Jesus in the foremost place 
of his affections and his service. 


668 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


What is the test of discipleship, then? It is Jesus on the throne of a man’s life. 4 
If to put him on there means martyrdom, as it did mean in Paul’s time, there is nothing | 
in the times in which we live to shield a disciple from that result. If to put Jesus — 
into first place demands loss of money, or friends, or position, it is no different from — 
the result of that discipleship in Jesus’ time. I do not mean to say that every disciple 
must be a martyr, every disciple must be a loser of property, in order to follow Him, 
I say only that if the test of discipleship results in martyrdom or earthly loss, we are — 
not to resent such a result and say that we are not under the same law of discipleship 
as Peter and Paul and John and Stephen. The nominal Christianity of the world says 
that it is not necessary to do as the early disciples did. The nominal Christianity of 
the world rejects the suffering, or the selt-denial, or the service at the point where 
following Jesus demands martyrdom of any sort. But the discipleship of Jesus now ~ 
is bound by the same law that bound the first Christians. There is no Christianity in — 
the world today that is worth anything except the same kind that Jesus taught. He 
did not teach one kind of His own times and another of ours. And I do not think 
He asked His own immediate disciples to do any more, really, than He asks every 
disciple to do. Certainly we must conclude that the centuries have added to, instead a 
of lessened, the obligations of the Christian follower. 


Hark! the voice of Jesus calling 
Follow me, follow me; 

As of old He called the fishers, 
By the sea of Galilee, 

Still I hear His sweet voice sounding, 
Follow me, follow me. 

II. While the test of discipleship means no less today than it meant in Jesus’ — 
time, the imitation of Jesus today calls for interpretation of Christian discipleship — 
that takes into account the age in which we live. If we take for our standard of 
conduct, ““What would Jesus do?” we ask more than, “What would He do in 
Palestine two thousand years ago?” We ask what would He do in the United States” 
now? That is, we ask, ‘what would He do in our places?” s 

For example, Jesus in Palestine said nothing directly about the sin of intoxicating 
drink. At least we have no record of anything He said. Indeed, it seems altogether 
probable that Jesus Himself, according to the universal custom of the times, drank wine q 
with His friends, and the very first miracle recorded is the miracle of turning water — 
into wine at the marriage feast so that the guests might not be disappointed. Now 
bring Jesus down to our age. Let Him live and speak in the United States, and 
it is impossible to conceive of Him drinking wine or approving its use at a marriage 
feast. Why? The conditions have altogether changed. Jesus would undoubtedly be 
regarded by the liquor men as opposed in every way to their business, and it is not: 
possible to imagine Him saying nothing about the saloons in His public speech. If 
He delivered another sermon on the Mount, it would contain some things not found 
in the sermon on the Mount delivered in Palestine. It would be adapted to the 
present-day conditions and present-day people; and Jesus alive today would arouse 

the church and encourage all lovers of home and good government by preaching 
' against lawlessness and drunkenness and the greed that seeks to make hellish gain 
by the saloon as a business. Imagine a sermon by Jesus Christ on the enforcement 
of the law in Kansas at the present time in its history. Would it consist of glittering 
generalities, or large general principles alone? To my mind it would contain as 
direct and searching a denunciation against particular offenders as the woes pro- 
nounced on the Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. The Scribes and the Pharisees of 
our time are the law-breakers, the property holders who get rentals from whiskey 
business, the city officers who plead the need of revenue from the illegal saloon, the 
men who in order to gratify their greed or their selfish passions defy the will of God 


The Christian Discipleship—Sheldon. 669 


and the people. And before the Scribes and Pharisees Jesus would not hold His 
peace. It is the spirit of Jesus we need to follow. It is not enough that we slavishly 
imitate His Palestine example. It is right for us to say that in one sense Jesus was 
limited by the age into which He was born. This is what I mean when I say, “In 
one sense we have more reason to follow Jesus further than Peter or Paul.” ‘Greater 
things than these shall ye do,” said Jesus to His disciples. Every age acts somewhat 
up to the definition of Christlike. What was Christlike in Jesus’ lifetime may not be 
Christlike now, as His drinking or making wine. But it is not a difficult or perplexing 
thing to adapt Jesus’ spirit to our own age and follow Him as He would be in our 
time. What we need to do is first to want to do God’s will; have a perfect passion to 
do it. Then we need to grow familiar with Jesus’ character and motives by a personal 
study of Him and His actions. We need to grow in a knowledge of Him before we 
can imitate or follow Him. And in addition, we need to love our fellow men with all 
our might. If any one of us will be guided by these three great passions: a passion 
as strong as life to do the will of God; a passion as deep as love to know the character 
of Jesus; and a passion as high as heaven to love our fellow men, we shall follow 
Christ very closely. We shall not make very many mistakes. 

Take again, for example, the action of Jesus while living in Palestine on the 
subject of slavery. He said nothing against it in any definite way. But Jesus in our 
age would undoubtedly put Himself on record as opposed to the slave trade in Africa, 
and if He had lived fifty years ago it is impossible to imagine Him preaching in behalf 
of negro slavery or keeping silent about it, or not meeting it except in general terms. 
Or take Christ's attitude toward the evils in government in His own time. He never 
talked to the Jews about the outrageous taxes imposed by the Roman government, 
He knew that a direct attack on the evils in government at that time would have led 
to a physical revolution, and it was not His purpose to bring in the Kingdom in that 
way. Now, in our age, we can direct the people to certain well-known evils in 
government, and to do it in such a way that reform is brought about instead of 
revolution, and in doing this we may satisfy ourselves that we are acting as Jesus might 
if He were in our places, even if He did not so act or speak while on earth. In other 
words, when we ask what would Jesus do, in any particular case, we are not to be 
guided alone by what Jesus actually did or did not do in Palestine, but we are to try 
to bring Jesus down to our own times and adapt His spirit to the action that we are 
called upon to do. Ian Maclaren says (‘Mind of the Master,” page 330): “If Jesus 
had asked of the world to accept of the emancipation of the slave and equality of 
woman, and civil rights, and religious liberty, Christianity would have been crushed at 
its birth. It would have spelled anarchy. What to our fathers would have seemed a 
revolution will seem to our children a regeneration. A century ago a slave owner 
would have defended himself from God’s Word, today he would be cast out of the 
church.” 

This leads me to speak of what has been urged as an objection by some who say, 
“How can we act as Jesus would do when He was so much greater than we, so much 
more divine, so much more powerful?” But Jesus identified Himself with humanity 
in such a way that any one of us has a right to feel that He might have lived the 
life we have to live. Suppose I am obliged to work on a farm. I say to myself, 
“Jesus was never a farmer. How can I tell what He would do in my place?” But 
Jesus knows that I have to be a farmer. I cannot be a teacher or a preacher, as He 
was. Can Jesus sympathize with no one unless he is a teacher or a preacher? Is it 
possible for me to suppose that His identification with humanity stops with carpenters, 
teachers, preachers, and martyrs? No matter who I am, if I am doing a human being’s 
necessary work, the work that I have to do, I have a right to ask, ““‘How would Jesus 
act? What would He do? What must I do to follow Him?” For if He could not be ° 


~~ 


670 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


a farmer, and a journalist, and a railroad man, and an office clerk, and a college 
student, nevertheless He was the Son of Man; He understood what each human life — 
had to do; He was tempted at all points like as we are. 

And right here we need to remember that Jesus did not use a diviner power than 
we possess in order to do right or live a Christian life. If we say that Jesus would 
do certain things in a certain way that we cannot do because He was divine and we 
are human, then we accuse Him of cruelty and injustice when He says, “Follow Me.” 
“Lord,” we say, “how can we follow Thee? Thou art Divine. We are human. We 
cannot follow Thee.” Still He answers, “If any man would serve Me, let him follow 
Me.” Then I begin to realize that He does not command impossibilities. He is not 
acting as Divine, while I must act as human. He is like one of us. He is human. He 
is doing things by means of no more power than I myself have a right to possess. 
That makes Jesus very human, And He was very human. He was Divine on the side 
of forgiveness, of sin, and of atonement. But He was human on the side of conduct. © 
He was the constant hope of what any man might be. And I believe it is solemnly 
and joyfully true that any one of us in any place, doing any work, in any circumstances, 
-can ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” with supreme confidence that Jesus in 
our place would act no differently from the way we may act, and with no advantage 
-over us because of a diviner power than we may also have. 

There is another question which those who are trying to follow Jesus ask, and 
~ it is also a vital question. Many persons say, “If the standard is, ‘What would Jesus 
do?’ who is going to be the authority for what He would do? Am I to decide myself, 

or how? What is the source of my interpretation of His conduct?” Well, this is very 
largely a matter of personal interpretation of what is Christlike. I will say, “I want to 
serve Jesus. I want to follow Him. I want to do as He would do. How shall I 
know?” No matter what sources I may go to for help, I am finally going to act as an 
individual, interpreting Jesus as I believe He would act in my place. I must get help 
in every way I can. My sources of interpreting Jesus are: those who have been with 
Him and lingered in His presence; the Gospels, where I study the early life of the 
Lord; most of all, the Holy Spirit who talks of the things of Jesus and shows them 
unto me. And when I have drawn from these sources of interpretation I must act as © 
it seems most probable that Jesus would act. Under any other standard of conduct, 
I do the same. Suppose I say, “I will do right simply because it is right.” Or, “I 

will do that which is for the greatest good to the greatest number.” Then, who is 
going to decide in every case what is right, or what is for the greatest good? Either 
I must accept the dogmatic statement of some one else as to what is right, or I must 
make my own definition and then act on it. If I ask, “What would Jesus do?” Iam 
less likely to make mistakes in my conduct than if I ask, “What is right?” And this 
leaves me at perfect liberty to choose. Always there must be a constant, loving, — 
unselfish appeal to the Holy Spirit for His guidance which, in course of time, will 
become as easy as breathing when we are well, and as little thought of so far as any * 
great conscious effort is concerned. 


“If any man would serve Me, let him follow Me.” What does following Jesus 


mean? Is that the reason the world hesitates to serve Him—because it means that 
it must follow Him? A Christian is very different from a good man. You cannot ~ 
define a Christian by saying he is a good man. He is a follower of Jesus, and there 
will come times in that following when the world will say of the follower, “Behold a 
fool!” or, “a fanatic!” The test of the Christian discipleship is the conduct,of Jesus. 7 
The sayings of Jesus are of no value apart from His doings. One of the great sins of © 
the world He Himself pointed out when He said to a certain class of men, “They say, © 
but do not.” “Ye are My disciples,” He said, “if ye do things that 1 command you.” 


There is no Christianity without conduct, unless it is based on the conduct of Jesus. 


The Christian Discipleship—Sheldon. 671 


‘The imitation of Jesus in the world becomes a mockery, unless it is an imitation based 
on what Jesus would do in any life under any circumstances and regardless of personal 
results. I believe the ultimate standard of conduct leaves us kneeling at the feet of 
the Son of Man. “Lord, where shall we go?” we ask, and in the same breath we make 
answer, “Thou hast the words of eternal life.”. The standard of what is right, the 
standard of utility, the standard of greatest good to the greatest number, all these 
standards are subordinate to the ultimate standard of “What would Jesus do?” “If any 
man would serve Me, let him follow Me.” A Christian is a follower of Jesus. The 
test of His discipleship, of His service, is found in the following: If we sing, “I'll go 
with Him, with Him all the way,” we sing what is not true, unless we mean Christlike 
action founded on the actual physical life of the Son of Man. Over the door of a model 
kindergarten is found inscribed Froebel’s favorite saying, “Come, let us live with 


_ our children!” It would not be without its great and eternal value, if over every 


w 


eee eee eee 


A (2 oe, 


church door in the world could be inscribed the words, “Come, let us follow Jesus.” 
And it is only when these words are actually written upon the tablet of the disciple’s 
heart and obeyed in every act of his daily conduct that the Kingdom of God is 


established and Jesus sits where He alone has the divine right, upon the throne of 
a human life. 


{Charles M. Sheldon was ordained to the Congregational ministry in 1886, and 
since 1889 has been pastor of Central Congregational Church, Topeka. “In His Steps,” 
delivered as Sunday evening sermons to that church, has reached a greater circulation 
than any novel of the century.] 


572 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD. 


MATTHEW SIMPSON, D.D., LL.D. 


“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that 
slept.”—1 Cor. 15: 20. 

A little more than eighteen hundred years ago, as the light of the morning was 
breaking around the walls of Jerusalem, there was a guard placed about a sepulchre 
in a small garden near the walls of the city. They were guarding a grave. Some 
strange scenes had occurred on the Friday before, While a man whom they had taken — 
from the hills of Gallilee and around the little lake of Capernaum had been hanging 
on the cross crucified as a malefactor, strange signs appeared in the heavens, and on 
the earth, and in the temple. It was rumored that He had said He would rise the 
third morning. The third morning was coming, and, as the light began to break in 
the East, there came two women silently and sadly wending their way among the tents” 
that were pitched all around the city of Jerusalem; they had sojourned all night in the — 
tents, for as yet the gates of the city had not been opened. They came to see the — 
sepulchre, and were bringing spices in their hands. They loved the Man who had ~ 
been crucified as a malefactor, because of His goodness, His purity, and His com- 
passion. They seemed to be almost the only hearts on earth that did love Him 
deeply, save the small circle of friends who had gathered around Him. There had 
been curses upon His head as He hung on the cross—curses from the bystanders, 
curses from the soldiers, curses from the people. They cried: “Away with Him; 
His blood be on us and on our children!” and on that morning there were none but a 
few feeble, obscure, heart-broken friends that dared to come near His grave. 

A little more than eighteen hundred years have passed away, and on the anniver- 
sary of that day, the morning of the first day of the week, the first Sabbath after the 
full moon and the vernal equinox, at the same season, the whole world comes to visit — 
that grave. The eyes of princes and of statesmen, the eyes of the poor and the — 
humble, in all parts of the earth, are turned toward that sepulchre. All through 
Europe, men and women are thinking of that grave, and of Him who lay in it. All 
over western lands, from ocean to ocean, on mountain top and in valley, over broad 
prairies and deep ravines, the eyes and hearts of people are gathered round that grave. ] 
In the darkness of Africa, here and there, we see them stretching out their hands 4 
towards it. Along from the coasts ot India and the heights of the Himalayas, they — 
have heard of that grave, and are bending toward it. The Chinese, laying aside their 
prejudices, have turned their eyes westward, and are looking toward that sepulchre. — 
Along the shores of the seas, over the mountain tops and in the valleys, the hearts of — 
the people hav not only been gathering around the grave, but they have caught a 
glimpse of the rising inmate, who ascended in His glory toward heaven. The song 
of jubilee has gone forth, and the old men are saying, “The Lord is risen from the 
dead.” The young men and matrons catch up the glowing theme, and the little 
children around our festive boards, scarcely comprehending the source of their joy, 
with glad hearts are now joyful, because Jesus has risen from the dead. All over the 
earth tidings of joy have gone forth, and as the valleys have been ringing out their 
praises on this bright Sabbath morning how many hearts have been singing, 


“Our Jesus is gone up on high!” 


The Resurrection of Our Lord—Simpson. 673 


Why this change? What hath produced such a wonderful difference in public 
feeling? The malefactor once cursed, now honored; the obscure and despised, now 
sought for; the rising Redeemer, not then regarded by men, now universally wor- 
shipped. What is the cause of this great change?—how brought about? The subject 
of this morning, taken from the associations of this day, call us to consider, as briefly 
as we may, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, and some of the 
consequences which flow to us from that resurrection. 

It is important for us to fix clearly in our mind the fact that this is one reason why 
such days are remembered in the annals of the Church, as well as in the annals of 
nations; for .our faith rests on facts, and the mind should clearly embrace the facts 
that we may feel that we are standing on firm ground. This fact of the resurrection of 
Christ is the foundation of the Christian system; for the Apostle says: ‘“‘And if Christ 
be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins; then they also which are fallen 
asleep in Christ will perish.” If Christ be not risen, we shall never see the fathers and 
the mothers who have fallen asleep in Jesus; we shall never see the little ones which 
have gone up to be, as we believe, angels before the throne of God. If Christ be not 
raised, we are of all men the most miserable, because we are fancying future enjoyment 
which never can be realized; but if Christ be raised, then shall we also rise, and them 
that sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. And that our minds may rest as to the 
fact of Christ’s resurrection, let us notice how God hath arranged the evidences to 
secure the knowledge of this fact clearly to man. 


The first point to which our attention is invited is the fact of Christ’s death. 
Were not this fact clearly established, it would be in vain to try to prove His resurrec- 
tion from the dead. Christ might have suffered for man in some obscure place; He 
might have laid down His life as a ransom, and yet there would have been no legal 
evidence of it. God allowed the wrath of man to become the instrument of praising 
Him, in that He suffered Christ to be taken under what was then the legal process— 
arrested first by the great council of the Jews, and then by the authority of the Roman 
governor, so that the matter became a matter of public record—a legal transaction. 
The highest power, both of the Jewish and Roman governments, united in this fact of 
His arrest, His trial, and His condemnation to death. Not only was this permitted, 
but the time of the occurrence was wisely arranged. It was at the feast of the Jews, 
the Passover, when all the Jews came up to keep the Passover. They came, not only 
from Egypt, but from all the country through which they were scattered. Jerusalem 
could not hold the people that came together; they pitched their tents all around the 
city, on the hills and in the valleys. It was the time of full moon, when there was 
brightness all night, and they came together with safety and security. The multitude, 
then, was there to witness the scene, so that it might be attested by people from all 


3 parts of Judea, and from all countries round about Judea. 


Then, again, the form of the death was such as to be not a sudden one, but one 
of torture, passing through many hours. Had the execution been a very sudden one, 
as it might have been, the death would have been equally efficacious, yet it would not 
have been witnessed by so many; but as He hung those dreadful hours, from nine 
until three, the sun being darkened, what an opportunity was given to the people 


_ passing by to be impressed with the scene! The crucifixion was near the city; the 


crowd was there; the temple worship was in process; the strangers were there; and as 
One great stream passes on some festive day through the great thoroughfare of your 
city, so passed the stream of men, women and children by that cross on which the 
Savior hung. They wagged their heads and reviled as they passed by. The very ones 


whom Jesus had healed, whose fathers had been cured of leprosy or fever, whose 


mothers’ eyes had been opened; the ones who had been raised up from beds of sickness 
by the touch of that Savior, passed by and reviled, and said: ‘He saved others, Him- 


674 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


self He cannot save.” The mutitude saw Him as He hung suffering on the cross. 
Then, again, the circumstances attending His death were such as to invite univer- 
sal attention. It was not designed that the death should be a private one; not merely — 
a legal transaction, a matter soon over, but a protracted and agonizing spectacle—one ; 
to be seen and known by the multitude; but, in addition, that man’s attention should 
be drawn to something to be connected with that wonderful scene; hence God called 
upon ‘the heavens and the earth, the air and the graves, and the temple itself for 
testimony. It is said that before the coronation of a Prince in olden time in Europe, ~ 
and in some kingdoms the custom is still observed, there is sent forth a herald, some- 
times three days in advance, at different periods according to the custom, to issue a 
challenge to any one that dares to claim the kingdom to come and prove his right, 
and to announce that the coronation of his prince is to take place. Methinks it was 
such a challenge God gave to all the powers of humanity and to all the powers of 
darkness. There hung suffering on the cross He who died for human woe, and as He 
hung God was about to crown Him King of kings and Lord of lords on the morning | 
of the third day, He sends forth His voice of challenge, and as He speaks the earth 
rocks to its center; that ground, shaking and convulsing, was a call to man to witness — 
what was about to occur. Not only is there a voice of earth. Yonder the sun clothed — 
himself in sackcloth for three hours, as much as to say: “There may be gloom for 
three days; the great source of Light hath veiled Himself, as in a mantle of night, for 
three days. As, for three hours, this darkness hangs, but as out of the darkness the 
Light shines forth, so, at the end of the three days, shall the Sun of Righteousness 
shine out again, the great center of glory, with that glory which He had with the 
Father from the foundation of the world.” It was the herald’s voice that passed 
through the heavens, and that spoke through all the orbs of light, “Give attention, ye 
created beings, to what is to happen!” But it was not alone in the earth, which is the 
great center, nor in the heavens, which is the great source of light, that the tidings 
were proclaimed. 
Look in yonder valley. The tombs are there; the prophets have been buried there. 
Yon hill-side is full of the resting places of the dead; generations on generations have 
been buried there; friends are walking in it, and they are saying, “Yonder is a mighty 
Judge in Israel; there is the tomb of a prophet.” They were passing to and fro 
through that valley of death, when the earthquake’s tread was heard, and behold! the — 
tombs were opened, the graves displayed the dead within, and there was a voice that 
seemed to call from the very depths of the graves, “Hear, O sons of men!” What 
feelings must have thrilled through the hearts of those who stood by those monuments, — 
and bended over those graves, when, thrown wide open, the doors bursting and the 
rocks giving way, they saw the forms of death come forth, and recognized friends that 
once they had known. What was to occur? What could all this mean? Then the 
great sacrifice was offered. It was at three o’clock in the afternoon when Christ was 
to give up the ghost. Yonder the multitude of pious people were gathered toward 
the temple. The outer court was full; the doors and gates which led into the sanctuary — 
were crowded; the lamb was before the altar; the priest in his vestments had taken the 
sacrificial knife; the blood was to be shed at the hour of three; the multitude were — 
looking. Yonder hangs a veil; it hides that inner sanctuary; there are cherubim in — 
yonder, with their wings spread over the mercy-seat; the shekinah once dwelt there; — 
God Himself in His glory was there, and the people are bending to look in. No one 
enters into that veil save the high priest, and he, with blood and in the midst of incense, — 
but once a year; but it was the mercy-seat, and the eye of every pious Jew was — 
directed toward that veil, thinking of the greater glory which lay beyond it. As the 
hour of three came, and as the priest was taking the sacrificial knife from the altar 
and was about to slay the lamb, behold! an unseen hand takes hold of that veil and 


The Resurrection of Our Lord—Simpson. 675 


tears it apart from top to bottom, and has thrown open the mercy-seat, not before seen 
by men. The cherubim are there; the altar, with its covering of blood, is there; the 
resting place of the ark is there; it is the holiest of holies. Methinks the priest drops 
the knife, the lamb goes free, for the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the 
world is suffering for man. The way to the holy of holies is open—a new and a living 
way, which man may not close, which priest alone cannot enter; but a way is open 
whereby humanity, oppressed and downtrodden, from all parts of the earth, may find 
its way to the mercy-seat of God. There was a call to the pious worshipper by voices 
which seemed to say: ‘An end to all the sacrifices, an end to all the suffering victims, 
an end to all the sprinkled hyssop that is used in purification, for One has come to do 
the will of God on whom the burden of man had been laid.” 

Now here were all these calls to humanity from all parts, as if to announce the 
great transaction. While all this was occurring, Christ was on the cros suffering the 
agony of the crucifixion. How deep that agony, we need not attempt to tell you; it 
was fearful; and yet no complaint escaped His lips; no murmuring was there. He 
bore the sins of many in His flesh on the tree. He heard the multitudes revile Him; 
He saw them wag their heads; He remembered that the disciples had fled from Him— 
one followed afar off, but the rest had gone; and yet He complained not. Friends 
and kindred had all left Him, and He trod the wine-press alone. He drank the cup 
in all its bitterness, and no complaint escaped from Him. One left Him that had 
never forsaken Him before. “The world is gone, the disciples I have fed and taught 
have all fled and passed away—all have forsaken Me.” But there was no time until 
that moment of fearful darkness came, when all the load of guilt was upon Him and 
for our sins He was smitten, that His spirit was crushed, and He called out, “My 
God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” All else might go—it were little; ‘“Why 
hast Thou forsaken Me?” But it is over; the darkness is past; the load is borne; and 
I hear Him say, “It is finished;’’ He bows His head and dies. 

Now there is publicity for the transaction. It demanded public investigation, it 
received it. There was not only the mental agony united with the agony of crucifixion, 
but there was the voluntary giving up of His life; yet, lest there might be some 
suspicion, to all this was added the proof of the fact of His death. When the limbs 
of the others were broken, and He was perceived to be dead, the soldier thrust the 
spear into His side, and there came out of that side both water and blood. There is 
a peculiarity in the sacred writings. A little incident, that seems to be mentioned 
without care, becomes the strongest possible proof, not only of the fact of Christ’s 
death, but of the nature of His death. When that sentence was written, the human 
frame was not understood, the circulation of the blood was not understood. Anato- 


mists had not then, as they have now, unveiled the human system; the great science 


of pathology had not yet been clearly taught to man; and yet, in that sentence we have 
almost a world of meaning. For it is well attested now that where persons die from 


violent mental emotion, by what is termed a broken heart, a crushed spirit, there is 
always formed a watery secretion around the heart. It was not known then to the 


soldier who lifted up that spear and pierced the body; but so much of that water had 


_ secreted around the heart that he saw it issuing forth from the pierced side, unstained 
_ by blood, which showed that that great heart had been crushed by agony within. 


When taken from the cross He was put in the sepulchre. His friends had given 
Him up, His disciples had forsaken Him; some of them saw Him die; they knew that 
He was crucified, and they abandoned Him. They were returning to their former 
employments; but His enemies remembered He had said He would rise the third day, 


and they put a guard around Him. The Roman soldiers were there; the king’s seal 


was on the stone rolled over the mouth of the sepulchre; they made everything secure. 
Here again God ordered that we should have abundant proof of Christ’s crucifixion. 


a | 


iN? 


676 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


He was crucified on Friday, which was to them the last day of the week, resting in 
the grave on our Saturday, which is their Sabbath, and then comes the first day of the 
week, our Sabbath morning, made our Sabbath because of Christ’s resurrection from 
the dead. There came an humble visitant to the tomb, Mary Magdalene; she had been 
healed of much, forgiven much, and she loved much. Mary, the mother of James, 
came also and beheld the scenes that occurred; but there had been strange commotions - 
elsewhere. Heaven had been gathering around that grave. Angels had been watch- 
ing there; they had seen the Roman guard; they had seen the shining spear and the 
polished shield; they had seen that Christ was held a prisoner by the greatest powers 
on earth. Methinks I see the angelic host as they gathered around the throne of God 
and looked up into the face of Omnipotence, and if ever there was a time when there 
was silence in heaven for half an hour, it was before the morning light of the third day 
dawned. I hear them say, “How long shall man triumph? How long shall human 
power exalt itself? How long shall the powers of darkness hold jubilee? Let us away 
and roll away the stone; let us away and frighten yonder Roman guard and drive them 
from the sepulchre.” They waited until permission was given. I see the angel coming 
down from the opening doors of glory; He hastens outside the walls of Jerusalem 
and down to the sepulchre; when they saw Him coming the keepers shook, they 
became like dead men; He rolls away the stone and sets Himself by the mouth of the 
sepulchre. Christ, girding Himself with all the power of His divinity, rises from the 
grave. He leads captivity captive, tears the crown from the head of death, and makes 
light the darkness of the grave. Behold Him as He rises just preparatory to His 
rising up to glory. Oh, what a moment was that! Hell was preparing for its jubilee; 
the powers of earth’ were preparing for a triumph; but as the grave yields its prey, 
Christ, charged with being an impostor, is proved to be the Son of God with power; 
it is the power of His resurrection from the dead. ! 
There was Christ’s resurrection from the dead. He became the first fruits of them 
that slept. But to give the amplest proofs of His resurrection He lingered on earth 
to be seen of men, and to be seen in such a manner as to show that He was still the 
Savior Christ. In my younger days I used often to wonder why was it that Mary 
Magdalene came first to the sepulchre, and the mother of James that stood there— 
why He should appear to them; put in later days I have said it was to show that 
was the Savior still; that the same nature was there which had made Him stoop to th 
lowliest of the low—the power that enabled Him to heal the guiltiest of the guilty: 
that that power, that compassion, were with Him still. Though now raised beyont 
death and triumphing over hell, He still had within Him the Savior’s heart. Methinks 
I see when Peter had run in anxiety to tell the news, Mary remained there; she cou 
not fully comprehend it; the grave was open, the napkins were there; it was said F 
Was not there, but He was risen. And yet, there was a darkness upon her; she coul 
not fully conceive, it seems to me, the resurrection of the dead. She stood wonder 
when she heard a voice behind her which said, “Woman, why weepest thou?” Bat 
in tears as she was, she turned round and saw the man standing, and taking Him to 
be the gardener, and supposing that He had taken the body and carried it away as not 
fit to lie in that tomb or be in that garden, she said: “If thou hast taken Him aw 
tell me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away. If He must not lie 
this tomb, if He cannot lie in the garden, if as a malefactor He must be cast out fr 
man, tell me where the body is, and I will take it away.” It was a proof of her affec- 
tion. A Voice said, “Mary, Mary.” Oh, she recognized it, and her heart cried out: 
“Rabboni, my Lord and my God!” and then she would have thrown herself at His 
feet and bathed those feet again with her tears, but He said: “Touch Me not, I amv 
not ascended to My Father; go and tell the disciples and Peter that I am risen from 
the dead.” See the compassion of the Savior! and then that message! “Tell the 


The Resurrection of Our Lord—Simpson. 677 


disciples, and Peter.” Why send a message to him? Because he cursed and swore 
and denied the Master. The other disciples might have said, if Christ is risen, He may 
receive and bless us all, but Peter is gone, hopelessly and irretrievably gone; he that 
forsook his Master and denied Him, there is no hope for him. And yet, said Jesus, 
“Go and tell the disciples and Peter’—poor backslidden Peter. Jesus knew his sorrow 
and anguish, and almost felt the throbbings of his broken heart, and He sent a 
message to Peter. He may be a disciple still—may come back and be saved through 
the boundless love of Christ. Oh, the compassion of the Son of God! Thank God 
that Peter’s Savior is on the throne this morning. Not only was He seen by these, 
but He met with the disciples journeying by the way and explained the Scriptures to 
them; and as they met in the upper room He was there. When the doors were 
unopened He came in their midst and said, “Peace!” breathed on them and said, 
“Receive ye the Holy Ghost.’’ Thus He met with them, and said to Thomas, ‘Reach 
hither thy fingers, and be not faithless but believing.””’ Then afterward He was seen 
by five hundred, and from the Mount of Olives, while the disciples were gathered 
around Him, He was received up into glory. They saw Him, and as He went He 
blessed them. The last vision that ever humanity had of the Son of God ere He 
ascended to heaven was that of spreading out His hands in blessing. Oh, My Savior 
hath thus gone up, and He dropped from those outstretched hands a blessing which 
falls today like the gentle dew all over the earth; it reaches heart after heart. It hath 
reached patriarchs, apostles, martyrs, fathers, and mothers and little children, and, 
thank God, the heavenly dew, as from those outstretched hands, is coming down on 
our assembly this very morning. On this glad day blessings are dropping from the 
throne of God upon us from this risen Savior. He hath ascended up on high, the 
_ gates have opened for Him, and He hath gone to His throne in glory. 

Let us look at a few of the results that flow to us from these facts thus sustained 

of His death and resurrection from the dead! 


In the first place, it establishes all Bible declarations. It had been predicted that 

He should not stay in the grave, and when He arose it put the seal to the Old Testa- 
_ ment as the Word of God. The prophecy in Him fulfilled gave glorious proof that the 
other parts of it should be also fulfilled as the word of an unchanging God. 

Again, in His resurrection we see a proof of His divine power. No man hath been 
raised, from the dead by his own power. All died, from Adam to Moses, with the 
exception of Enoch and Elijah, who, because of their devotion and acknowledgment of 

the Divine head, themselves became prophets of a coming Savior. He rose by His 
a own power. He conquered death itself, the grave, and the whole powers of humanity. 
: Jupiter is represented by an old classic writer as saying to the lesser gods that if 
all of them combined together and should endeavor to throw down his throne—if all 
power was arrayed against him—he, by his own might, would be able to overcome 
them all. What was fiction with the ancients becomes gloriously realized in Christ. 
Take all the powers of humanity—the Jewish power, the Roman power; the power of 
~ fearning, of art, of public opinion; take all the powers of earth and hell, death and the 
_ grave, and combine them all against the Savior, and, without one effort, without one 
single apparent movement—the sleeper lies in death, His eyes are sealed, and, as if all 
unconscious, for the warning had not been given before—in an instant those eyes 
ere opened, that frame rises, the grave yields up its prey, death retires conquered, and 
rist demonstrates Himself to be the ruler of the whole universe. He made the 
h to tremble, the sun to put on sackcloth, the very air to grow dark, the graves to 
pen, the dead to come forth, and proclaimed Himself to be the conqueror of death 
and hell. So we have the proof of His being the Son of God with power. 
; In that resurrection from the dead we have a pledge of our own resurrection. 
Christ has become the first fruits of them that slept. You know the figure of the first 


678 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


fruits as understood by the Jews. Their religion was connected with the seasons of 
the year—with the harvest crops; one of their feasts was called the feast. of the first 
fruits, and was on this wise: When the first heads of grain began to ripen in the field, 
and there was thus a pledge of harvest, they cut off those first ripened heads and went 
up to Jerusalem. Before that the grain was not crushed, no bread was baked out of it, 
and nothing was done to appropriate that crop to man’s use until first those ripened 
heads of grain were brought up to Jerusalem and presented to the Lord as a thank 
offering. He was acknowledged as Lord of the harvest, and they were laid up as a 
kind of thank offering before God. They were the first fruits. Then they went away 
to the fields, and all through Judea the sickle was thrust in, the grain was reaped and 
gathered into sheaves, and when the harvest was secured they baked the bread for 
their children out of this first grain. They came up to the temple, where the first fruits” 
had been laid, and they held a feast of thanksgiving, and shouted harvest home. The 
old harvest feast seems to be descended from this ancient custom. Christ rose as the 
first fruits, and there is to be a glorious resurrection. Christ came, the first man to 
rise in this respect, by His own power, from the grave, having snatched the crown: 
from death, having thrown light into the grave, having Himself ascended up toward 
glory. He goes up in the midst of the shouts of angels; the heavens open before Him; 
yonder is the altar; there is the throne, and around it stand the seraphim and the 
cherubim; and Christ enters the victor and sits down upon the throne, from hence- 
forth expecting until His enemies be made His footstool. He is the first fruits of the 
harvest, but the angels are to be sent out like the reapers, and by and by humanity is 
coming. As Christ, the first fruits, passed through the grave and went up to glory, 
so there shall come from their sleeping dust in Asia, in Africa, in Europe and in 
America, from every mountain top, from the depths of the sea, from deep ravines, and 
from plains outspread—Oh there shall come, in the time of the glorious harvest—the 
uprising of humanity. When all the nations, waking from their long sleep, shall rise 
and shall shout the harvest home! Thank God! at that time none shall be wanting 
Oh, they come, they come, from the nations of the past and from the generations yet 
unborn! I see the crowd gathering there. Behold, the angels are waiting, and, as the 
hosts rise from the dead, they gather round the throne. Christ invites His followe $ 
to overcome and sit down with Him on His throne, as He overcame and sat down 
with the Father on His throne. In that is the pledge of our resurrection from the 
dead. Can I not suffer, since Christ suffered? Can I not die, since Christ died? Let 
the grave be my resting place, for Christ rested there. Is it cold? The warmth of His 
animation isin it. Is it lonely? He shall be beside me in all His spirit’s power. Does 
the load of earth above me, and beneath which I am placed, press upon me? Christ 
hath power to burst the tomb; He shall burst the tomb, though deep it be, and I shall 
rise through His almighty power. Yes, let the malice of men be directed against me 
let me be taken, if it must be, as a martyr, and be bound to the stake; let the faggots be 
kindled, let the flame ascend, let my body be burned; gather my ashes, grind my bones 
to powder, scatter them on the ocean’s surface; or carry those ashes to the top of 
yonder volcano and throw them within its consuming fire—let them be given to the 
dust—and yet I can sing: 


“God, my Redeemer, lives, 
And ever from the skies 
Looks down and watches all my dust, 
Till He shall bid it rise.” 


Thank God! it may be scattered on the wings of the wind—Christ is everywhere 
present; He has marked every particle, and it shall rise again by His own almighty — 
power. And what is it to sleep awhile, if I am Christ's? To die, if I am like Christ im 


. 
; 
t 
' 


The Resurrection of Our Lord—Simpson. 679 


dying? and be buried, if I am like Christ in being buried? I trust I shall be like Him 
when He-comes forth in His glory. I shall be like Him, for the Apostle says, We 
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is; we shall be changed from glory into 
glory, into the same image as by the Spirit of God. It would be a great change to be 
changed from glory to glory, from saints to angels, from angels to cherubim, from 
cherubim to seraphim, from glory to glory; but, thank God! we shall not stop being 
changed; for the change shall go on from glory to glory until we shall be transformed 
into the likeness of the Son of God, brighter than angels ever shone, more glorious 
than were ever cherubim. We shall be near the throne; we shall sit beside Him, for 
He hath made room for us there. Then if we can calmly look at death and face him. 
because his strength has been overcome, it reconciles us to parting a little while with 
friends. A father or a mother may be taken from us, but we shall see them again; 
they shall not sleep for ever. The little ones that drop from our arms, we can almost 
see them this morning; some of us can almost see them this morning; some of us can 
almost feel them in our arms—can see the glance of that beautiful eye, and hear the 
sound of that little prattling lip; they seem to be with us now, as a little while ago they 
dropped from out of our arms. We followed them to the grave, and we left them there, 
where the winter’s storm has been howling around them. Sometimes loneliness like 
that terrible storm has swept over our hearts and left them almost in despair; but 
through Christ’s resurrection we see our children yonder in glory, safe in the Savior’s 
arms. Their little forms shall rise all-glorious from the tomb in the morning of the 
resurrection; we shall find them, for Jesus is the resurrection and the life. All this 
comes to us from the resurrection of Christ from the dead. He died once; He dies 
no more; the condemnation of death is for ever gone; He sits on the throne of ever- 
lasting dominion; His kingdom is an eternal kingdom; and as He died once and has 
risen to die no more, so when we have died once and gone to the grave, and entered 
the dark valley and shadow of death, and we come up safely on the other side, thank 
God! death is passed for ever; we shall then put our feet on the neck of the monster, 
and shall be able to say: 


“Oh death, where is thy sting? 
Oh grave, where is thy victory?” 


Looking at the resurrection of Christ we exclaim, Thanks be unto God, who hath 
given us the victory! Such is the eternity of glory and blessedness that awaits us. 
Thank God for a spiritual body! Here some of us long to triumph over nature. We 
would grasp, if we could, angelic wisdom; but our brows will ache with pain, our 
frames decay, our eyes grow dim, our hearing fail. This flesh of ours will not stand 
hours of painful study and seasons of protracted labor; but, thank God! when the body 
that now oppresses us is laid in the grave, a spiritual body will be given to us, pure, 
ethereal, and holy. Oh, what an extent of knowledge shall flash upon us! what light 
and gloty! what spirituality and power! Then we shall not need to ask an angel any- 
thing. We shall know as we are known. Jesus will be our teacher; the Everlasting 
God, the Man whose name is Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Prince of Peace. He 
Himself shall be our Leader. We shall know then as also we are known. 


Then rejoice in God. Dry up those tears. Cast away that downcast look. Child 
of the dust, you are an heir of glory. There is a crown all burnished for you; there is 
a mansion all ready for you; there is a white robe prepared for you; there is eternal 
glory for you; angels are to be your servants, and you are to reign with the King of 
kings for ever. But while you wait on earth, be witnesses for God; attest the glory of 
your Master; rise in the greatness of His strength; bind sin captive to your chariot 
wheels; go onward in your heavenly career, and be as pure as your ascended Head is 
pure. Be active in works of mercy; be angels of light, be flames of fire; go on your 


680 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


mission of mercy, and convert the world unto God before you go up higher. When . 
you go, not only go forward to present yourselves, but may every one of you be able 
to say: “Here am I, and those which thou hast given me.” ee 


[Matthew Simpson, D. D., LL.D., Bishop and the incomparable orator, of the | 
Methodist Episcopal Church, was born in Cadiz, Ohio, June 21, 1810.. From childhood © 
a diligent student, he mastered the German language, so as to read Luther’s version 
of the Bible, in his ninth year. He graduated from Allegheny College, Meadville, © 
Pennsylvania, and in 1833 received a medical diploma. The following year he became 
a minister in the Pittsburg Conference. In 1839 he was elected president of Asbury — 
University, Greencastle, Indiana. Nine years later the General Conference appointed — 
him editor of the Western Christian Advocate, and in 1852 he was called to the episco- — 


pate. Nee ; 
The above unedited discourse. reported as delivered on Easter Sunday, 1866, is 


given here through the courtesy of Porter & Coates. ] 


(681) 


THE FALSE PEACE OF RITUAL. 


BY GEORGE ADAM SMITH. 
Amos 4: 4-06. 

The next four groups of oracles—4: 4-13, 5: 1-17, 5: 17-27, and 6—treat of many 
different details, and each of them has its own emphasis; but all are alike in this, that 
they vehemently attack the national worship and the sense of political security which 
it has engendered, Let us at once make clear that this worship is the worship of 
Jehovah. It is true that it is mixed with idolatry, but except possibly in one obscure 
verse, Amos does not concern himself with the idols. What he strikes at, what he 
would sweep away, is his people’s form of devotion to their own God. The cult of the 
national God, at the national sanctuaries, in the national interest and by the whole 
body of the people, who practice it with a zeal unparalleled by their forefathers—this is 
what Amos condemns. And he does so absolutely. He has nothing but scorn for the 
temples and the feasts. The assiduity of attendance, the liberality of gifts, the employ- 
ment of wealth and art and patriotism in worship—he tells his generation that God 
loathes it all. Like Jeremiah, he even seems to imply that God never instituted in 
Israel any sacrifice or offering. It is all this which gives these oracles their interest 
for us; and that interest is not merely historical. 


It is indeed historical to begin with. When we find, not idolatry, but all religious 
ceremonial—temples, public worship, tithes, sacrifice, the praise of God by music, in 
fact every material form in which man has ever been wont to express his devotion to 
God—scorned and condemned with the same uncompromising passion as idolatry 
itself, we receive a needed lesson in the history of religion. For when one is asked, 
What is the distinguishing characteristic of heathenism? one is always ready to say 
Idolatry, which is not true. The distinguishing characteristic of heathenism is the 
stress which it lays upon ceremonial. To the pagan religions, both of the ancient and 
modern world, rites were the indispensable element in religion. The gifts of the gods, 
the abundance of fruits, the security of the state, depended upon the full and accurate 
performance of ritual. In Greek literature we have innumerable illustrations of this: 
the “Iliad” itself starts from a god’s anger, roused by an insult to his priest, whose 
prayers for vengeance he hears because sacrifices have been assiduously offered to 
him. And so too with the systems of paganism from which the faith of Israel, though 
at first it had so much in common with them, broke away to its supreme religious dis- 
tinction. The Semites laid the stress of their obedience to the gods upon traditional 
ceremonies; and no sin was held so heinous by them as the neglect or infringement of 
a religious rite. By the side of it offences against one’s fellowmen or one’s own char- 
acter were deemed mere misdemeanors. In the day of Amos this pagan superstition 
thoroughly penetrated the religion of Jehovah, and so absorbed the attention of men, 
that without the indignant and complete repudiation of it prophecy could not have 
started on her task of identifying morality with religion, and of teaching men more 
spiritual views of God. But even when we are thus aware of ceremonialism as the 
characteristic quality of the pagan religions, we have not measured the full reason of 
that uncompromising attack on it, which is the chief feature of this part of the per- 
manent canon of our religion. For idolatries die everywhere; but everywhere a super- 


_ stitious ritualism survives. It continues with philosophies that have ceased to believe 


682 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


in the gods who enforced it. Upon ethical movements which have gained their 
ireedom by breaking away from it, in the course of time it makes up, and lays its — 
paralyzing weight. With offers of help it flatters religions the most spiritual in theory 
and intention. The Pharisees, than _whom few parties. had_at first_purer idea fa 
morality, tithed mint, anise, and cummin, to the neglect of the essence of the Law; 
anid’ even Sound Christians, who have assimilated the Gospel of St. John, find it hard 
and sometimes impossible to believe in salvation apart from their own sacraments, or 
outside their own denominational forms. Now this is because ritual is a thing which 
appeals both to the baser and to the nobler instincts of man. To the baser it offers 
itself as a mechanical atonement for sin, and a substitute for all moral and intellectual 
effort in connection with faith; to the nobler it insists on a man’s need in religion of 
order and routine, of sacrament and picture. Plainly then the words of Amos have 
significance for more than the immediate problems of his day. And if it seem to some 
that Amos goes too far with his cry to sweep away all ceremonial, let them remember, 
besides the crisis of his times, that the temper he exposes and seeks to dissipate is) a 
rank and obdurate error of the human heart. Our Lord, who recognized the place of 
ritual in worship, who said, “Thus it behooveth us to fulfil all righteousness,” which 
righteousness in the dialect of His day was not the moral law, but man’s due of rite, 
sacrifice, tithe, and alms, said also, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” There is 
an irreducible minimum of rite and routine in worship; there is an invaluable loyalty 
to traditional habits; there are holy and spiritual uses in symbol and sacrament. But 
these are all dispensable; and because they are all constantly abused, the voice of the © 
prophet is ever needed which tells us that God will have none of them; but let justice 
roll on like water, and righteousness like an unfailing stream. , 
For the superstition that ritual is the indispensable bond between God and man, 
Amos substitutes two other aspects of religion. They are history as God's discipline 
of man: and civic justice as man’s duty to God. The first of them he contrasts with — 
religious ceremonialism in chap. 4: 4-13, and the second in chap. 5; while in chap. 6 
he assaults once more the false political peace which the ceremonialism engenders, 


I. FOR WORSHIP, CHASTISEMENT. 
i Amos. 4: 4-13. 


In chap. 2 Amos contrasted the popular conception of religion as worship with 
God’s conception of it as history. He placed a picture of the sanctuary, hot with 
religious zeal, but hot, too, with passion and the fumes of wine, side by side witha 
great prospect of the national history: God's guidance of Israel from Egypt onwards. 7 
That is, as we said at the time, he placed an indoors picture of religion side by sider 
with an open-air one. He repeats that arrangement here. The religious services he 
sketches are more pure, and the history he takes from his own day; but the contrast is 
the same. Again we have on the one side the temple worship—artificial, exaggerated, . 
indoors, smoky; but on the other a few movements of God in Nature, which, though i 
they all be calamities, have a great moral majesty upon them. The first opens witha 
scornful call to worship, which the prophet, letting out his whole heart at the begin- 
ning, shows to be equivalent to sin. Note the next impossible caricature of their 
exaggerated zeal: sacrifices every morning instead of once a year, tithes every three 
days instead of every three years. To offer leavened bread was a departure from the 
older fashion of unleavened. To publish their liberality was like the later Pharisees, 
who were not dissimilarly mocked by our Lord: “When thou doest alms, cause not 
a trumpet to be sounded before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the 
streets, that they may have the glory of men.” There is a certain rhythm in the taunt; 
but the prose style seems to be resumed with fitness when the prophet describes the 
solemn approach of God in deeds of doom. ; 


5 


The False Peace of Ritwal—S mith, 683, 


Come away to Bethel and transgress, 
At Gilgal exaggerate your transgression! 
And bring every morning your sacrifices, 
Every three days your tithes! 
And send up the savour of leavened bread as a thank- 
offering, 
And call out your liberalities—make them to be heard! 
For so ye love to do, O children of Israel: 
Oracle of Jehovah. 


“But I on My side have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want 
of bread in all your places—yet ye did not return to Me: Oracle of Jehovah. 

“But I on My side withheld from you the winter rain, while it was still three 
months to the harvest: and I let it rain repeatedly on one city, and upon one city I did 
not let it rain: one lot was rained upon, and the lot that was not rained upon withered; 
and two or three cities kept straggling to one city to drink water, and were not satis- 
fied—yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah. 

“T smote you with blasting and with mildew: many of your gardens and your 
vineyards and your figs and your olives the locust devoured—yet ye did not return to 
Me: oracle of Jehovah. 

“T sent among you a pestilence by way of Egypt: I slew with the sword your 
youths—besides the capture of your horses—and I brought up the stench of your 
camps to your nostrils—yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah. 

“IT overturned among you, like God’s own overturning of Sodom and Gomorrah, 
till ye became as a brand plucked from the burning—yet ye did not return to Me: 
oracle of Jehovah.” 

This recalls a passage in that English poem of which we are again and again 
reminded by the Book of Amos, “‘The Vision of Piers Plowman.” It is the sermon 
of Reason in Passus V. (Skeat’s edition) :— 


“He preved that thise pestilences were for pure synne, 
And the southwest wynde in saterday et evene 
Was pertliche for pure pride and for no poynt elles. 
Piries and plomtrees were puffed to the erthe, 
In ensample ze segges ze shulden do the bettere. 
Beches and brode okes were blowen to the grounde. 
Torned upward her tailles in tokenynge of drede, 
That dedly synne at domesday shal fordon hem alle.”’ 


In the ancient world it was a settled belief that natural calamities like these were 
the effects of the deity’s wrath. When Israel suffers from them the prophets take for 
granted that they are for the people’s punishment. I have elsewhere shown how the 
climate of Palestine lent itself to these convictions; in this respect the Book of Deu- 
teronomy contrasts it with the climate of Egypt. And although some, perhaps rightly, 
have scoffed at the exaggerated form of the belief, that God is angry with the sons of 
men every time drought or floods happen, yet the instinct is sound which in all ages 
has led religious people to feel that such things are inflicted for moral purposes. In 
the economy of the universe there may be ends of a purely physical kind served by 
such disasters, apart altogether from their meaning to man. But man at least learns 
from them that nature does not exist solely for feeding, clothing, and keeping him 
wealthy; nor is it anything’else than his monotheism, his faith in God as the Lord 
both of his moral life and of nature, which moves him to believe, as Hebrew prophets 
taught and as our early English seer heard Reason herself preach. Amos had the 
more need to explain those disasters as the work of the God of righteousness, because 
his contemporaries, while willing to grant Jehovah leadership in war, were tempted 
to attribute to the Canaanite gods of the land all power over the seasons. 


684 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


What, however, more immediately concerns us in this passage is its very effective 
contrast between men’s treatment of God and God’s treatment of men. They lavish 
upon Him gifts and sacrifices. He—‘on His side”’—sends them cleanness of teeth, 
drought, blasting of their fruits, pestilence, war, and earthquake. That is to say, they 
regard Him as a being only to be flattered and fed. He regards them as creatures 
with characters to discipline, even at the expense of their material welfare. Their 
views of him, if religious, are sensuous and gross; His views of them, if austere, are 
moral and ennobling. All this may be grim, but it is exceeding grand; and short as 
the efforts of Amos are, we begin to perceive in him something already of the great- 
ness of an Isaiah. 

And have not those who have believed as Amos believed ever been the strong 
spirits of our race, making the very disasters which crushed them to the earth the 
tokens that God has great views about them? Laugh not at the simple peoples, who 
have their days of humiliation, and their fast-days after floods and stunted harvests. 
For they take these, not like other men, as the signs of their frailty and helplessness; 
but as measures of the greatness God sees in them, His provocation of their souls to 
the infinite possibilities which He has prepared for them. 

Israel, however, did not turn even at the fifth call to penitence, and so there 
remained nothing for her but a fearful looking forward to judgment, all the more 
terrible that the prophet does not define what the judgment shall be. 

“Therefore thus shall I do to thee, O Israel: because I am going to do this to 
thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For, lo, He that formeth the mountains, and 
createth the wind, and declareth to man what His thought is, that maketh morning 
darkness, and marcheth on the high places of earth, Jehovah, God of Hosts, is His 


Name.” 
Il. FOR WORSHIP, JUSTICE. 
Amos 5. 


In the next of these groups of oracles Amos continues his attack on the national 
ritual, and now contrasts it with the service of God in public life—the relief of the 
poor, the discharge of justice. But he does not begin with this. The group opens 
with an elegy, which bewails the nation as already fallen. It is always difficult to 
mark where the style of a prophet passes from rhythmical prose into what we may 
justly call a metrical form. But in this short wail, we catch the well-known measure 
of the Hebrew dirge; not so artistic as in later poems, yet with at least the character- 
istic couplet of a long and a short line. 

‘Hear this word which I lift up against you—a Dirge, O house of Israel— 


“Fallen, no more shall she rise, 
Virgin of Israel! 
Flung down on her own ground, 
No one to raise her!”’ 
The “Virgin,” which with Isaiah is a standing title for Jerusalem and occasionally 
used of other cities, is here probably the whole nation of Northern Israel. The 
explanation follows. It is War. ‘For thus saith the Lord Jehovah: The city that 
goeth forth a thousand shall have an hundred left; and she that goeth forth an hundred 
shall have left ten for the house of Israel.” 

But judgment is not yet irrevocable. There break forthwith the only two 
promises which lighten the lowering darkness of the book. Let the people turn to 
Jehovah Himself—and that means let them turn from the ritual, and instead of it 
purge their civic life, restore justice in their courts, and help the poor. For God and 
moral good are one. It is “seek Me and ye shall live,” and “seek good and ye shall 
live.” Omitting for the present all argument as to whether the interruption of praise 
to the power of Jehovah be from Amos or another, we read the whole oracle as follows: 


z 
“4 
" 
f 
Li 


‘4 


—- ;- 


The False Peace of Ritwal—Smith, . 685 


“Thus saith Jehovah to the house of Israel: Seek Me and live. But seek not 
Bethel, and come not to Gilgal, and to Beersheba pass not over’—to come to Beer- 
sheba one had to cross all Judah. ‘For Gilgal shall taste the gall of exile’—it is not 
possible except in this clumsy way to echo the prophet’s play upon words, ‘‘Ha-Gilgal’ 


galoh yigleh’—‘“and Bethel,’ God’s house, “‘shall become an idolatry.” This ren- 
dering, however, scarcely gives the rude force of the original; for the word rendered. 
idolatry, Aven, means also falsehood and perdition, so that we should not exaggerate 
the antithesis if we employed a phrase which once was not vulgar: “And Bethel, house 
of God, shall go to the devil!” The epigram was the more natural that near Bethel, 
on a site now uncertain, but close to the edge of the desert to which it gave its name, 
there lay from ancient times a village actually called Beth-Aven, however the form 
may have arisen. And we shall find Hosea stereotyping this epigram of Amos, and 
calling the sanctuary Beth-Aven oftener than he calls it Beth-el. “Seek ye Jehovah 
and live,” he begins again, “lest He break forth like fire, O house of Joseph, and it 
consume and there be none to quench at Bethel. . . He that made the Seven Stars 
and Orion, that turneth the murk into morning, and day He darkeneth to night, 
that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out on the face of the earth— 
Jehovah His Name. He it is that flasheth out ruin on strength, and bringeth down 
destruction on the fortified.” This rendering of the last verse is uncertain, and rightly 
suspected, but there is no alternative so probable, and it returns to the keynote from 
which the passage started, that God should break forth like fire. 

Ah, “they that turn justice to wormwood, and abase righteousness to the earth! 
They hate him that reproveth in the gate’—in an Eastern city both the law-court and 
the place of the popular council—‘‘and him that speaketh sincerely they abhor.” So 
in the English mystic’s Vision Peace complains of Wrong: 


“I dar noughte for fere of hym fyghte ne chyde.’’ 


“Wherefore, because ye trample on the weak and take from him a present of corn, ye 
have built houses of ashlar, but ye shall not dwell in them; vineyards for pleasure have 
ye planted, but ye shall not drink of their wine. For I know how many are your 
crimes, and how forceful your sins—ye that browbeat the righteous, take bribes, and 
bring down the poor in the gate! Therefore the prudent in such a time is dumb, 
for an evil time is it” indeed. 

“Seek good and not evil, that ye may live, and Jehovah God of Hosts be with you, 
as ye say” He is. “Hate evil and love good; and in the gate set justice on her feet again 
—peradventure Jehovah God of Hosts may have pity on the remnant of Joseph.” If 
in the book of Amos there be any passages, which, to say the least, do not now lie in 
their proper places, this is one of them. For, firstly, while it regards the nation as stiil 
responsible for the duties of government, it recognizes them as reduced to a rem- 
nant. To find such a state of affairs we have to come down to the years subsequent 
to 734, when Tiglath-Pileser swept into captivity all Gilead and Galilee—that is, two- 
thirds, in bulk, of the territory of Northern Israel—but left Ephraim untouched. In 
answer to this, it may, of course, be pointed out that in thus calling the people to 
repentance, so that a remnant might be saved, Amos may have been contemplating 
a disaster still future, from which, though it was inevitable, God might be moved to 
spare a remnant. That is very true. But it does not meet this further difficulty, that 
the verses (14, 15) plainly make interruption between the end of verse 13 and the 
beginning of verse 16; and that the initial “therefore” of the latter verse, while it has 
no meaning in its present sequence, becomes natural and appropriate when made to 
follow immediately on verse 13. For all these reasons, then, I take verses 14 and 15 as 
a parenthesis, whether from Amos himself or from a later writer who can tell? But it 
ought to be kept in mind that in other prophetic writings, where judgment is very 


686 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


severe, we have some proof of the later insertion of calls to repentance, by way of 
mitigation. 


Verse 13 had said the time was so evil that the prudent man kept silence. All the — 


more must the Lord Himself speak, as verse 16 now proclaims. “Therefore thus saith 
Jehovah, God of Hosts, Lord: On all open ways lamentation, and in all streets they 
shall be saying, Ah woe! Ah woe! And in all vineyards lamentation, and they shall 
call the ploughman to wailing and to lamentation them that are skilful in dirges”— 
town and country, rustic and artist alike—“for I shall pass through thy midst, saith 
Jehovah.” It is the solemn formula of the Greek Passover, when Egypt was filled with 
wailing and there were dead in every house. 


The next verse starts another, but a kindred, theme. As blind as was Israel’s confi- 
dence in ritual, so blind was their confidence in dogma, and the popular dogma was 
that of the ““Day of Jehovah.” 


All popular hopes expect their victory to come in a single sharp crisis—a day. 
And again, the day of any one means either the day he was appointed, or the day of his 
display and triumph. So Jehovah’s day meant to the people the day of His judgment, 

-or of His triumph: His triumph in war over their enemies, His judgment upon the 
heathen. But Amos, whose keynote has been that judgment begins at home, cries woe 
upon such hopes, and tells his people that for them the day of Jehovah is not victory, 
but rather insidious, importunate, inevitable death. And this he describes as a man 
who has lived, alone with wild beasts, from the jungles of the Jordan, where the lions 
lurk, to the huts of the desert infested by snakes. 


“Woe unto them that long for the day of Jehovah! What have you to do with 
the day of Jehovah? It is darkness, and not light. As when a man fleeth from the 
face of a lion, and a bear falls upon him; and he comes into his home, and,” breathless, 
“Jeans his hand upon the wall, and a serpent bites him.”’ And then, as if appealing to 
heaven for confirmation: Is it not so? “Is it not darkness, the day of Jehovah, and 
not light? storm darkness, and not a ray of light upon it?” 


Then Amos returns to the worship, that nurse of their vain hopes, that false 
prophet of peace, and he hears God speak more strongly than ever of its futility and 
hatefulness. 


“T hate, I loathe your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your gatherings to 
sacrifice.” For with pagan folly they still believed that the smoke of their burnt 
offerings went up to heaven and flattered the nostrils of Deity. How ingrained was 
this belief may be judged by us from the fact that the terms of it had to be adopted by 
the apostles of a spiritual religion, if they would make themselves understood, and 
are now the metaphors of the sacrifices of the Christian heart. “Though ye bring to 
Me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings I will not be pleased, or your thank- 
offerings of fatted calves, I will not look at them. Let cease from Me the voice of 
thy songs; to the playing of thy viols I will not listen, But let justice roll on like water, 
and righteousness like an unfailing stream.” 

Then follows the remarkable appeal from the habits of this age to those of the 
times of Israel’s simplicity. “Was it flesh—or meal-offerings that ye brought Me 
in the wilderness, forty years, O house of Israel?” That is to say, at the very time 
when God made Israel His people, and Jed them safely to the promised land—the time 
when of all others He did most for them—He was not moved to such love and deliv- 
erance by the propitiatory bribes, which this generation imagine to be so availing and 
indispensable. Nay, those still shall not avail, for exile from the land shall now as 
surely come in spite of them, as the possession of the land in old times came without 
them. This at least seems to be the drift of the very obscure verse which follows, and 
is the unmistakable statement of the close of the oracle. “But ye shall liftup .. . 


— 


The False Peace of Ritual—S mith, 687 


your king and . . . your god, images which you have made for yourselves; and 
I will carry you away into exile far beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah—God of Hosts 
is His Name!” So this chapter closes like the previous, with the marshalling of God’s 
armies. But as there His hosts were the movements of Nature and the Great Stars, 
so here they are the nations of the world. By His rule of both He is the God of Hosts. 
III. AT EASE IN ZION. 
Amos 6. 

The evil of the national worship was the false political confidence which it 
engendered. Leaving the ritual alone, Amos now proceeds to assault this confidence. 
Weare taken from the public worship of the people to the private banquets of the rich, 
but again only in order to have their security and extravagance contrasted with the 
pestilence, the war, and the captivity that are rapidly approaching. 

“Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion’ —it is a proud and overweening ease which 
the word expresses—‘‘and that trust in the mount of Samaria! Men of mark of the 
first of the peoples’—ironically, for that is Israel’s opinion of itself—‘‘and to them 
do the house of Israel resort! . . . Ye that put off the day of calamity and draw 
near the sessions of injustice’—an epigram and proverb, for it is the universal way of 
men to wish and fancy far away the very crisis that their sins are hastening on. Isaiah 
described this same generation as drawing iniquity with cords of hypocrisy, and sin 
as it were with a cart-rope! ‘That lie on ivory divans and sprawl on their couches” 
—another luxurious custom, which filled this rude shepherd with contempt—‘‘and eat 
lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall’—that is, only the most 
delicate of meats—‘‘who prate” or “purr” or “babble to the sound of the viol, as if 
they were David’ himself ‘invent for them instruments of song; who drink wine by 
ewerfuls—waterpotfuls—and anoint with the finest of oil—yet never do they grieve at 
the havoc of Joseph!” The havoc is the moral havoc, for the social structure of Israel 
is obviously still secure. The rich are indifferent to it; they have wealth, art, patriotism, 
religion, but neither heart for the poverty nor conscience for the sin of their people. 
We know their kind! They are always with us, who live well and imagine they are 
proportionately clever and refined. They have their political zeal, will rally to an 
election when the interests of their class or their trade is in danger. They have a 
robust and exuberant patriotism, talk grandly of commerce, empire, and the national 
destiny; but for the real woes and sores of the people, the poverty, the overwork, the 
drunkenness, the dissoluteness, which more affect a nation’s life than anything else, 
they have no pity and no care. Fi 

“Therefore now’—the double initial of judgment—‘“shall they go into exile at the 
head of the exiles, and stilled shall be the revelry of the dissolute’—literally “the 
sprawlers,” as in verse 4, but used here rather in the moral than in the physical sense. 
“Sworn hath the Lord Jehovah by Himself—’tis the oracle of Jehovah God of Hosts: 
I am loathing the pride of Jacob, and his palaces do I hate, and I will pack up a city 
and its fulness. . . . For, behold, Jehovah is commanding, and He will smite the 
great house into ruins and the small house into splinters.” The collapse must come, 
postpone it as. their fancy will, for it has been workéa tor and is inevitable. How 
could it be otherwise? “Shall horses run on a cliff, or the sea be ploughed by oxen— 
that ye should turn justice to poison and the fruit of righteousness to wormwood! 
Ye that exult in Lo-Debar and say, By our own strength have we taken to ourselves 
Karnaim.” So Gratz rightly reads the verse. The Hebrew text and all the versions 
take these names as if they were common nouns—Lo-Debar, “a thing of naught”; 
Karnaim, “a pair of horns’—and doubtless it was just because of this possible play 
upon their names, that Amos selected these two out of all the recent conquests of 
Israel. Karnaim, in full Ashteroth Karnaim, ‘‘Astarte of Horns,” was that imme- 
morial fortress and sanctuary which lay out upon the great plateau of Bashan towards 


688 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 
Damascus; so obvious and cardinal a site that it appears in the sacred history both in 
the earliest recorded campaign in Abraham’s time and in one of the latest under the 
Maccabees. Lo-Debar was of Gilead, and probably lay on that last rampart of the 
province northward, overlooking the Yarmuk, a strategical point which must have often 
been contested by Israel and Aram, and with which no other Old Testament name has 
been identified. These two fortresses, with many others, Israel had lately taken from 
Aram; but not as they boasted, “by their own strength.” It was only Aram’s pre- 
occupation with Assyria, now surgent on the northern flank, which allowed Israel 
these easy victories. And this same northern foe would soon overwhelm themselves. 
“For, behold, I am to raise up against you, O house of Israel—tis the oracle oi 
Jehovah God of the Hosts—a Nation, and they shall oppress you from the entrance 
of Hamath to the Torrent of the ’Arabah.’”’ Every one knows the former, the pass 
between the Lebanons, at whose mouth stands Dan, northern limit of Israel; but it 
is hard to identify the latter. If Amos means to include Judah, we should have expected 
the Torrent of Egypt, the present Wady el ’Arish; but the Wady of the ’Arabah may 
be a corresponding valley in the eastern watershed issuing in the ’Arabah. If Amos 
threatens only the northern kingdom, he intends some wady running down to that 
Sea of the ’Arabah, the Dead Sea, which is elsewhere given as the limit of Israel. 
The Assyrian flood, then, was about to break, and the oracles close with the hope- 
less prospect of the whole land submerged beneath it. 


IV. A FRAGMENT FROM THE PLAGUE. 

In the above exposition we have omitted two very curious verses, 9 and 10, which 
are held by some critics to interrupt the current of the chapter, and to reflect an 
entirely different kind of calamity from that which it predicts. I do not think these 
critics right, for reasons I am about to give; but the verses are so remarkable that 
it is most convenient to treat them by themselves apart from the rest of the chapter. 
Here they are, with the verse immediately in front of them. 

“I am loathing the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate. And I will give up a 
city and its fulness’ to . . . (perhaps “siege” or “pestilence’?). “And it shall 
come to pass, if there be left ten men in one house, they shall die, . . . that his 
cousin and the man to burn him shall lift him and bring the body out of the house, 
and they shall say to one who is in the recesses of the house, Are there any more 
with thee? And he shall say, Not one . . . And they shall say, Hush! (for one 
must not mention the name of Jehovah).” 

This grim fragment is obscure in its relation to the context. But the death of even 
so large a household as ten—the funeral left to a distant relation—the disposal of the 
bodies by burning instead of the burial customary among the Hebrews—sufficiently 
reflect the kind of cakamity. It is a weird little bit of memory, and recollection of an 
eye-witness, from one of those great pestilences which, during the first half of the 
eighth century, happened not seldom in western Asia. But what does it do here? 
Wellhausen says that there is nothing to lead up to the incident; that before it the 
chapter speaks, not of pestilence, but only of political destruction by an enemy. This 
is not accurate. The phrase immediately preceding may mean either “I will shut up 
the city and its fulness,’ in which case a siege is meant, and a siege was the possibility 
both of famine and pestilence; or “I will give up the city and its fulness . . .” in 
which case a word or two may have been dropped, as words have undoubtedly been 
dropped at the end of the next verse, and one ought perhaps to add “‘to the pestilence.” 
The latter alternative is the more probable, and this may be one of the passages, 
already alluded to, in which the want of connection with the preceding verses is to be 
explained, not upon the favorite theory that there has been a violent intrusion into 
the text, but upon the too much neglected hypothesis that some words have been lost. 

The uncertainty of the text, however, does not weaken the impression of its 


; 
; 


~ 


The False Peace of Ritual—Smith, 689 


ghastly realism: the unclean and haunted house; the kinsman and the body-burner 
afraid to search through the infected rooms, and calling in muffled voice to the single 
survivor crouching in some far corner of them, “Are there any more with thee?” his 
reply, ““None”—himself the next! Yet these details are not the most weird. Over ali 
hangs a terror darker than the pestilence. “Shall there be evil in a city and Jehovah 
not have done it?” Such, as we have heard from Amos, was the settled faith of the 
age. But in times of woe it was held with an awful and a craven superstition. The 
whole of life was believed to be overhung with loose accumulations of Divine anger. 
And as in some fatal hollow in the high Alps, where any noise may bring down the 
impending masses of snow, and the fearful traveler hurries along in silence, so the 
men of that superstitious age feared, when an evil like the plague was imminent, even 
to utter the Deity’s name, lest it should loosen some avalanche of His wrath. “And 
he said, Hush! for,” adds the comment, one “must not make mention of the name of 
Jehovah.” 3 

This reveals another side of the popular religion which Amos has been attacking. 
We have seen it as the sheer superstition of routine; but we now know that it was a 
routine broken by panic. The God who in times of peace was propitiated by regular 
supplies of savory sacrifice and flattery, is conceived, when His wrath is roused and 
imminent, as kept quiet only by the silence of its miserable objects. The false piece 
of ritual is tempered by panic. 


[The request camé from Rev. Ward B. Pickard, pastor of Epworth Memorial 
church, Cleveland, to include without fail George Adam Smith in this work, and 
suggested some of his expository work. From The Expositor’s Bible was chosen 
this chapter on Amos. Mr. Smith says, ‘The book of Amos opens one of the greatest 
stages in the religious development of mankind.” He quotes Corniil as follows: 
“Amos is one of the most wonderful appearances in the history of the human spirit.” 

George Adam Smith, M. A., D. D., LL. D., was born in Calcutta, Oct. 19, 1856, 
educated at New College, Edinburgh, and Universities of Tubingen and Leipzig. He 
became assistant to Rev. John Fraser, Free West Church, Brechin, 1880, minister of 
Queen’s Cross Free Church, 1890-2, and after travel in Syria and east of Jordan became 
professor of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis, Free Church College, Glasgow. 
His chief literary works are The Book of Isaiah, The Life of Henry Drummond, The 
Preaching of the Old Testament to the Age, and The Twelve Prophets.] 


690 Pulpit Power and Eloquence 


NOT ASHAMED OF THE GOSFEE 


Text: Rom. 1:16: ‘For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the 
power of God unto salvation, to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to 
the Greek.” 

When Paul wrote his letter to the Church at Rome, that city was the metropolis 
of the world, and the seat of universal empire. In imperial splendor she “sat upon her 
seven hills, and from her throne cf bezuty ruled the world.” She had been enriched 
by the spoils of war, and the tributes of oriental monarchies had greatly swelled her 
revenues. Luxury and ease were the lot of her citizens who lived in marble palaces 
and regaled themselves in private parks. Her hillsides were adorned with ample 
villas, their summits crowned with temples, theatres, and museums of art. Above 
them all was Nero’s “golden house,” that surpassed all other residences in ancient 
and modern times. 

The streets of the city swarmed with slaves, swarthy with toil, and homesick in 
their cruel exile. 


To all outward appearance, the empire was still at the zenith of its glory. Mili- 


tarism was triumphant, and the apotheosis of the Czsars went on despite the terrible © 


degeneracy which marked the chasm between the noble Augustus and the despicable 
Nero. In reality, the empire was already declining. Around it were gathering, even 
then, thick and fast the sunset shadows of the golden age. The introduction of Greek 
culture exerted an enervating influence upon the sturdy Romans. With Greek culture 
came oriental voluptuousness. The Greek religion, transplanted to the soil of Italy, 
degenerated into the deification of the sensuous. While the Roman soldier, with his 
imperial eagles. was triumphant to the utmost bounds of civilization abroad, Roman 


citizens gradually lost their moral strength in their voluptuous habits. The grossest 


vices were openly tolerated. Family life was destroyed. Domestic virtue became a 
byword. Commercial honesty was unknown. Political integrity was inconceivable. 
Here heathenism had done its utmost and plunged humanity into abysmal depths of 
infamy. Depravity wrought its masterpiece in the monster Nero, then on the throne, 
whose wanton cruelty, whose unspeakable degradation personified the spirit of the 
age and consummated the ripened fruit of a world left to its own devices. (Rom. 
1: 18-32.) 

With all this vice and shame, the Roman citizen was the proudest man on earth. 
Despairing at heart, he was purse proud, and egotistical to the last degree. 
Entrenched in barricades of false philosophy and false religion, glorying in a freedom 
that gave unbridled rein to lust and passion, he asked contemptuously, “What is 
truth?” and went his way, feeling that there is nothing better than to eat, drink and 
be merry. A deadly fatalism had blighted all hopefulness of aspiration, a frivolous 
materialism had destroyed all concern for or belief in a future life. 

To this terrible Rome St. Paul proposed to carry the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Not 
that it never had been preached there, for there were Christians there to whom 
he wrote. But Paul, the Jew, born in Asia, but born a Roman citizen, wanted to 
preach the Gospel in Rome. He would inject Christianity into the heart of the world, 
and storm with batteries of divine truth the citadel of world-power. He would 


- 


as 


Le te 


Not Ashamed of the Gospel—Spreng. 691 


plant the banner of the cross over the very walls of Nero’s house of gold, and proposed 
to conquer Rome in the name of One whom Rome had slain.* 

This was the high resolve that animated the breast of the greatest man that ever 
lived. Paul was not ignorant of the meaning of such an undertaking. His was an 
imperial intellect, trained in the severest discipline of the time. He was a true cos- 
mopolitan. In him were combined Jewish blood and faith with Greek culture and 
Roman citizenship. None knew better than he the power and weakness of heathenism. 
He fully understood the haughty pride of Roman institutions. But he also knew 
the power of the Gospel. He knew what an invincible weapon was his. Therefore he 
uttered the noble language of the text. 

“T am not ashamed of the Gospel!” What, then, is the Gospel? Where shall we 
learn. what it is? I answer, go to the word of God. Jesus himself said: “Ye search 
the Scriptures, for they are they which testify of me.” 

I. Let us note that the Gospel is Christo-centric. Christ is not only its author 
and founder; He is not only its great authoritative Teacher, but He is the Gospel. 
He is the substance and content of the Gospel. Christianity is in reality but an ex- 
pansion of the Christ. His person stands out in sublime supremacy not only in the 
historical sense, but in the dogmatic sense as well. Christ is at once transcendent and 
immanent in religion. He is the organ of revelation and at the same time its highest 
theme, yea, more, in Him is the entire residuum of redemptive energy. His glorious 
presence fills all the books of the Bible. Revelation is a burning bush glowing with the 
light of Immanuel. He is “the seed of the woman that shall bruise the serpent’s head.” 
He is foreshadowed in type and symbol. Every sacrifice slain on patriarchal or Jewish 
altars represented Him, the Lamb of God. Every priest, mitred and robed, stood 
for the One Great High Priest of the world. Every prophet was a light kindled by 
the Light of the world. 

In the four evangelists His portrait is given us in wondrous lines of beauty and 
perfection. In the Epistles His person and work forms the theme of argument, 
analysis, appeal, exhortation and legislation. And so in all true gospel preaching, 
Jesus forms the beginning and the end, the first and the last. 

1. But note that the Christ of the Gospel is Divine. He is at once the Creator 
of worlds and the Savior of sinners. Divine honors are attributed to Him. Divine 
attributes are ascribed to Him. Divine names are given to Him. Divine power is 
predicated of Him. 

2. He is also human. Human in form and nature. Human in wants and limi- 
tations. Human in modes of thought and forms of expression. Human in feelings, 
in sufferings and in toils, the Son of Man. He was the normal man, God's ideal 
realized by His own incarnation. In His humanity we have the unity of human 
brotherhood. Men prate of the brotherhood of man, who deny the essential truths of 
Christianity. The bond of human brotherhood is to be sought and found in this one 
perfect universal man. So the Fatherhood of God is revealed only in the conscious- 
ness of Sonship which Jesus possessed. In Him God is not only the Creator but the 
Father of the race. 


3. He was the God-man, God manifest in the flesh. In Him, as the prototype of 
man’s creation, God restored the close relation which was to exist from the beginning. 
Thus we see that in Jesus Christ, the great doctrine of Christian theism is revealed and 
demonstrated. This Bible doctrine takes a middle ground between Deism on the 
one hand and Pantheism on the other. Deism says God is supreme, transcendent, 
but not immanent. He sustains no vital relation to the universe He has made, but 
as a watchmaker abandons the watch to its fate, so God abandons His creative work, 
leaving it under the stern reign of law forever. Pantheism, on the other hand, makes 
God identical with Nature, neither able to exist without the other, thus denying the 


+: bread“. 


692 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


supreme sovereignty of God as well as His spirituality, and emphasizing only His 
immanence. Christian theism treats each of these as a half-truth, brings them 
together, and makes them the whole truth. I am not now speaking of theism as a 
philosophical system, but as a doctrine of religion. Theism says God is not only 
supreme and transcendent, but also immanent. He is not only Creator but Upholder. 
The transcendency of God is revealed in creation—the immanency of God in Provi- 
dence, and both are revealed in Christ. For creation was in, by and for Christ, and 
Providence is redemptional. 

All this is abundantly proven in the Word of God. God hath spoken to us by 
His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the 
worlds. Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, 
and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged 
our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on High. God says to Him: Thou 
Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the 
works of thy hands. For it became Him for whom are all things and by whom are 
all things. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works. 
And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. 

The specific world in which He lives and moves is this human, sinful world of 
ours. This earth is the arena of redemption. Mankind is the object of the Divine 
passion of solicitude. 

II. Let us note next that in the Gospel thus conceived, there are revealed also 
the two great primary facts, Sin and Redemption. 

1. The fact and force of sin—that foul blot on the fair universe of God. On the 
subject of sin, let me say only this here. Men ask: “If God is an Almighty Sovereign, 
how did sin come into the world?” It is wrong to answer that question by saying, 
as some do, that God in His wisdom permitted it. He did not permit it. Sin came 
without permission. That is its very essence. Sin is lawlessness. Sin is the great 
anarchist in the moral universe. Sin is, because man chose to resist the will of God. 
That is sin. But why did God create a being that could resist His will? Because 
only thus could He create a being capable of obeying. Ability to do right involves 
ability to do wrong. 

2. The great fact is, sin is here. But the greater fact is that redemption met sin 
on the very threshold of human history as an antidote to counteract it. Redemption 
was not an after thought, but one of the eternal thoughts and purposes of God, for He 
hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, according to His own 
purpose and grace in Christ Jesus before the world began, according to the eternal 
purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

This eternal purpose of redemption was wrought out by our Lord Jesus Christ, 
and consummated by His atoning death. In whom we have redemption through His 
blood, even the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God, the first- 
born of every creature: for by Him were all things created that are in heaven, and 
that are in earth . . . all things were created by and for Him. And He is the Head 
of the body, the Church; in Him dwells all fulness, and having made peace by the 
blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things to Himself. 

3. O what a wonderful reach there is in the death of Christ! How vast the bear- 
ings of the cross! 


That death revealed the righteousness of God. God will save the transgressor, 
but He will do it right. Much is said of the love of God as the prompting motive. 
But even the love of God is supremely a love of righteousness. But now the 
righteousness of God, without the law, is manifested through the redemption which is 
in Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth (put forward) to be a propitiation (atoning 
sacrifice) through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness; that He tight be 


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Not Ashamed of the Gospel—Spreng. 693 


just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. For He is our peace and hath 
broken down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity 
and reconciled both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity 
thereby. 

This is the central truth of the Gospel. I have said that the Gospel is Christo- 
centric. But the Christ of the Gospel, is Christ crucified. Every thing in Christ, as 
Redeemer, stands related to the Cross. Christ died for our offences. Christ died for 
us. Christ died for the ungodly. Here is the heart of Christianity. Blood is the 
mightiest thing in the universe—and blood comes from the heart; the blood of atone- 
ment comes from the heart of God. It did what everything else failed to do. It 
atoned for sin. It made pardon possible, on a basis of eternal justice. The blood of 
His cross is the open sesame cf the kingdom of heaven. Without shedding of blood 
is no remission. But the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth us from all sin. 
God says, When I see the blood I will pass over you. Thank God for the blood 
shed on Calvary. Thank God for “blood theology.” May we never be ashamed of 
it, as Paul was not. May we always boldly declare the atonement as the crowning 
truth of the Gospel, as the only scheme that offers a satisfactory solution of the 
problem of sin. 

But it required something beyond the death of Jesus to redeem us by the com- 
pleted atonement. If it was necessary for Him to die, it was also necessary for Him 
to rise again from the dead. He was delivered for our offences and rose again for our 
justification. We were dead in sin, but God, whose Son died for our sins, hath quick- 
ened us together with Christ and raised us up together. He blotted out the hand- 
writing of ordinances which was against us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to 
His cross, and having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a show of them 
openly, triumphing over them in it. 

More: Having risen from the dead, He ascended on high and led captivity 
captive, receiving gifts for men. Our High Priest went into the holiest with His 
own blood where He offered himself without spot to God. By one oblation or offer- 
ing He perfected forever them that are sanctified. And having made atonement, 
reconciling mercy with justice and God with man, He sat down at the right hand of 
God, thenceforth waiting until His enemies be made His footstool. He was received 
up into glory, where He ever liveth to make intercession for us. He has been made 
both Lord and Christ. 

And this Christ, who is God manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of 
angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory, is 
the Christ of the Gospel. This Christ we are to set forth before the eyes of men, 
Christ the power of God and the wisdom, declared to be the Son of God with power, 
according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. By whom also 
we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, 
for His name. This Christ we are to proclaim to all men. For He died for all, and 
rose again for all, and prepared salvation for all, who will believe and receive it. 

III. Such, in brief, is the Gospel of Christ, of which Paul is not ashamed, His 
reason for this is, that it is the power of God unto salvation. 

Power was the pride and boast of Rome. She was proud of her imperial 
authority, proud of her victorious legions, proud of her world-wide dominion, proud 
of her wealth. Power, not virtue, was the goal of her ambition. Her whole history 
culminated in an apotheosis of power, personified in the Cesar. But Paul would 
introduce a new power into Rome herself. He would set over against Roman mili- 
tarism, and the brute force of Casardom, the power of the gospel, with full confidence 
in the result. 

“Power.” The word in the original here and in other places rendered power, is, 


694 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


as you know, the Greek word, dunamis, from which we have our words, dynamics, 
dynamo, dynamite. It implies causal energy, force, capacity, effectiveness. It is not 
material energy or mechanical force of which we speak. It is not intellectual, social or 
political power. What a sad mistake has been made in looking to any of these carnal 
weapons for success. When the Church has depended upon intellectual supremacy, 
she has become top-heavy and lost herself in philosophical mazes. If she sought to 


win by social power she has become worldly minded. If she sought political power, 


as did the Roman Catholic Church, she has become corrupt. 

It is the power of God. Not merely supernatural power in a vague philosophical 
sense, but spiritual power, Divine power—power of the highest order, power according 
to the measure of Divine infinity—power to the highest ends. There is in the gospel 
the invincible power of truth. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free.’ There is in it the power of a great moral force, the love of God that moves 
ever forward toward its goal, the regeneration of man. It is the power of God unto 
salvation. It is therefore not destructive energy, but causal energy actuated by the 
motive of love, moving toward its object, which is the restoration, the elevation of men 
from the dominion of sin. The power of God is persuasive. It deals with moral 
reason, with the argument of facts, and aims to influence the moral choice of men. It 
is the power which moves the stubborn will of free agents in right directions. 

And all this upon the simple condition of faith . . . “to every one that 
believeth.” Faith is the vinculum by which the atonement and salvation are connected, 
the force that brings the sinner and his Savior together, the medium through which 
the power of the Gospel is brought into the soul. With the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness. He that believeth shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be 
damned. Faith accepts Christ, unbelief rejects Him; faith connects the soul vitally 
with Him, unbelief separates from Him; faith quickens into life, unbelief destroys life. 
Faith enters like a strong man armed into the Holy Place, whither our Fore-runner 
has gone, and brings forth the treasures of eternal life, as the trophies of its holy 
adventure. Faith is the conducting medium through which the power of God flashes 
like an electrical shock into the soul. Without faith there is no salvation, after all. 
But the provisions of the Gospel in all their fulness are for him that believeth. The 
believer has all things, the unbeliever has nothing. And this faith is simple confidence 
in Jesus and His meritorious death, the personal appropriation of that merit unto 
conscious salvation. 

The power of God unto salvation. Salvation! What a word! Its meaning 
sweeps through the whole gamut of human need and human possibilities in the infinite 
grace of God. Salvation from the depths of depravity and the gates of hell up to the 
presence of God and the thrones of the redeemed. Salvation that overleaps the 
boundaries of time and sense, and opens to the soul the gates of eternal life. 

Salvation from the guilt of sin by justification, salvation from the life of sin by 
regeneration, salvation from the inbeing of sin by sanctification, salvation from the 
effects of sin by eternal glorification. Such is its scope, its purpose, its achievement, 
for which we give glory to God, and for which we glory in the Cross. 


[Samuel P. Spreng was born in Wayne County, O., February 11, 1853. He 
enjoyed only the meager advantage of a country district school. In August, 1875, he 
began preaching, and at Bellevue, Ohio, in a pastorate of only eight months over fifty 
persons were saved, and a new congregation established. The next three years were 
spent in a successful pastorate in Cleveland. In 1887 the General Conference of his 
Church elected him editor of the Evangelical Messenger, the official organ of the 
Church, a place he continues to fill, He is also the president of the Young People’s 
Alliance, the author of The Life of Bishop John Seybert and Rays of Light on the 
Highway to Success, and several other books of wide circulation. ] 


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PAUL THE READY. 


C. H. SPURGEON. 
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I think Paul might have used these words as his motto, We had once a Saxon 
king called Ethelred the Unready; here we have an apostle who might be called Paul 
the Ready. The Lord Jesus no sooner called to him out of heaven, “Saul, Saul, why 
persecutest thou me?” than he answered, “Who art Thou, Lord?” Almost directly 
after, his question was, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” He was no sooner 
converted, than he was ready for holy service; and “‘straightway he preached Christ” 
in the synagogues at Damascus. All through his life, whatever happened to him, he 
was always ready. If he had to speak to crowds in the street, he had the fitting word; 
or if, to the elite on Mars’ hill, he was ready for the philosophers. If he talked to the 
Pharisees, he knew how to address them; and when he was brought before the Sanhe- 
drim, and perceived the Pharisaic and Sadducean elements in it, he knew how to avail 
himself of their mutual jealousies to help his own escape. See him before Felix, before 
Festus, before Agrippa, he is always ready; and when he came to stand before Nero, 
God was with him, and delivered him out of the mouth of the lion. If you find him 
on board ship he is ready to comfort men in the storm; and when he gets on shore, a 
shipwrecked prisoner, he is ready to gather sticks to help make the fires. At all points 
he is an all-round man, and an all-ready man; always ready to go wherever his Master 
sends him, and to do whatever his Lord appoints him. 

Here we have Paul’s readiness to work. ‘So, as much as in, me is, I am ready to 
preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also.” He had preached the gospel in a 
great part of Asia, he had crossed over into Europe, he had proclaimed the Word 
through Greece; and if ever an opportunity should occur for him to get to the capital 
of the world, whatever might be the danger to which he would be exposed, he was 
prepared to go. He was ready to go anywhere for Jesus, anywhere to preach the 
gospel, anywhere to win a soul, anywhere to comfort the people of God. “I am 
ready.” There is no place to which Paul was not ready to go. He was ready to make 
a journey into Spain; and if he did not come to this island of ours, which is a matter 
of question, undoubtedly he was ready to have gone to the utmost isles of the sea, and 
to lands and rivers unknown, to carry his Master’s mighty Word. Are we as ready as 
Paul was to go anywhere for Jesus, or do we feel that we could only work for Christ 
at home, and that we should not dare to go to the United States, or to Australia, or 
into some heathen land? Oh, may God keep us always on tiptoe, ready to move if the 
cloud moves, and equally ready to stay where we are if the cloud moveth not! 

If you will kindly turn to Acts 21: 13, you will read, in the second place, of Paul's 
readiness to suffer. He says, “I am ready not to be bound only but also to die at 
Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” This is perhaps a greater thing than the 
former one; to be ready to suffer is more than to be ready to serve. To some of us 
it has become a habit to be ready to preach the Gospel; but here was a man who was 
ready to suffer for the name of the Lord Jesus; so ready that he could not be dissuaded 
from it. He must preach the Gospel; but why must he go to Jerusalem? All the 
world was before him; why must he go to that persecuting city? Everybody told him 
he would have bonds and imprisonment, and perhaps death; but he cared nothing 
about all that; he said, “I am ready, I am ready.” 


“T am ready.”-—Rom. 1: 15. 


en 


696 Pulpit Power and Eloquence, 


Beloved friends, are we ready to be scoffed at, to be thought idiots, to be put down 


amongst old-fashioned fossils? Perhaps so. Are we ready, if we should be required ~ 


to do so, to lose friends for Christ’s sake, to have the cold shoulder for Christ’s sake? 
Perhaps so. Are we also ready, if it be the Lord’s will, to go home, to be carried 
upstairs, and to lie there for the next three months? Are we ready as that poor 
woman, who said, “The Lord said to me, ‘Betty, mind the house, look after the 
children,’ and I did it. By-and-by, he said, ‘Betty, go upstairs and cough twelve 
months.’ Shall I not do that also, and not complain, for it is all that I can do?” “I 
am ready.” You remember what is on the seal of the American Baptist Missionary 
Society, an ox with a plough on one side and a halter on the other, ready for either, 
ready to serve, or ready to suffer. You have not come to the highest style of readiness 
till you are ready for whatever the will of God may appoint for you. Unreadiness for 
this point of view is very common; but it shows unsubdued human nature. 

The third passage I must now quote is not exactly the same in words; but it means 
the same as the others. It tells us of Paul’s readiness to do unpleasant work. I am 
afraid many of God’s servants fall short here. The passage is in 2 Cor. 10:6, “And 
having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.” 
The church at Corinth had sunk into a very sad condition. It was a church that did 
not have any minister; it had an open ministry, and nobody knows what mischief 
comes of that kind of thing. Paul recommended what a minister could do for them; 
for he said, “I beseech you, brethren (ye know the house of Stephanas, that it is the 
first fruits of Achaia, and that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the 
saints), that you submit yourselves unto such.” They were too gifted for that, and 
everybody wanted to speak. When a church is all mouth what becomes of the body? 
If it were all mouth it would simply become a vacuum, nothing’ more; and the church 
in Corinth became very much that. It was nobody’s business to administer discipline, 
for it was everybody’s business; and what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business, 
as we well know; so no discipline was administered, and the church became what we 
call “all sixes and sevens.” It stands in the Scriptures forever as a warning against 
that method of church government, or, rather of no church government at all. 

Paul, when he went among these people, determined to administer discipline, and 
to try to put things right. He was not going to Corinth with a sword, or with any 
carnal weapon, or with anything of unkindness or hasty temper; but he was going with 
the Word of God. He wrote, “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty 
through God to the pulling down of strongholds;” and he meant to go among the 
Corinthian professors and pull down the stronghold of heathen vice that had entered 
the church to such an extent that even at the Lord’s table some of them were drunken, 
Paul meant to deal honestly with all who were dishonoring the name of Christ. Now, 
dear friends, I speak especially to brethren whom God has put into the ministry, or 
put into office in the church, are you ready for this unpleasant duty? Oh, it costs 
some of us a great deal to say a strong thing! Perhaps we cannot say it at all without 
getting into a temper; and we had better not say it at all. It is not easy to have firm- 
ness in the language combined with sweetness in the manner of uttering it. It is easy 
to congratulate friends, it is not difficult to condemn them in the gross; but it is 
another thing to speak personally and faithfully to each erring one, and to be assured 
in our own souls that, as far as we have any responsibility in the matter, we will not 
tolerate an Achan in the camp, and will not have evil done knowingly in the house of 
God. It should be our endeavor, as God has made us overseers, not to overlook 
things that are evil, but really to oversee everything that is committed to our charge, 
and to try to set right whatever is wrong. 

Now, once more, will you kindly turn to 2 Timothy 4:6, where you have a verse 
well known to you all, “For I am now ready to be offered and the time of my depar- 


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Paul the Ready—S purgeon. 697 


ture is at hand.” Paul was ready to die; he was ready to loose his cable from earth, 
and to sail away to the haven of the blessed; and well he might be, for he could add, 
“T have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith, hence- 
forth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous 
Judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love 
His appearing.” Beloved friends, we cannot be ready to die unless we have been taught 
how to live. We who are active, and have talents to use, and health and strength with 
which to use those talents; must go on with “the greatest fight in the world” till we 
can say, “I have fought a good fight.’”” We must go on running the Christian race till 
we can say, “I have finished my course.” We must go on guarding the Word of God, 
and holding fast the truth of God, till we can say, “I have kept the faith.” It will be 
hard work to lie dying if we have been unfaithful. God’s infinite mercy may come in 
and forgive and help us; and we may be “saved; yet so as by fire;” but if we would 
look forward to death with perfect readiness, having no dread or fear about it, but 
being as ready to die as we are to go to our beds tonight, then we must be kept faithful 
to God by His Almighty grace. The faith must keep us, and we must keep the faith. 

Thus, you see, Paul was ready for service, ready for suffering, ready for unpleasant 
duty and ready to die. If I were to go round this tabernacle and ask of every one, 
“My friend, are you ready in these four ways?” how many would have to shake their 
heads and say, “I do not know what to say; I am doing my best in some style, but I 
cannot say that I have the readiness which the apostle claimed.” 

Let me show you now that Paul’s readiness arose from excellent principles. 

As for Paul’s readiness to preach, I should trace that to his solemn conviction of 
the truth of the gospel. If a man only thinks it is true, he will not care whether he 
preaches it or does not preach it; but if he knows it is true, then he must preach it. I 
do not think we need find much fault with people now-a-days for being too positive 
and dogmatic about the truth of God; the present current runs in quite another direc- 
tion. A feeble faith, which might also be mistaken for unbelief, is the common thing; 
and hence there is no great readiness to speak. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “As 
it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore 
speak.” If I get a grip of a thing, and know it is true, then I must tell it to others. 
The backbone of the preaching of Christ is a conviction of the truth of Christ. 

Paul also had a dauntless courage in this matter. He said, ‘Woe is unto me if I 
preach not the gospel!” Whatever happened to him if he did preach it, he had 
counted the cost, and he was quite ready for all the consequences of his action. He 
had a holy self-denial; so that he put himself out of the question. “I am ready for 
anything; I am ready to preach this gospel, if I am stoned, if I am thrown out of the 
city as dead, if I am imprisoned, if I am sent into the den of Cesar at Rome.” Paul 
was ready because his courage had been given him of God. 

Paul had, besides, such love for men, whether they were Jews or Romans or any 
other people, that he was ready to go anywhere to save them. He had also such zeal 
for God that it was a happiness to him to think of going to the furthest region if he 
might but preach Christ where he was not known; not building on another man’s 
foundation, but laying the first stone of the edifice himself. This, then, accounted for 
his readiness to preach, and of the need of preaching it. 7 

But how ever did Paul screw himself up to be ready to exercise discipline? That is, 
_to me, the ugliest point of all. How could he bring himself to be able to do that? I 

think it was because he had not received his gospel of men, nor by men; and he had 
learned not to depend upon men, nor to look for their approval as the support of his 
life. He was able to lean on the Savior and to walk alone with his Lord. So long as 
he had Christ with him he wanted nobody else. Paul had learned the fear of God, 
which casteth out the fear of man. ‘Who art thou, that thou shouldst be afraid of 


698 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


a man that shall die, and the son of man which shall be made as grass; and forgettest — 
the Lord thy Maker?’ Remembering man leads to the forgetting of God. If we 
learn to speak very plainly, yet very lovingly, habitually cultivating frankness towards. 
all Christian people, and even towards the ungodly, and do not know what it is to ask 
of any man leave to speak the truth, how much better it will be all round! May the 
Holy Spirit deepen in us the fear of God, and so take away from us the fear of man! 
Then, with Paul, each of us will be ready to say even concerning the most unpleasant % 
duty, “I am ready.” : 

But how came he to be able to say that he was ready to die? I will not dwell upon 
that. I have already told you that he felt ready to die because he could say that, as 
far as he had gone, he had finished the work God gave him to do, and he had kept the 
faith. Ah, dear friends, it is nothing but keeping faithful to God that will enable you 
to treat death as a friend! One dereliction of duty will be sufficient to rob you of 
comfort. When a traveler is walking a very small stone in his shoe will lame him; 
and a very small offense against the integrity that God requires of His servants may 
do us great mischief. Did you ever notice in Gideon’s life that he had seventy sons, 
his own legitimate sons, and that he had one son who was the child of a harlot, and 
that one, Abimelech, killed his father’s seventy sons? So it may be that a good man 
has seventy virtues, but if he tolerates one wrong thing it will be enough to rob him 
of the comfort of all the good things of this life, so when he comes to die he may go — 
limping and lame. Ay, and all his life long he may go, like David did, halting even” 
to the grave. May the Lord in mercy and love keep us right! If He teaches us how 


to live we shall know how to die. 

It is not dying that is the great difficulty; 
the good fight of faith, to finish our course, and to keep t 
enough. As Mr. Wesley said when the good woman asked him, “Do you not some- 
times feel an awe at the thought of dying?” “No,” he replied, “if I knew for certain 
that I was going to die tomorrow night I should do just exactly what I am going to 
do. Iam going to preach (I think it was) at Gloucester this afternoon and this even-_ 
ing; and I shall go to lodge with friend So-and-so, I shall stay up with him till 10 
o’clock, and then I shall go to bed; and I shall be up at 5, and ride over to Tewkesbury, - 
and I shall preach there, and shall go to friend So-and-so’s for the night, and I shall 
go to bed at 10 o’clock, and whether I live or die, it does not matter at all to me, for 
if I die I shall wake up in glory. That is what I am going to do, whether I live or 
die.” It was said of Mr. Whitefield that he never went to bed at night leaving even 
a pair of gloves out of its place. He used to say that he would like to have everything 
ready in case he might be taken away. I think I see that good man standing with a 
bed-room candle in his hand, at the top of the staircase, preaching Christ the last night 
of his life to the people sitting on the stairs and then going inside the room and com- 
mending himself to God, and going straightway to heaven. That is the way to die; 
but if you do not live like Wesley and Whitefield lived you cannot die like Wesley and 
Whitefield died. May God grant us grace that we may be perfectly ready to die when 


the time for our departure is at hand! 


it is living. If we are but helped to fight 


he faith, we shall die right — 
& 


[Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in 1834 at Essex and died in 1892. He went 
to London in 1853, opening the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861. His sermons were 
published weekly and had a large sale from the beginning. He is generally agreed 
to have been the greatest preacher of the century. The general facts of his life are so 
well known that they are not included here.] 


(699) 


HEAVEN---A FUNERAL SERMON. 


JAMES STALKER, D. D. 


“T go to prepare a place for you.”—John 14: 2. 

A great many people, and even some Christian people, would, I imagine, confess 
that they are little affected by the thought of heaven. They do not disbelieve in it by 
any means, but it does not lay hold of them. In comparison with this solid world, on 
which our homes are built and in which our business lies, it is a land of shadows or a 
city in the clouds; and, although they know that they ought to desire to go there, in 
reality they would prefer, if it were possible, to stay here. 

There may be different reasons for this state of feeling. 

The explanation of it may in some cases be the simple one that we have never 
reflected on the subject. When we wish any great secular subject to lay hold of the 
mind and the heart, we exercise our faculties about it; we give it long and ample enter- 
tainment within us, till it has had time to make a deep impression; we should never 
expect to be impressed and inspired with it if we gave it only a careless and hasty 
glance. But we sometimes forget to carry these commonsense principles into religion; 
and we complain that the thought of heaven has not taken hold of us, though we have 
never given it a chance of doing so. 

But in other cases the explanation may be different. The inability to be affected 
by the thought of heaven may be due not to the lack of meditation on the subject, but 
to the lack of experience. It is doubtful if anyone can thoroughly realize the other 
world till someone very dear to him has entered it. It is true that every Christian has 
One very dear there, for Christ is there; and for some this may be enough to surround 
the subject with all the glowing colors of reality. But to the average mind it seems 
to be necessary to have someone there whom we have seen and touched and walked 
beside in this visible world; and it is only as heaven fills up with our dear ones that it 
becomes to us a familiar place, drawing to itself our thoughts and desires. 

But I must mention a third reason why the thought of heaven fails to impress. 
Some would, I imagine, complain that for them this subject has been spoilt. It has 
often been handled in a childish and unnatural way. Pictures of heaven have been 
painted which do not appeal to any craving in our nature, and which, therefore, cannot 
stir our interest or awaken any desire. Now, I would lay it down as the foundation 
for all speculation on this subject, that our ideas on it must be natural: we must take 
it for granted that we shall continue to be ourselves in the future state, and that the 
provisions made for our reception there will correspond to real human wants, and to 
the qualities and capacities of human nature. It is from this point of view that I will 
ask you to think for a little of the place which the Savior has gone to prepare for His 
own, while I point out a few of its more prominent characteristics. 


I. It will be a Place of Rest for the Body. 

Heaven has a physical side. This may sometimes have been too much dwelt upon. 
It is naturally the aspect of it first presented to children; for they require to have 
everything represented to them in physical images. The Bible has stooped to this 
necessity, and supplied glowing pictures of a paradise full of fair meadows and 
crystal rivers and fruit-laden trees, of golden streets and splendid mansions, of white- 
tobed multitudes and glorious music. But our minds, when they reach maturity, 


700 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. Z| 


cannot think of heaven in this way; and I believe the reason why the whole subject 
sounds unreal to many of us is because we have never taken the trouble to translate 
these material splendors into their spiritual equivalents. Yet there must not be too 
much spiritualizing. Monks in their cells and recluses in their studies have fashioned 
pictures of heaven so highly pitched as to be altogether alien from the desires and — 
sympathies of common-place mortals. A heaven in which the sole employment is one 
eternal gaze on divine beauty or one eternal rapture of song is too ghostly for ordinary 
minds. : 

The certainty of there being a physical side to the heavenly state is given in the 
promise of the resurrection of the body; for, where the body is, there must be an 
environment to suit it. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body presents, indeed, 
many difficulties to the reason; yet perhaps it would not be so difficult if we did not 
conceive of it too grossly. The common notion, that God is at the last day to gather 
the minute particles of the dissolved clay from all the corners whither chance may have 
dispersed them, seems to be discountenanced by Scripture, which, while comparing 
the body which is buried to the grain of seed as it is cast into the ground, and the risen 
body to the crop which grows from it, distinctly draws attention to the fact that the 
seed-grain is not the same in substance with the stalk, topped with its golden crown, 
which has been produced out of it. There is a certain identity between them, but it 
is not such an identity as favors the notion that the atoms of the glorified body will 
correspond exactly with those of the body which has decayed. Even in our bodies we 
shall be ourselves when we rise, the very men and women who have walked this solid 
earth; but how God will preserve the identity we cannot tell. 


We need not care to know. It is far more important to be assured that the bodies 
of the saints at the resurrection will be like the glorified body of Christ, and that they 
will be totally free from the weaknesses and vices which mar our bodily constitution 
here. Ours is at present, as it is well called in Scripture, a body of humiliation. 
What ugliness and blemishes, what aches and tortures, what a thousandfold variety of 
disease it is subject to. I suppose there is scarcely a man in whose constitution there 
is not some weak spot; and multitudes live in a moving prison, which is a loathing to 
both themselves and others. But in heaven the body, as well as the soul, will be 
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Can you remember any day in your life 
when you were absolutely healthy—say a spring morning, when you awoke with the 
sweet pulse of the awakening year in your blood, with strength going up every sinew, 
and when the steady hand executed with perfect freedom the suggestions of the clear 
brain? That is perhaps the best hint you can obtain of what the bodily state in heaven 
will be. 

II. It will be a Place of Occupation for the Mind. 

This aspect of the heavenly state has also been very fully brought out, those who 
have written most about heaven being men of mind, whose principal pleasures were 
intellectual. It may not appeal much to the majority, yet it is an aspect of the subject 
well worth dwelling on; for the pleasures of the intellect are among the highest our 
nature is capable of. The greatest men of our species have been men great in intellect; 
and we acknowledge that this is one of the standards of greatness, even if it dwarfs 
ourselves. 


The very fact that intellectual pleasures are accessible only to the few is a sad 
feature of this earthly state. Many have no share in them not because nature has 
withheld from them the necessary endowments, but because circumstances have pre- 
vented their talents from being developed by education. You remember the pathetic 
lines in which one of our poets, musing in a country church-yard, suggests that among 
the unmarked mounds there may be the grayes of mute Miltons and inglorious Crom- 
wells: 


a 


ieee 


Heaven—A Funeral Sermon—Stalker. 7O1 


“But knowledge to their eyes her ample page, 
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll; 
Chill penury suppressed their noble rage, 
And froze the genial current of their soul.” 


Other forms of obstruction may also stunt the mind’s growth. The intellects of 
many fail to grow to their natural size and to shine with their natural radiance, because 
associated with a diseased body; and the dislocation of the delicate organism of the 
brain may at any moment quench the light of the most refulgent genius. 

But how little it is which even the greatest intellect can know here! This has 
been acknowledged by the foremost of mankind. Everyone remembers the touching 
saying of Sir Isaac Newton, after he had made some of the most brilliant discoveries 
of modern times: I seem to myself but as a child picking up a few pebbles on the 
shore, whilst the great ocean of truth stretches unexplored before me. And a greater 
than he, who enjoyed the light of inspiration as well as that of a massive intellect, said, 
“Now we see through a glass darkly.” 


It is precisely in regard to the most important subjects, too, that we are most in 
the dark. How many mysteries there are in Providence! Why does God allow chil- 
dren to be born who are to die before life has well begun? Why has He imparted the 
knowledge of Himself to so few of His creatures? If He has foreordained whatsoever 
comes to pass, how can we be held responsible for our actions? There are a hundred 
such riddles to perplex the mind. The certainty of unimportant things is easily 
demonstrated; but the most vital things are hard to grasp and harder still to retain. 

It will be different above. “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to 
face; now we know in part, but then we shall know even as also we are known.” I do 
not suppose that the intellects of all will be on the same level there any more than they 
are here. But the pleasures of intellect will be inaccessible to none, either on account 
of lack of endowment or lack of education. As much may be learned there in a day as 
can be learned here in a lifetime; the child may there know as much as is known here 
by the wisest man; the thinker will have unlimited realms of knowledge opened out 
before him, and he will have a whole eternity in which to prosecute his successful 
investigations. 

III. It will be a Place of Fellowship for the Heart. 

Most people are stronger in the heart than in the head, and derive their happiness 
mofe through the channels of the affections than along the avenues of the intellect. 
The charm of friendship, the glow of love, the sweet charities of home—these are the 
sources of our keenest and amplest enjoyments here. But the blemish of imperfection 
is on this part of our earthly life also; and, if our best joys spring from the heart, it is 
in the same spot that we are stabbed with the bitterest disappointments and the keenest 
sorrows. 


Many a heart full of affection gets no opportunity on earth of lavishing its full 
wealth and reaping the usury of mutual love. Behind our calm faces there is often 
raging from day to day a storm of unsatisfied longing, and the heart is bleeding in 
secret when the eyes are dry. We all begin life with boundless desires, confident that 
the world is full enough and life long enough to fulfill them all. But before life is 
half done we have to dig the grave of many an impossible ambition and many a hope- 
less hope. The good and the beautiful are torn from us by the cruel hand of death, 
and we have to put up with those between whom and us there can be little sympathy 
and no understanding. The pure and pious have to dwell in the same home with 
souls that are godless and lips that blaspheme, and the gentle heart, sighing for peace, 
has to sojourn in the tents of the children of strife. Even the followers of Christ are 
often at war among themselves; one church persecuting another and parties anathe- 


702 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


matizing each other within the same church. Who does not sometimes sigh: “Oh, 


that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away and be at rest?” 

One of the very greatest attractions of heaven will be its company. There the 
wicked cease from troubling; for all are holy. What a world ours would be if there 
were none but godly people in it, even with the imperfections of the present state! 
But there will be none but the children of God there; and everyone of them will be 
better than the best are here. If we have ever enjoyed the company of our fellow- 
believers on earth, when our lips have been unsealed to speak out what lies nearest the 
heart, what will our enjoyment of their fellowship be when both they and we are 
perfect? What will it be to see and converse with Abel and Enoch and Abraham, with 
David about his psalms and Isaiah about his prophecies, with Paul about the hard 
things of his epistles and with John about the mysteries of Revelation; with Polycarp 
and Athanasius and Augustine; with Luther and Milton and Wesley! and it will bea 
greater joy still to see again those whose names are not written on the page of history, 
but on the page of memory which we have wetted with many a secret tear. 

When Luther was dying, someone asked him if he thought that we should recog- 
nize our friends in heaven. His reply was as profound as it was unexpected. “What 
happened to Adam,” he answered, “when he awoke and saw Eve? He had never seen 
her before, but they recognized each other perfectly in an instant, because both were 
full of the Holy Ghost.” 

IV. It will be a place of Purity for the Spirit. 

This is the very heart and center of the whole—it will be a place of total rest from 
sin, where the spirit will be equipped with ability for all goodness. 


No ungodly man can conceive or believe what a source of pain sin is to the people 
of God. Let any child of God look back over twenty years of a Christian life and 
consider what untold misery this has caused him—what remorse for sins past, what 
loathing of himself for the vile body of death which clings to us, what self-scorn at his 
weakness in presence of favorite temptations and besetting sins! If it were not for this, 
the Christian life on earth would be a kind of heaven, but this often makes it a kind of 
hell; for Christians get all their hell in this world. The pain does not increase as life 
goes on; for, although sin becomes less, the sensitiveness of conscience becomes more 
acute the longer it has been in the school of Christ. Some of you, I dare say, know 
nothing of this: you know nothing of the daily crucifixion your godly neighbors are 
undergoing for acts which you would consider mere peccadilloes and for motions of 
the mind which you encourage instead of checking in yourselves. These are the 
heaviest part of the burden of life to them, causing them such grief as you could feel 
only for some calamity, such as the loss of your fortune or the death of one you love. 

It is the weakness of faith which permits sin thus to prevail against us. Some- 


times when the sense of Divine things is strong and the presence of Christ vividly — 


realized, we feel a strength which subdues sin completely under our feet; temptation 
has no attraction for us; and it seems as if the final victory were won. But soon the 
blessed mood passes away; spiritual things become dim and uncertain again; it is a 
marvel to ourselves how little the most solemn or sublime truths move us; and even in 
the house of God or during the still hour of prayer the vilest forms of sin will be 
buzzing like wasps about our heads. 


Still these moments of clear vision and of spiritual strength are a prophecy. There 
is a time coming when the weakness of faith will no longer leave us in the lurch, but 
spiritual things will constantly exert on us their full and legitimate influence; for faith 
will have given place to sight, and the Savior in His glory will be before our eyes. In 
heaven there will be no temptations; but, I think, if there were ten thousand of them, 
they would not have the weight of a feather as long as we were looking on our Savior’s 
face. The sight of Him will fill our whole being with purity in a moment; for it will 


* 
4 


Heaven—A Funeral Sermon—Stalker. 7 


flood it with a river of love in whose current no impure thing will be able to stand. 


The best of heaven is that it is a place which Jesus is preparing for us. It is being 


prepared according to His taste; He is putting out His thought and His love upon it; 
and it will be a place for Him as well as for us. 

' IT have not said the half I should like to say on this great theme, but, if I said as 
much again, there would still be as much more to say. Mortal tongue cannot express 
it. If it be given us to tread the heavenly court, we shall say what the Queen of Sheba 
said when she saw the court of Solomon, “The half was not told me.’ But shall we 
be there? How we toil and moil to prepare a place for ourselves on earth! What an 


amount of thought we give to the comfort of our earthly homes, and how much 


anxiety and forethought men expend upon the provision for their old age! But what 


preparation have you made for yourselves in the long ages of eternity? A father of the 
church, meeting a bright and brilliant boy, asked him what he was going to do. “I 
am going to college to prepare for the work of life,” he answered. And what was he 
going to dothen? ‘Then I am going into a bank to learn business before going into 
partnership with my father.” And what then? “Then I am going to become my 


father’s partner and be a rich man.” And what then? “Then I am going to marry 


and have a home of my own.” And what then? “Why, I suppose my father will die 
sometime, and I shall be head of the house.’ Well, what then? ‘When I have 


amassed a large enough fortune, I am going to retire and spend a happy old age ina 


country mansion.” And what then? “Oh!” he said, dropping his voice, “I suppose 
I must die myself at last.” Yes, and what then? But the young man was silent. 

My hearers, what then? There are many mansions in the Father’s house; but is 
there one for you? How can I tell that? you may ask. We can tell it in this way: 
Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people; if Christ is preparing a place for 


_ you there, then He will be preparing you here for the place. Have you believed in 
Him? Do you love Him? Are you becoming like Him? Are you growing holy and 


heavenly-minded? These are the only guarantees by which we can assure ourselves 
that Jesus is preparing a place for us. 


[James Stalker is widely known as the author of the Life of Christ, and as pastor 


of St. Matthew’s Free Church, Glasgow, Scotland.] 


704 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


JESUS OF NAZARETH. 


ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D. D. 

“Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, ‘Jesus of 
Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’’”’—John 19: 19. 

What are the lessons of Good Friday? especially of Good Friday in Palestine and 
in this place? In the words of the text, in the title written on the Cross, the name of 
Jesus Christ is at that supreme moment of His Last Passion brought together with 
the recollection of His early years at Nazareth. What are the lessons which they both 
teach in common? 

I. Everywhere the event of Good Friday speaks to us of the universal love of 
God to His creatures. That is why it is so truly called Good Friday. It has its good 
news as much as Christmas Day or Easter Day. It tells us not only that God is Love, 
but that He bears love to every one on earth, however far they may seem to be 
removed from Him. It was for this that He sent His Son into the world—it was for 
this that Christ died. It was by His death, more even than by His life, that He 
showed how His sympathy extended far beyond His own nation, His own friends, 
His own family. “I, if I be lifted up” on the Cross, “will draw all men unto me.” 
It is this which the Collects of this day bring before us. They speak, in fact, of hardly 
anything else. They tell us how He died that “all estates,” not one estate only, but 
“all estates in His Holy Church,”—that “every member of the Church” in its widest 
sense, not the clergy or the religious only, but every one, in his “several vocation and 
ministry,” might “truly and godly serve Him.” They pray for God’s mercy to visit 
not Christians merely, but all religions, however separate from ours—“Jews, Turks, 
Heretics, and Infidels,”—in the hope that they may all at last, here or hereafter, be 
“one fold under one shepherd,” the One Good Shepherd who laid down His life not 
for the flock of one single fold only, but for the countless sheep scattered on the hills, 
not of the fold of the Jewish people, or of the Christian Church only, but of all man- 
kind. 

This is a truth which comes home to us with peculiar force in Palestine. What 
is it that has made this small country so famous? What is it that has carried the 
names of Jerusalem and of Nazareth to the uttermost parts of the earth? It is in one 
word, “the death of Christ.” Had He not died as He did, His religion—His name— 
His country—the places of His birth and education and life—would never have broken 
through all the bonds of time and place as they have. That we are here at all on this 
day, is a proof of the effect which His death has had even on the outward fortunes of 
the world. 

This universal love of God in Christ’s death is specially impressed upon us in 
Nazareth. What Christ was in His death, He was in His life. What He was in His 
life, He was in His death. And if we wish to know the spirit which pervades both, 
we cannot do so better than by seeing what we may call the text of His first sermon 
at Nazareth. He was in the synagogue. The roll of the Hebrew Scriptures was 
handed to Him. He unrolled it. His former friends and acquaintance fixed their 
eyes upon Him to see what He would say. And what were the words which He 
chose? They are these: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath 
anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken- 
hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to 


Pee ee ae, 


Jesus of Nazareth—Stauley. 705 


set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” What 
He said on this text is not described; we are only told that they “marvelled at the 
gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth.” But what those gracious words 
were we can well see from the words of the passage itself. “The Spirit of the Lord 
was upon Him,” first, “to preach the gospel to the poor,” the glad tidings of God’s 
love to the poor, the humble classes, the neglected classes, the dangerous classes, the 
friendless, the oppressed, the unthought-for, the uncared-for. The Spirit of God was 
upon Him, secondly, “to heal the broken-hearted:”’ to heal as a good physician 
heals, not with one medicine, but with all the various medicines and remedies which 
Infinite Wisdom possesses, all the fractures and diseases and infirmities of our poor 
human hearts. There is not a weakness, there is not a sorrow, there is not a griev- 
ance, for which the love of God, as seen in the life and death of Christ, does not offer 
some remedy. He has not overlooked us. He is with us. He remembers us. The 
Spirit of God was upon Him, thirdly, “to preach deliverance to the captive.” What- 
ever be the evil habit, or the inveterate prejudice, or the master passion, or the long 
indulgence, which weighs upon us like a bondage, He feels for us, and will do His 
utmost to set us free—to set at liberty those that are cramped and bruised and confined 
by the chain of their sins, their weakness, their misfortunes, their condition in life, 
their difficulties, their responsibilities, their want of responsibilities, their employments, 
their want of employments. And, fourthly, “The Spirit of God was upon Him,” to 
“give sight to the blind.” How few of us there are who know our own failings, who 
see into our own hearts, who know what is really good for us! That is the knowledge 
which the thought of Christ’s death is likely to give us. That is the truth, which, 
above all other truths, is likely to set us free. “Lord, that I may receive my sight,” is 
the prayer which each of us may offer up for our spiritual state, as the poor man 
whom He met at Jericho did for his bodily eyesight. 

For every one of these conditions He died. Not for those only who are profess- 
edly religious, but for those who are the least so—to them the message of Good Friday 
and of Nazareth is especially addressed. Christianity is, one may almost say, the only 
religion, of which the Teacher addressed Himseif, not to the religious, not to the 
ecclesiastical, not to the learned world, but to the irreligious, or the non-religious, to 
those who thought little of themselves and were thought little of by others, to the 
careless, to the thoughtless, to the rough publican, to the wild prodigal, to the heretical 
Samaritan, to the heathen soldier, to the thankless peasants of Nazareth, to the 
Swarming populations of Galilee. He addresses Himself now, to each of us, however 
lowly we may be in our own eyes, however little we think that we have a religious call, 
however encompassed we are with infirmities; His love is ready to receive, to encour- 
age, to cherish, to save us. 

II. I pass to the other lesson which Good Friday teaches us here. It is that, 
whatever good is to be done in the world, even though it is God Himself who does it, 
cannot be done without an effort—a preparation—a sacrifice. So it was especially in 
‘the death of Christ—so it was in His whole life. His whole life from the time when 
‘He grew up, “as a tender plant” in the seclusion of this valley, to the hour when He 
died at Jerusalem, was one long effort—one jong struggle against misunderstanding, 
‘Opposition, scorn, hatred, hardship, pain. He had doubtless His happier and gentler 
hours; we must not forget them: His friends at Bethany, His apostles who hung upon 
is lips, His mother who followed Him in thought and mind wherever He went. But 
here, amongst His own people, He met with angry opposition and jealousy. He had 
‘0 bear the hardships of toil and labor, like any other Nazarene artisan. He had here, 
y a silent preparation of thirty years, to make Himself ready for the work which lay 
fore Him. He had to endure the heat and the cold, the burning sun and the stormy 
in, of these hills and valleys. “The foxes” of the plain of Esdraelon “have holes,” 


706 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


“the birds” of the Galilean forests “have their nests,” but “He had” often “not where 
to lay His head.” And in Jerusalem, though there were momentary bursts of 
enthusiasm in His behalf, yet He came so directly across the interests, the fears, the 
pleasures, and the prejudices of those who there ruled and taught, that at last it cost 
Him His life. By no less a sacrifice could the world be redeemed, by no less a 
struggle could His work be finished. 

In that work, in one sense, none but He can take part. ‘He trod the wine-press 
alone.’ But in another sense, often urged upon us in the Bible, we must all take part 
in it, if we would wish to do good to ourselves or to others: We cannot improve our- 
selves, we cannot assist others, we cannot do our duty in the world, except by exertion, 


except by unpopularity, except with annoyance, except with care and difficulty. We © 


must, each of us, bear our cross with Him. When we bear it, it is lightened by think- 
ing of Him. When we bear it, each day makes it easier to us. Once the name of 
“Christian,” of “Nazarene,” was an offence in the eyes of the world; now, it is a glory. 
But we cannot have the glory without the labor which it involves. To “hear His 


words, and to do them,” to hear of His death, and to follow in the path of His suffer- 1 


ings, this, and this only, as He himself has told us, is to build our house, the house of 
our life, of our faith, of our happiness, upon a rock; a rock which will grow firmer 


and stronger the more we build upon it, and the more we have to bear. “The rains — 


may descend, and the floods may come, and the winds may blow and may beat upon 
that house;” but the house will not fall, “for it will have been founded upon the rock.” 


[Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D., son of the Bishop of Norwich, was born at — 


Alderley, England, December 13, 1815. A pupil of Dr. Arnold at Rugby, he wrote a 
worthy biography of that lamented schoolmaster. While regius professor of ecclesi- 
astical history, Oxford, and honorary chaplain in ordinary to the Queen, he was made 


Dean of Westminster in 1864, having declined the honorary appointment ef Arch- 


bishop of Dublin. 


This sermon was preached on Good Friday, 1862, in the encampment by the | 
Spring of Nazareth, when he was chaplain to the Prince of Wales, during his trip to 


the Holy Land. This extract is from “Sermons in the East.”] 


i 


(707) 


GLORY TO GOD. 


THOMAS HEWLINGS STOCKTON, D.D. 


“Glory to God.”—Luke 2: 14. 


I divest myself of sensation. I withdraw myself even from the organs of intellect, 
sentiment, and affection. I abstract myself entirely from my physical constitution. I 
throw myself as a pure spirit into the original condition of immensity and eternity. 
God alone is there. I commune with Him—spirit with spirit. I learn that He desires 
to share His infinite felicity with other consciousness than His own; and that His 
perfections have composed a theory of creation. What that theory is, I am not 
informed; but am satisfied that whenever it shall be disclosed it will glitter with all the 
insignia of His own sovereign distinctions. 

Resuming my natural sympathies with the universe, I hold it in contemplation. I 
see its throne. God is on it. A heaven-full of cherubim and seraphim shine and sing 
around it. Beyond heaven, innumerable and magnificent systems of suns, comets, 
planets, and satellites, map off the darkness with golden lines of silent glory, and fill 
up the yacuum with the pulse, and thought, and action of life everlasting. The genius 
of the Mind of minds has made itself creative; the theory of eternity is embodied in 
time; and while God withholds not a smile at the faithfulness of the mirror before 

_ Him, the mirror kindles with still more glowing beauty, reflecting His smile and the 
bliss by which it is brightened. 


I look again. The pavilion of God is closed, and His throne is shaded within its 
folds. At the sight the multitude of worshippers suspend their praise. There is silence 
in heaven. The fellowship of anxiety prevails. Soon they decry afar off a returning 
host. As they come nearer, they are seen to consist of two orders. In one, every 
brow is crowned, and every crown adorned with a single star. In the other, a royal 
breast-plate gleams on every purple robe. They are the morning stars and the sons 
of God. They went out to witness the creation of a world. As it rose, they welcomed 
it with ecstatic music. They saw it perfected; saw it filled with living things; saw its 
paradise planted and burst into bloom; saw the manly majesty and womanly beauty of 
its wedded rulers; spent the first Sabbath with them, and exulted in its holiness and 
bliss. But now they come, sad that they went. As they alight upon their native land- 
scape, and fold their plumes among the myriads that gather around them, they tell the 
Story of sin and death! The whole multitude turn toward the throne and wonder no 
more that the folds of the pavilion are drawn closely around it. 

Touched with a desire to behold the scene of guilt, and the parties involved in it, 
I leave the center of creation and tend toward its circumference. I find a new system, 
and less magnificent than many I have passed. I alight upon its sun, and survey its 
comets, planets, and satellites. The planets are divided into three classes. Those in the 

first and remotest class are comparatively of great size, and beautifully adorned—one 
with belts, another with rings; one with four moons, another with six, another with 
seven. Those in the second and middle class are very small. The four in the third 
and nearest class are larger than the latter, but not one of them is even a tenth part as 
large as the largest of the first class. In this nearest class I find the one I seek. It is 
the third from the sun, and moves along its orbit attended by a single moon. I 
descend upon it, and stand on a hill overlooking Paradise. The garden of the Lord 


PP et eh 


708 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


has not yet lost its loveliness, though its sinful tenants, ashamed and sorrowful, hide 
themselves in its deepest shadows. 

I commune with my own thoughts. What is such a world as this, and who are 
these its occupants, that for anything done here, the hallelujahs of heaven should be 
hushed, and the throne of the universe be darkened? I am overwhelmed by the realiza- 
tion of the infinite holiness and sensibility of the Divine law. There is no point in 
immensity where the finger of sin can touch it, without that touch being felt by Him 
who ordained it. But why is it not avenged? Even as a bubble on one of its own 
streams, so might such a world dissolve and vanish. Why does it not? Ah me! I 


feel the cause. Those timid criminals, trembling in the shade, have been quickened — 


into immortality by the breath of God; and there is not an archangel in heaven whose 
spirit shall not fail with age as soon as theirs. Nor only so; but those same fugitives. 
are the representatives of innumerable millions of immortalities like themselves— 
enough, if they should be finally translated to heaven, to make it necessary to employ 
ages in preparing mansions to receive them. What now? Who shall terminate this 
awful suspense—and how shall it close? 


I return whence I came. The cherubim and seraphim still stand, in adoring 
silence, in the strange twilight. But lo! the pavilion opens—and all is glory! A ieel- 
ing of intenser love comes with it, exciting a rarer rapture. The angel of the Lord 
appears at the right hand of the Divine Presence. He announces the adoption of a 
plan of redemption—the necessity of sacrifice to the accomplishment of the plan—the 
inability of any less than Himself to make the sacrifice—and His own assumption of 
the obligation, to be discharged in due time. He summons the morning stars and the 
sons of God to attend Him again; commands the resumption of worship by the multi- 
tude left before the throne, and comes away on His mission of mercy to this far-off 
sphere of sin. With the noblest burst of music that heaven ever heard still seeming 
to follow, I come with them, and hover in the midst of the holy train, while the angel 
of the Lord Himself descends to the garden, calls the sinners before Him, gives law 
to their changed estate, intimates the scheme of salvation, and sends them forth from 
their forfeited inheritance, to engage in toil, endure pain, and hopefully await the 
performance of His promise. 

The angel and His retinue re-ascend. I remain to see the influence of the first 
death. Men multiply. Sins multiply. Sorrows multiply. All the good of the former 
estate perishes. As some noble tree, in the autumn, feels its life returning to the soil 
from which it rose in the spring, and sees its foliage withering and falling from its 
branches, till, one by one, they are all stripped and bare, so the spiritual life of man 
returns to its source in the Godhead, and all his beauty and glory fades and dies. The 
tree is not hopeless. Another spring may warm its life up again, through every 
branch, and into every twig, and cover it all over with leaves and blossoms, and iruit. 
And so, man is not hopeless. Redemption may hereafter invest him with fairer and 
richer felicities than he knew at first. But, for all the present, he perishes. Intellect 
dies: reason, judgment, memory, imagination, knowledge, wisdom, truth, all die. 
Sentiment dies: gratitude, benevolence. Honor, courage, virtue, conscience, all die. 
Affection dies: love, friendship, joy, peace, all die. Ignorance, like that of the brute, 
prevails. All notion of the magnificence of the universe is lost. Even the magnitude 
of the earth is not suspected. Men deem it a small plain; the sky above it a solid dome; 
and sun, moon, and stars a set of interchanging lamps. But not only is all proper 
notion of the works of God lost: God Himself is not in all their thoughts. They have 
a dreamy remembrance of something Divine; but know not whether it is one or many, 
little or great, or where or how it is to be found. They seek it in the objects around 
them, even inferior to themselves. They think they see it in the eye of a beast, in the 
coil of a reptile, in the wing of a bird, in the color of a plant—and so worship these. 


_ 


EEE Ll CU 


Glory to God—Stockton. 709 


Meantime, the passions of the brute awake to confirm and aggravate this ignorance. 
Gluttony, lust, jealousy, murder; and, with these, vices of which brutes know nothing— 
drunkenness, cursing, lying, covetousness, fraud, slavery, war, and a thousand others. 
In the midst of all, a little spiritual life is preserved—like an evergreen, with a waste of 
wintry snow around it. I see a venerable patriarch, here and there, who builds an 
altar to the true God, and lays his offering on it. An angel descends, stands by the 
altar, blesses the worshipper, touches the offering with heavenly fire, and ascends with 
the flame. The patriarch learns much of God—His will, ways, works, and designs; 
but still all is confined within the apparent littleness of the circle of the senses. To 
him the sky is simply God's palace; there is His throne; thence He looks to the ends 
of the earth, or, from horizon to horizon; the lightning is the glance of His eye, the 
thunder is the utterance of His voice, the cloud is His chariot, and the winds are His 
steeds. So near is He, at all times, that He not only sees every sacrifice that is made 
to Him, but smells the savor of it, as it rises from the altar. Therefore, too, He so 
easily hears and answers prayer. 

Time passes. All the life left on earth is enclosed in an ark. There it burns, 
brightly but gently, with a world of wild waters around it, striving to quench it. But 
God dries the top of a mountain, sanctifies it as an altar, puts the living fire on it, 
hangs the rainbow over it, and smiles to see how the waters rush away from its kind- 
ling and spreading glory, and gather their waves for ever within impassable bounds. 


Other ages pass. Men multiply again. Sins multiply again. Sorrows multiply 
again. Intellect, sentiment, affection, die again. Yet, here and there, in the withered 
wilderness, a true altar is raised, and the fire from heaven again descends upon it. Ere 
long a nation of slaves, whose chains melted from their forms at the flash of an angel’s 
eye, and who marched over a path of pearl through the valley of the sea, between 
mountains shining all through like crystal, pitch their camp in the shadow of a desert 
cliff, and see that same pavilion which was folded round the throne of the universe, in 
the hour of heaven's strange twilight and hushed hallelujahs, borne by the morning 
stars and sons of God, and rested, with its fullness of inner glory, amidst the trumpet- 
ings and shoutings of the whole host, on the trembling summit. They see their leader 
enter the pavilion with the pale face of a man, and come out again with a countenance 
glowing like a God. He bears in his hand a law written by the fingers of Him who 
dwells within those sacred folds. They make a tabernacle, according to the pattern 
shown in the mount, and the priests bear it from station to station, for forty years, 
under the angel’s watching, till Jordan pauses to let it pass; and Zion rises up to 
receive it, and Lebanon bows in homage from afar; and the great sea turning its 
billows and foam into gold, in the smile of the setting sun, rolls its tribute along the 
coast from Syria to Egypt, and kneels and kisses the soil which is hallowed from shore 
to shore by the presence of the Shekinah and the tribes of the chosen. 

Other ages pass. The temple shines on Moriah. The sky above it gleams with 
prophetic visions. The land around it blooms with symbolic blessings and smokes 
with symbolic curses. The rocks, groves, and streams; the palaces, cottages and tents, 
are all alive with the bugles of faith, the harps of hope, the lutes of love, and.the 
timbrels of salvation. The thrill is felt in other lands. A gush of expectation is felt 
at the heart, and pulsates to the extremities of the world. 

Four thousand years have rolled away. Many generations of millions on millions 
have led an animal life, and fallen, with the beasts, into the grave. Some spiritual life 
has kept the world from growing quite cold; and, beside this, there is hope of redemp- 
tion. The promise given in Eden is on record yet. But why is it not fulfilled? 

Again, I leave this little, lower world. I pass Venus, pass Mercury, pass the Sun, 
pass the orbit of Mercury again and of Venus, and of the Earth, and of Mars, and of 
the Asteroids, and of Jupiter, and Saturn, and Uranus; pass other systems thousands 


710 . Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


on thousands, still tending to the center and balance of the universe. I reach Heaven. 
I see the angel of the Lord again, with a farewell suffusion in His eyes, but a smile 
of joy on His lips. Though in the form of God, and thinking it not robbery to be 
equal with God, and with the whole host of glory in adoring homage before Him, 
there is something nearer and dearer to His heart than all the grandeur of His filial 
estate. His promise is the brightest jewel in His breast-plate; and is only excelled by 
the love which burns behind it. He sees from the throne what no other vision can 
discern, the humble dwelling-place of man. And the appointed time is near for advent 
and sacrifice. Solemnity, such as was never felt before, oppresses heaven. In the 
universal stillness, if a single harp-string should snap, the sound would jar the throne. 
He alone may break such silence. I hear His voice divine. All orders are permitted 
to attend Him. When they approach the earth, order after order is to descend and 
ascend, offering Him worship—but quietly and unseen. One company only, the sons 
of God, with Michael, the archangel of power, at their head, may announce His com- 
ing to a few shepherds. Another, the morning stars, with Gabriel, the archangel of 
wisdom, at their head, may lead a few sages to His presence by the light of a 
single star. 

I wait not to witness the solitude of heaven, but rather leave the procession to 
complete its arrangements, and hasten again to the earth. 

The world is at peace. The decree of a Roman prince is abroad in Judea. The 
people are gathering together in the cities to which they belong. I repair to Bethle- 
hem. Though the least of the cities of Judah, it is honored as the birth-place of David, 
and cherished as the chosen of David’s greater son. Already it is crowded. Every 
street, and court, and roof, and the hill-side around is thronged. I look upon its 
multitude, and think—Oh how will they feel when the coming Messiah, advancing 
beyond His invisible host, shall shine on their towers, and alight in their midst! The 
sun sets. The cool of the evening causes the throng to retire to their shelter. The 
twilight lingers about the gates. 

I pass through. I seek a rest at the inn. It is full. I hear of two strangers who 
have spent several days in the stable. If good enough for them, it is good enough for” 
me. I enter the same retreat. I find it full of parental solicitude. The noble counte- 
nance of the man is softened with a heart full of tenderness. The pale face of the young 
mother is inexpressibly serene, with a holy and wonderful beauty. Her bed is but 
straw; and in a manger, laid close beside her, sleeps her Babe, but a few hours old. 
Young as it is, that Babe has a heavenly smile; but the mother is still the most attract- 
ive. There is a dignity in her mien that awes me, and a spirit which it seems as if 
nothing could surprise or overcome. Yet, as she bends her calm eyes on her smiling 
Son, she wears a look of devotion and praise. 


I soon learn their story. They have come from Nazareth, from the hills of Galilee, 
overlooking the plain of Esdrelon; by Tabor and Gilboa, and the moun- 
tains of Samaria; between Ebal and Gerizim; by Jacob’s well; and by Jerusalem— 
a long and weary way. And now, though both of the lineage of David, and in 
the city of their renowned ancestor, and under circumstances of so much interest, they 
are happy to find a refuge from the careless crowd around them among the beasts of 
the stall. 

But who are these? Shepherds! whence do ye come? They answer not; but 
kneel by the manger, and worship the Babe! They rise with His heavenly. smile 
reflected in their own. They tell of a visit of angels; first one, then many, with visions 
of glory and chantings of praise and peace. I tremble with fear. Where, then, is the 
angel of the Lord? While yet the night lingers, other footsteps draw near. Sages! 
who and whence are ye? They answer not. Like Moses, they shake off their sandals, 
breathing only—this is holy ground! They, too, kneel by the manger, and worship the 


Glory to God—Stockton. — 711 


Babe. With tears in their eyes they spread their gifts before Him—gold, and frankin- 
cense, and myrrh, They, also, rise, with their tears turned into smiles. They tell how 
a star brought them from their far-off homes. I tremble more and more. What 
means this worship of the stranger's Babe, and where yet is the angel of the Lord? 
I step forth from the stable. I listen. All is still. The inn is hushed. The halls 
around are all hushed. I look up. I see the new star sparkling in the middle air, 
right over the stable. My natural vision seems clear as ever; but my spiritual vision 
has been dim ever since I saw the suffused countenance of the angel of the Lord, 
preparing to leave the throne of the universe. To think that He should make such a 
sacrifice as to stoop to the earth for a kingdom, and resign the government of angels 
for the redemption of men, was more than my spirit could bear. But still less can I 
bear the burden of this mystery. Has He come? Where, then, does He hide the 
greatness of His power? God of the servant, of thy servant Elisha, open thou mine 
eyes! 5 

My vision returns. That light! See! Why it shines on the forehead of Gabriel, 
standing on his watch as he stood erewhile at the throne! Lo! The morning stars 
are arrayed beside him, and extend their train far behind him. Lo! Michael stands 
opposite, with all the sons of God in their purple robes and royal breast-plates. 
Behold! how, between their ranks, order after order of the whole heavenly host 
descend and ascend, to worship the Babe. I tremble still; but doubt no more. I sink 
by the manger, and thrill while I see that the same suffused light, and the same glad . 
smile that were blended in the countenance of the angel of the Lord, gleams in the 
eye and glows on the lips of the infant Jesus! ; 


“Sweetest name on mortal’s tongue, 
Sweetest note in angel’s song, 
Sweetest carol ever sung, 

Jesus! Jesus!” 


Yet, was it not sacrifice enough to exchange the throne of heaven for the throne 
of earth? Why this deeper humiliation? How shall He rise now? Earthly sov- 
ereignty is divided. A thousand petty princes sway their scepters here. How shall 
He reach even the palace of Zion? And if this be hard, how shall He displace Cesar, 
and win the supremacy of the world? 

I see Him as a boy; wise indeed, and pure, but self-abased and gentle. 

I see Him as a man; wonderful in word and mighty in miracle, but still meek and 
lowly in heart, the companion of fishermen and publicans, outcast and poor; a citizen, 
but without a penny for tribute; weary, but without a spot to lay His head; hungry, 
and without a morsel of food. I see Him opposed by demons; assailed by jealous and 
bloodthirsty men; betrayed by one of His cherished friends; conducted, with every 
method of insult, through a mock trial; condemned, without the shadow of guilt, to 
the vilest and most painful of all modes of execution; and led forth, without a murmur 
of complaint or an effort of resistance, bearing His cross, through a jeering mob, to 
the place of skulls. 


Again, I am confounded. What means this strange submission? Will there be 
a change presently, like that between the throne whence He came, and the manger 
where He lay? Will Calvary, as soon as His feet touch it, tower above Zion and 
Moriah? Will the cross be turned into a shining seat of imperial power? Will the 
patriarchs and prophets be summoned from their graves, that He may reign in the 
midst of His ancients gloriously? Will His enemies wither in His glance, and shrivel 
in the wrath of His frown? Will all cities throw open their gates, and all princes come 
down from their thrones, and all nations send ambassadors in haste to conciliate His 
Majesty with homage and praise? 


712 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


I see Him step on Calvary, and not an atom trembles. I see Him nailed iv the 
wood, I see His upward look of pitying love, and hear His prayer—‘Father, forgive 
them, they know not what they do!” I see Him hanging, faint, in the noon-day dark- 
ness. I hear His last cry—‘“‘It is finished!’’—and see His head fall upon His bosom 
in death! i 

Sudden as the shock of the earthquake, my soul thrills with the truth. Quick as 
the rending of the veil of the temple, the veil upon my mind is parted, and the glory 
of God shines in upon it. 

I see that there was one sacrifice too great for Christ to make! He was willing to 
leave the throne of the universe for the manger of Bethlehem; willing to grow up as 
the son of a poor carpenter; willing to be called the friend of publicans and sinners; 
willing to be watched with jealous eyes, and slandered by lying tongues, and hated by 
murderous hearts, and betrayed by friendly hands, and denied by pledged lips, and 
tejected by apostate priests, and a deluded populace, and cowardly princes; willing to 
be sentenced to the cross, and to carry the cross, and be nailed to the cross, and bleed, 
and groan, and thirst, and die on the cross. But He was not willing to wear an earthly 
crown, or robe, or wield an earthly sceptre, or exercise earthly rule. That would have 
been too great a sacrifice! He did, indeed, endure the crown of thorns, and the cast- 
off purple, and the reed, and the cry—‘“Hail! King of the Jews!” But this was merely 
because He preferred the mockery to the reality; so pouring infinite contempt on the 
one, not only by rejecting it in the beginning of His ministry, but, also, by accepting 
the other at its close. 

A Godlike sacrifice! I see it. I see it. The blood of Christ was an atonement 
for the sins of the world! ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised 
for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and by His stripes we 
are healed!” 

I see it. His burial hallowed the tomb; the breaking of the seal on His sepulchre 
was the breaking of the seal on every sepulchre; the ascension of His humanity to 
heaven is the warrant of our own ascension; and its entire and eternal perfection, 
exalted as it is, “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and 
every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come,” 
is the assurance of our perfection, in all the honors of joint-heirship with Him, in the 
many-mansioned house of His Father, where He has gone “to prepare a place” for us. 

I look on heaven again. Instead of the angel of the Lord, I see by the throne of 
the universe, Jesus, the Babe of Bethlehem, the Boy of Nazareth, the Man of Calvary! 


“While, long returned, the angels round Him sing, 
And saints, yet coming, shout to see their King!” 


The saints! Who are they? “The spirits of the just made perfect’”—redeemed 
from the earth! They who have “come up through much tribulation, and washed their 
robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” They who, in imitation of 
their Lord and Master, quickened into spiritual life, have cherished and manifested a 
readiness to sacrifice fame, rank, office, power, wealth, pleasure, ease, time, health, 
life—cverything but righteousness—for the one great cause of man’s redemption! 

Patriarchs! Prophets! Apostles! Martyrs! Confessors! Reformers! and 
millions of humble names scarce ever heard on earth beyond the hearth-stone of love, 
the threshold of home, and the courts of the house of the Lord, there unite with the 
first-born sons of glory in giving praise “to Him that sitteth upon the throne and to 
the Lamb for ever!” 

I see an immense multitude preparing around me, for the same transit: 


“They all of sin were dupes and slaves, 
And rushing blind toward hopeless graves. 


Glory to God—Stockton. 703 


Then blew the trumpet of God’s word! 

Then flashed the Spirit’s two-edged sword! 
They burst their bonds, their freedom won, 
And now toward heaven are marching on!” 


We are enrolled with them. We are pledged to the whole campaign! What 
though our foes are many? What though they are mighty? “Greater is He that is 
in us, than he that is in the world!” “Through Christ we can do all things.” This 
is the victory that overcometh the world—even our faith! “All things are possible 
to him that believeth!” We can run through a troop, we can leap over a wall. “One 
shall chase a thousand, and two shall put ten thousand to flight!” Let the mightiest 
array be marshalled against us that ever was mustered by the Prince of Darkness, we 
fear not to meet them. Our friends are beyond them. Our kindred are beyond them. 
The saints are all beyond them. The angels are all beyond them. Christ is beyond 
them. God is beyond them. Heaven and eternal life are beyond them. And we will 
break through them. Shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot, heart with heart, hand with 
hand, with our shields lapped and our swords ready, we will press and cut our way 
to glory! 

The spirit of Abraham is in us. The spirit of Moses is in us. The spirit of Elijah 
is in us. The spirit of Paul is in us. The spirit of Luther is in us. The spirit of 
Wesley is in us. Like them, we are ready to give up all for Christ. Nay, the spirit 
of Christ is in us, and like Him, we are ready even to be crucified for the cause! 

It is well, brethren and friends, to be confident in the Lord—to be able to say, “T 
am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powets, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

But, it is still better to be actually “faithful unto death,” and then to be able to 
say—‘I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have 
fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there 
is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall 
give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His 
appearing.” 

“Glory to God!” 


[Thomas Hewlings Stockton, D. D., was born at Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 
1808, and entered the ministry in his twenty-first year. He was elected chaplain to the 
United States House of Representatives three times, and once to the Senate. His 
Pastoral life was consecrated to the aim—noble, but now unattainable—of uniting ‘‘all 
who love the Lord Jesus Christ” on the pure and catholic basis of faith implicit in 
the Holy Bible. He died in Philadelphia, October 9, 1868.] 


714 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE PERMANENT MOTIVE IN MISSIONARY 
WORK. 


R. S. STORRS, D.D., LL.D. 


No one, I am sure, can more profoundly regret than I do the removal by death 
from this scene and this service of our honored and beloved brother, Dr. Lamson, 
president of our oldest and largest missionary society. His work in the world-wide 
interest of missions was finished when it seemed to us to have hardly begun. The star 
went down when it had scarcely crossed the meridian; and we are left, as so often we 
have before been left, to bow before an inscrutable wisdom, and to say, “Thy ways, Oo 
Lord, are past finding out; nevertheless, not our will but thine be done.” It must 
strike one with a sense of unnaturalness, that the older tree should stand when the 
younger and more vigorous has been suddenly broken; and that I, who have been 
retired from every occasion of this kind for many months, should be suddenly called 
upon to take his place for the service which he would far more suitably have performed. 
But we have to face facts as they meet us in life and adjust ourselves to them, and to 
do as courageously as we may the duty which seems plainly to fall to us. 

Standing for the hour in his place, I can only suggest some thoughts, which may 
or may not be coincident with those which Dr. Lamson would have presented if he 
were here, but which were borne in upon my own mind, constantly, while I occupied 
the office in which he succeeded me, and to which I am sure he would give his,cordial 
assent. 

The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work: that was the theme which he had 
selected, and which we had hoped to hear treated by him with his customary and 
characteristic eloquence, impressing upon us his matured thought, and his earnest and 


inspiring feeling, on the great subject. It is a catholic and comprehensive, even a. 


cosmopolitan theme. It does not concern itself simply with the interest of foreign 
missions, technically, so-called, although it may be that that interest was prominent 
before his mind as he chose and announced the theme. But, if you think of it, it 
concerns not Congregationalists only, but those in every Christian communion who 
are trying to further the cause and kingdom of our Lord on the earth. It concerns 
not the missionary fields alone, as they are popularly called, in other lands, but every 
field in which Christian service is sought to be rendered, from the obscurest slum in 
this town of Boston to the ragged edges of the circumference, the outmost circumfer- 
ence, of the world of mankind. The Permanent Motive in Missionary or Christian 
Work: that is what we are to look for. 

We are familiar, of course, with the temporary, local, changing motives of mission- 
ary enterprise, which meet us at times, impress us forcibly for the moment, and pass 
away; the influence of great and signal occasions, when sympathies are almost 
tumultuously excited: the impulse which comes with a sweeping eloquence, which lifts 
us from the common levels of earth, and bears us as on wings toward issues and actions 
which we had not anticipated; perhaps the impulse which comes with personal interest 
in missionaries whom we have known, or mission fields which we have traversed. 
Great successes on certain fields move our enthusiasm; or tragic and terrible experi- 
ences in others, as recently among the Armenians, stir the deep fountains of our 
feelings. No one of these impulses is to be disregarded. Each one in its place has a 


power of its own, and all are to be valued and welcomed for their effect. But what we 


The Permanent Motive in Misstonary Work—Storrs. 715 


are to look for is the motive more deep, permanent, governing, which will be beneath 
and behind all these; as the tide-motive is beneath and behind the advancing and 
retreating waves which rise and flash, and break upon the beach; and this will be a 
motive not simple and single, but no doubt combined of several, distinguishable from 
each other, as a powerful current is made up of different uniting affluents. We must 
separate them in thought, that we may afterward combine them. 

I think, first, then, we shall all recognize this as essential to the missionary 
motive: a clear and profound recognition of the evilness and misery of the actual 
condition of mankind, certainly as compared with the powers which are instinctive in 
every human soul. It makes no difference really, or very little, at this point, whether 
we accept the Scriptural declaration that man has fallen from a higher estate to his 
present level, or conceive, with some modern theorizers, that man is just now partially 
emerging from the conditions of his brute-ancestry, stumbling up, through sin and 
error and manifold tremendous mistakes, toward wisdom and virtue, and the blessed- 
ness which they bring. In either case, the present condition of mankind is one of 
imperfection, weakness, unsatisfied desire, unrealized promise, and manifold peril. It 
is not the missionary that tells us this, principally or alone. Every observant foreign 
traveler repeats the same. Every one who has resided abroad, and then has come 
back to testify with an unprejudiced mind to that which he has observed, relates the 
same. The supreme difficulty here is in the want of the recognition of God, and of the 
great Immortality. . 


It used to be a reproach against Christian scholars made by skeptics that they 
investigated the ethnic religions in the spirit of suspicious hostility, by which their 
processes were diverted from true lines, by which their conclusions were colored. I 
am not concerned to argue the case of the Christian scholars of fifty years ago, or 
more, but I can certainly affirm that the Christian scholars of our own time investigate 
these religions carefully, patiently, sympathetically, with an eager desire to find every- 
thing in them that is of beautiful worth; and they do find many things of truth and 
beauty, many things which excite their admiration, as illustrating the attainment of the 
higher aspiration of the human mind, reaching after the Unseen if haply it might find 
it. But they find nowhere the discovery of one personal God, eternal in authority, 
immaculate in character, creating man in His own image and opening before him the 
ageless immensities beyond the grave; and in the absence of such recognition of God, 
and such recognition of the Immortality, man is left to grope where he cannot fly, to 
clutch the earth where he misses heaven. So it is that industrially, politically, com- 
mercially, socially, intellectually, he is on the lower level, until some exterior power 
reaches and ennobles him. So it is that crime such as is unknown in Christian com- 
munities is familiar and tolerated in the world. In fact, we need not fix our thought, 
prominently, on the more devilish crimes which still exist in parts and portions of the 
earth—cannibalism, infanticide; human sacrifices, self-torture, the slavery that would 
destroy body and soul together in its own hell. Commoner vices have told us the 
story sufficiently—drunkenness, licentiousness, the gambling passion, the opium habit, 
the fierce self-will that rushes to its end, regardless of anything sacred, in order to 
attain its pleasures. 

All these we know. How familiar they are to the mind, and in the life, of the 
world at large. And there seems no power arising within the circle not reached by 
Christian influence to relieve the gloom, to elevate those who are oppressed by these 
sore burdens. There is no power. Property asserts its right to oppress, and to enjoy; 
poverty accepts its function, however unwillingly, of suffering in silence; the degrada- 
tion of woman strikes a vicious stab at the heart and conscience of immense communi- 
ties, while the oppression of childhood blights life in its germ; and, with the prospect of 
nothing better to come, suicide becomes a common refuge from the unbearable misery. 


716 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


There is nothing overstated in this description of the world at large; and you know 
how it is in your city slums, even in this city of refinement and culture I have no 
doubt, certainly in the city in which I live; in the London and Birmingham of the other 
side, where the little girl twelve years old had never heard the name of Christ, where 
the boy of about the same age only knew the nature of an oath by having been his 
lordship’s caddy. These are what we are to reach and lift, if we can do it. These are 
they to whom we are to bring blessings from the most high. Certainly, every heart in 
which there is a spark of Christian sympathy must feel the power of this motive, 
pressing to the utmost and instant exertion of every force to relieve the suffering, to 
enlighten the darkened, and to lift the oppressed. 


No one need exaggerate; every one should recognize the weakness and wretched- 
ness, the exposure and the peril of human society. When we remember that in this 
universe of ours destiny clings closely to character, has never anything mechanical or 
arbitrary about it, but follows the spirit which enters into it, then those tremendous 
words of our Lord in the twenty-fifth of Matthew have upon them an appalling sharp- 
ness and reach, as addressed to great classes and companies of mankind; and we must 
recognize it, and hear the solemn bell of the universe ringing through His Word, and 
telling us of what is to be looked for in the hereafter. 


But then with this recognition of the exposure and peril of human society, of 
mankind at large, we must associate the recognition of the recoverableness to truth, to 
virtue and God, of persons and of peoples who are now involved in these calamities and 
pains; to whom now unrest and apprehension are as natural as speech or sight; the 
recoverableness of men as persons, and of communities as well as persons. 


Here, of course, we come into direct antagonism with the pessimist, who says: 
“Tt is all nonsense! you can’t possibly do the work; you can’t take these ragged and 
soiled remnants of humanity in your city streets and weave them into purple and 
golden garments for the Master; you cannot accomplish the effect which you contem- 
plate in the cities, in your own land, among the frontier, or in other lands. It is as 
impossible to make the unchaste pure, to make the mean noble, as it is to make crystal 
lenses out of mud, or the delicate elastic watch-spring out of the iron slag! That is the 
world’s view, a common and hateful view. Our answer to it is that the thing can be 
done, and has been done, and done in such multitudes of instances that there is no use 
whatever in arguing against the fact. Christ came from the heavens to the earth on 
an errand. He knew what was in man; and He did not come from the celestial seats 
on an errand seen and known beforehand to be fruitless and futile. He came because 
He knew the interior, central, divine element in human nature, to which He could 
appeal and by which He could lift men toward things transcendent. We have seen the 
examples of success how many times! hundreds, yea, even thousands of times, in our 
own communities, as missionaries have seen them in the lands abroad: where the 
woman, intemperate, in harlotry, in despair, has been lifted to restored womanhood, 
as the pearl oyster is brought up with its precious contents with the slimy ooze; where 
the man whose lips had been charged with foulest blasphemies has become the preacher 
of the gospel of light and love, of hope and peace, to others, his former comrades; 
where the feet that were swift to do evil have become beautiful on the mountains in 
publishing salvation. We have seen these things in individuals and in communities; 
in the roughest frontier mining-camp, where every door opened on a saloon or a 
brothel or a gambling table, and where, by the power coming from on high, it has 
been transformed into the peaceful Christian village, with the home, with the school, 
with the church, with the asylum, with the holy song, where the former customary 
music had been the crack of revolvers. We have seen the same thing on a larger 
scale in the coral islands, scenes of savage massacre and of cannibal riot and ferocity, 


The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work—Storrs. 717 


where the church has been planted, and Christian fellowships have been established 
and maintained. We have seen these things, and why argue against facts? 

Arguing against fact, as men ultimately find out, is like trying to stop with articu- 
late breath the march of the stately battleship Olympia, as she sweeps onward to her 
anchorage. An argument may not meet a contrary argument; no argument can over- 
whelm a fact. And these facts in experience are as sure, as difficult of belief perhaps, 
but as compulsive of belief, as are the scientific demonstrations of the liquid air, of 
the wireless telegraphy. We do not question the reality of what we see; and we know 
that these effects have been produced, on the smaller scale and on the larger. I 
suppose that every one who has ever stood on the heights above Naples, at the church 
of St. Martino, on the way to St. Elmo, has noticed, as I remember to have noticed, 
that all the sounds coming up from that gay, populous, brilliant, fascinating city, as 
they reached the upper air, met and mingled on the minor key. There were the voices 
of traffic and the voices of command, the voices of affection and the voices of rebuke, 
the shouts of sailors, and the cries of itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter 
and the laugh of childhood; but they all came into this incessant moan in the air. 
That is the voice of the world in the upper air, where there are spirits to hear it. That 
is the cry of the world for help. And here is the answer to that cry: a song of 
triumph and glorious expectation, taking the place of the moan, in the village, in the 
city, in the great community; men and women out of whom multitudes of devils have 
been cast, as out of him of old, sitting clothed and in their right minds, at the feet of 
Jesus. 

You cannot tell me that it is impossible to produce these effects, for mine own 
eyes have seen them, mine own hands have touched them. I know their reality, and 
that every human soul which has not committed the final sin and passed the judgement 
is recoverable to God, if the right remedy be definitely applied; and that every people, 
however weak, however sinful, however wanting in hope and expectation, has within 
it the possibility and above it the promise of the millennium. God’s power is adequate 
to all that. We want to associate this idea of the recoverableness of persons and of 
peoples to the highest ideal and to God Himself; we want to combine this with the idea 
of man’s present misery and hopelessness in his condition, to constitute the true and 
powerful missionary motive; and then we want to recognize the fact that the Gospel of 
Christ is the one force which, being used, secures this result in the most unpromising 
conditions. 

Here, again, we encounter the opposition of multitudes. How often men have 
laughed, how loudly they have laughed, at the idea that the story of the crucified 
Nazarene could inspire a despondent soul to hope, could purify the vicious sou! unto 
virtue, could bring any soul nearer to God! Perhaps somewhere they are laughing at 
it now; possibly even in this city of Boston, the home of culture and refinement, of 
fine’and wide thought—I don’t know, I don’t live here; but I know that in the country 
at large there are always those who are disposed to say, “It is perfectly puerile to try 
to reach human sorrow and human sin with the power of the Gospel, lodged in the 
little book which the child may carry in her hand!” As if the inconspicuous forces in 
the world’s development were not always those deadliest on the one hand or most 
benign on the other; as if wafts of air did not kill multitudes more than all the batteries 
of artillery; as if the unseen forces, hardly manifesting themselves at all, were not those 
which society seizes by which to advance itself most rapidly and grandly—that little 
spark, vanishing instantaneously but revealing the unseen force which drives 
machineries, draws carriages, illuminates cities, and enables you and me to talk as if 
face to face with friends and correspondents at the distance of a thousand miles; that 
fleecy vapor, vanishing silently into the air but representing the gigantic servant of 
modern civilization, which tunnels mountains, scoops out mines, and links the conti- 


718 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


ments together in iron bands. These unseen powers are the ones that man craves and 
uses, or that, on the other hand, he dreads and repels; and the power of the Gospel, 
however men may smile at the idea of that power, has vindicated itself too many times 
to be assailed by argument, certainly too many times to be encountered with ridicule. 

The Gospel is able to reconstitute society by reconstructing the character of indi- 
viduals; through its effect on persons it opens the way for vast national advances. It 
touches not merely the higher themes, but all the themes that are associated with those, 
and immediately pertinent to the interest of mankind. It teaches frugality and industry 
and honesty, by express command, and by the divine example of Him who brought it 
to us. It turns men, as has been forcibly said, “out of the trails of blood and plunder 
into the path of honest toil.” It is a gospel for every creature, that is, for every 
created thing; and gardens bloom in a lovelier beauty under its influence, and harvest- 
festivals, of which the country is full today, are only its natural and beautiful fruit and 
trophy. It exalts womanhood, and by the honor it puts on childhood, it inaugurates 
the new family-life in the world. It honors, as no other religion does or ever did, the 
essential worth of the immortal spirit in man} and it forces him, pushes him, crowds 
him, into thoughtfulness and educational discipline, since it will not allow him to be 
manipulated into paradise by any priestly hand, but comes to him in a Book, and sets 
him to work to investigate its contents, to inquire concerning it, to look out widely 
around it, and to inform himself by careful thought of what it is and what it means. 

There is the basis of colleges and theological seminaries, and I hope there will be 
no quarrel between them! There is the basis of all the educational institutions and 
influences that are worthy in the world. Christianty brings them. It generates by 
degrees a new social conscience. It unites communities, on which it has operated, in 
new relationships to each other. International alliances become possible, become 
vital. International law becomes a reality and a power; beneficence is stimulated, and 
law becomes ethical. As we have seen recently, in the prodigious excitement of feeling 
throughout civilized countries in consequence of the apparent gross injustice done to 
a single French officer by a military court, the time is coming, though it has not yet 
fully come, when mankind shall be one in spirit, and an 


: 4 instinct bear along, 
Round the earth’s electric circle, 
One swift flash of right or wrong. 


It is not commerce which does this, it is Christianity. We are witnesses to it. 
Our ancestors, not many centuries ago, were mere rapacious savages, robbers in the 
forest, pirates on the sea; it was Christianity, brought to them, that lifted them into 
gladness, serenity, great purpose, great expectation and hope; and the new civilization 
in which we rejoice on either side, I will not say of the separating, of the uniting, 
ocean, was founded on that New Testament, the folios of which, I believe, are still 
preserved in Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library in 
Oxford. Here is the basis of what has been grandest, most illustrious, and most 
prophetic, in the recent history of mankind. Give the gospel freedom and it will every- 
where show the power. Among the children and youth to whom it goes, among the 
mature and strong, wheresoever it goes, it grapples conscience, it stimulates the heart. 
That one sentence, “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin,” is the pro- 
foundest truth, is the most persuasive and commanding appeal ever addressed by an 
inspired apostle to the children of mankind; and wherever that is heard, sin is ‘lost in 
penitence, and hope is lost in triumphant vision, and the glory of the world disappears 
before the glory immutable of the Son of God! 

Then we are to remember, certainly never is this to be forgotten, that the great 
imperishable motive, surpassing and dominating every other in missionary effort, is 


The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work—Storrs. 719 


adoring love toward Christ, as central in the Scripture, glorified in history. No 
student of history, no observer of human experience, can fail to see that there is the 
sovereign passion possible to human nature; beside which the passion of love for a 
friend, for a country, for a business, for studies, may be auxiliary, but must be subor- 
dinate. There is the passion which has done the grandest things the world has ever 
known. There is the passion, the vision of which interprets to us the strangest, 
sublimest pages of history. We have all felt it, I am sure, if we are Christian, in our 
measure, and at times; at the sacrament, perhaps; in those sabbaths of the soul of 
which Coleridge speaks, when the mind eddies round instead of flowing onward; when 
we have been moved to a great effort for Him whom we love; most keenly, perhaps, 
when we have been in keenest sorrow, when the earth was as iron under our feet and 
the heavens as brass above our head, and we were all alone, yet not alone, for there 
stood beside us One in the form of the Son of Man, making luminous the dark! We 
have felt this love toward Christ; and when we have felt it we have known that no 
power could surpass or approach it in the intensity of its moving force, to every enter- 
prise, great, difficult howsoever it might be, by which He would be honored. 

Love has been the sovereign power in all the churches. Judgment may be gener- 
ous; love is lavish. Judgment may be steadfast in its conclusions; love is heroic in its 
affirmations. It was love that garnished the house, and poured out the spikenard, and 
spiced the sepulcher. It was love that faced the flame, as in Felicitas and Perpetua, 
fronting the dungeon and not shrinking, fronting the sword and not blanching. It 
was love that said, “The nearer the sword, the nearer to God.” You cannot conquer 
that power, indestructible, full of divine energy. 

And with the experience of this comes the vivid vision of the Divine Providence 
working for the gospel in human history. How wonderful it is! Look at the progress 
of the last ninety years, since missionary work began in this country! The changes, 
except as they are matters of public record and of universal personal observation, 
would be simply unthinkable—the vast new machineries of travel and of commerce; 
the incalculable additions to the wealth of civilized lands; the ever-increasing pros- 
perity and power of Protestant nations, in which the gospel is honored; the equally 
ever-reduced power and lessening fame of nations, ancient and famous, in which the 
gospel is refused free movement with a home among the people; the continually closer 
approaches of civilized and Protestant nations to each other, as of Great Britain and 
this country. Many years ago Lord Brougham said, I remember, “Not an axe falls 
in the American forest but it sets in motion a shuttle in Manchester.” That has been 
true ever since, and is more true today than ever before. Not a mine is opened, not 
an industry established, not a mechanism invented in the one country, which is not 
recognized and the power of which is not felt in the other; and more and more their 
policies are weaving together, not necessarily in form, but in fundamental, underlying 
sympathy. All these things are going forward with the opening of regions and realms 
formerly inaccessible to Christianity; so, that now the Christianity which seemed buried 


‘in the catacombs, which seemed burned up in the martyr fires, has the freedom of the 


world, and may everywhere be preached in its purity and its power. Here are the 
plans of God going forward; and we ought to feel in ourselves that in every hardest 
work we do we are only keeping step with the march of Omnipotence. 

I know that there are many who fear that the prosperity of our times, the love of 
pleasure, the desire for ease and enjoyment, are to interfere with and stay these plans 
of the: Divine Providence for the furtherance of Christ’s church and of His cause in 
the world. I do not wonder at the fear, though I do not share it. Unquestionably 
the secular spirit is more intense and widely distributed at this time than it ever was 
before; and the opportunities for its gratification, in the acquirement of wealth and in 
the enjoyment of every luxury, are greater than ever before. Undoubtedly, it is true 


ie 


720 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


that Sunday observances are far less strict, and family discipline and training far less 
careful, than they were, perhaps, in the days of our own childhood. Sunday newspapers 
make almost all American ministers wish they were Englishmen; and Sunday observ- 
ance among ourselves reminds one too often of that colloquy between Joshua and 
Moses as they were coming down from the mount during the idol-feast, when the 
younger said, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” “No,” said the elder, and more 
discerning, “it is not the voice of them that shout for the mastery, neither is it the 
voice of them that cry for being overcome, but it is the voice of them that sing that I 
hear.” Some times in our congregations I think it is not the shout for the mastery of 
the truth, pushing it upon men, it is not the voice of them that cry in penitence and 
humble obedience because they are overcome, but it is the voice of them that sing that 
we hear; and the singing is too often in operatic measures, and done by quartets, not 
by congregations. Talleyrand was right in saying years ago that Americans take their 
pleasures sadly. I think that we are right also, and more nearly right, when we say 
that Americans take their religion too lightly, too gaily, as if it were a varnish upon 
life instead of a fire and power within it. We need to meditate much more than we do 
on those great words that were written fifty years ago and more, on “The Earnest 
Church,” written by the predecessor of our beloved and honored Dr. Dale of Birm- 
ingham: a man of such singular excellence, I once heard Dr. Cox say, that it required 
an angel hyphenated between the two apostles to make a name worthy of him— 
John Angell James. We need to meditate upon that, and to gird ourselves for more 
energetic service in the cause of the Master. 


But the human soul is still beating, and full of life, in the heart of every one whom 
we address; and God's gospel has its grip on that human soul whenever it reaches it 
through our ministry and lifts it nearer the things supernal, and nearer God Himself. 
While I see many things to make us solicitous, I see nothing to make us timid, con- 
cerning these mighty advancing plans of God. If persecution could not stay them, if 
prelacy could not finally thwart them, I do not believe that bicycles are going to 
override them, in the end, or that they are to find their grave in the fascinating golf- 
links. No! There is One who sitteth above the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants 
thereof are as grasshoppers; and His plans go forth, soundless, silent, except as they 
come into operation. But they never are broken; they never are drawn back; and the 
world has to learn more and more clearly, every century, that the banners of God are 
those which never go down in any struggle, and that whoever walks and works with 
God is sure of the triumph. 


Then do not let us ever forget that fhis is the sublime interval in history between 
the ascension of the Master and His second coming in power and glory to judge the 
world! “Ina grand and awful time,” the hymn says—and I repeat it: 


“We are living, we are dwelling, 
In a grand and awful time,” 


when the heavens have been luminous with the splendor of the Ascension, and are 
destined to be luminous again with the awful glory.of the coming for judgment; and 
now is our time for work—work with the energy of the Divine Spirit whose dispensa- 
tion this is. That Spirit wrote His Gospel by the inspiration of human minds, and by 
the instruments of human hands, on leaves of parchment and papyrus. He is writing 
His Gospel now, at large, through His inspiration of human minds and guidance of 
human hands over the expanses of the continents. But it is the same gospel—the 
gospel of sin, the gospel of atonement, the gospel of regeneration, the gospel of future 
judgment, and of future glory for the believing. That is the gospel; and we are to 
go with Him in extending the knowledge of that and in writing it ourselves. Where- 


The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work—Storrs. ° 721 


soever we have the opportunity, that is our work; a work greater, more momentous, 
wider in its relations, than any other done upon the earth. 


Let us not forget then the meanness, the misery, and evilness, of human society, 
where the gospel does not enter and pervade it. Let us not forget the recoverableness 
to God of every person and every people, if the divine energies are rightly used. Let 
us not forget that the gospel of Christ is the power at which men laugh and say, “You 
are trying to quarry mountains with sunbeams; you are trying to lift masses of 
masonry with aerial or, at best, with silken threads.” It is the gospel of Christ which 
is to be the power to lift mankind and glorify God on all the continents, in all the 
earth. The passion of love for Christ, stimulated by everything that we read or hear, 
quickened by the Spirit in our hearts, is the power that is to loosen massed wealth 
and make it fluent, that is to vitalize dead wealth and make it active, that is to enter 
into every languid heart and inspire it for service. And then the view of the Divine 
Providence working in history toward one result, steadily steering toward one haven 
and port—the earth renewed in righteousness and beautiful before God; and then this 
dispensation of the Spirit, in which we have our time. After the resurrection, a disciple 
said, “I go a-fishing.” Likewise said they all. It seems strange that even after that 
miracle, which has shot its radiance everywhere upon the history of the world, any 
disciple should have yielded to such an impulse. But now shall we, after the ascension 
and when the skies are still glowing with it, after Pentecost has opened heavenly prin- 
cipalities and powers to our view and our experience, under the shadow of the great 
white throne that is to be set in heaven—shall we go to building and bargaining, to 
mining and merchandizing, as our chief aim in life, and omit this sublimest service 
which angels, it seems to me, must bend above the battlements of heaven to see in its 
progress, and to make their hearts and harps jubilant in its vitality and success? 


Oh, my friends, let us remember, wheresoever we labor, that our errand is to make 
this complex, complete, energetic missionary motive more clear to every mind, more 
thoroughly vigorous and energetic in every heart. Everything else must be postponed! 
Do not let us spend our strength in picking the gospel to pieces, to see if’ 
we can’t put it together again in a better fashion. Do not let us spend our 
Strength in any denominational controversies or collisions. Let us give our- 
selves, with all our power, to make this immense missionary motive operative 
throughout all the churches, throughout and in all Christian hearts; till He 
shall come whose right it is to reign, and to take unto Himself His great power, and 
rule King of Nations as well as King of Saints. Let us recognize this as the only 
truly magnificent errand for man on the earth. Let us be filled with the Divine Spirit, 
that we may accomplish it the more perfectly. Let us never intermit the service. 
And if, as we grow older, we grow weary with cares and labors, and it may be with 
sorrows, and are disposed sometimes to think we may now rest, let us remember the 
word of Arnauld, the illustrious Port Royalist, whom even his passionate enemies, the 
Jesuits, admitted to be great, of whom it is recorded that when some one said to him, 
“You have labored long, now is your time to rest!” his reply was, “Rest? Why rest, 
here and now, when I have-a whole Eternity to rest in?” God in His grace open that 
tranquil and luminous Eternity to each of us, where we may rest in nobler praise and 
grander work, forevermore; and unto Him be all the praise! 


[Richard Salter Storrs was born at Braintree, Mass., August 21, 1821, graduating 
from Amherst College in 1839, receiving degrees from Union College, Harvard, 
Princeton and Columbia. Taught in Monson Academy and Welleston Seminary, and 
studied law under Rufus Choate, but chose theology instead, graduating from Andover 
Theological Seminary in 1845, ordained the same year, serving the Harvard Congre- 
gational Church one year, and from 1846 to 1900, the year of his death, pastor of the 


722 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Church of the Pilgrims, one of the largest pastorates known. He was for thirteen 
years one of the editors of The Independent, and for ten years president of American 
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. His literary work includes such books 
as Bernard of Clairvaux, The First English Bible, Preaching Without Notes, etc. 

This address by Dr. Storrs was delivered at the Second International Congrega- 
tional Council September 20-29, 1899. It was to have been delivered by Dr. Lamson, 
whose sudden death is mentioned in the first paragraph. Dr. Storrs was called upon 
suddenly to fill the place. Not long after he passed to his reward. He delivered a 
number of missionary addresses while president of the American Board. Joseph Cook, 
shortly before his death, suggested that one of Dr. Storrs’ missionary addresses be 
included in the book, and his suggestion is followed.] 


(723) 


CHRIST OVER ALL. 


T. DE WITT TALMAGE, 


“Christ Over All Forever.”—Romans 9: 5. 


For four thousand years the world had been waiting for a deliverer—waiting while 
“empires rose and fell. Conquerors came and made the world worse instead of making 
it better; still the centuries watched and waited. They looked for Him on thrones, 
looked for Him in palaces, looked for Him in imperial robes, looked for Him at the 
head of armies. At last they found Him in a barn. - The cattle stood nearer to Him 
than the angel, for the former were in the adjoining stall, while the latter were in the 
clouds. A parentage of peasantry. No room for Him in the inn, because there 
was no one to pay the hotel expense. Yet the pointing star and the angelic cantata 
showed that heaven made up in appreciation of His worth what the world lacked. 
“Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever, Amen.” 

But who is this Christ who came? As to the difference between different denomi- 
nations of evangelical Christians I have no concern. If I could, by the turning over 
of my hand, decide whether all the world shall at last be Baptist, or Methodist, or 
Congregational, or Episcopalian, or Presbyterian, I would not turn my hand. But 
there are doctrines which are vital to the soul. If Christ be not a God, we are idola- 
ters. To this Christological question I devote myself this morning and pray God that 
we may think aright and do aright in regard to a question in which mistake is infinite, 

I suppose that the majority of those here today assembled, believe the Bible. 
It requires as much faith to be an infidel as to be a Christian. It is faith in a different 
direction. The Christian has faith in the teachings of Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, 
Isaiah, Moses. The infidel has faith in the free thinkers. We have faith in one class 
of men. They have faith in another class of men, But as the majority of those— 
perhaps all of those here assembled—are willing to take the Bible for a standard in 
morals and in faith, I make this book my starting point. 

I suppose’ you are aware that the two generals who have marshaled the great 
armies against the deity of Jesus Christ are Strauss and Renan. The number of their 
slain will not be counted until the trumpet of the archangel sounds the roll call of the 
resurrection. Those men and their sympathizers say that if they could destroy the 
fortress of the miracles they could destroy Christianity, and they were right. Sur- 
render the miracles, and you surrender Christianity. The great German exegete says 
that all the miracles were myths. The great French exegete says that all the miracles 
were legends. They propose to take everything supernatural from the life of Christ 
-and everything supernatural from the Bible. They prefer the miracles of human 
nonsense to the glorious miracles of Jesus Christ. 

They say there was no miraculous birth in Bethlehem, but that it is all a fanciful 
story, just like the story of Romulus said to have been born of Rhea Silvia and the 
god Mars. They say no star pointed to the manger, it was only the flash of a passing 
lantern. They say there was no miraculous making of bread, but that it is the corrup- 
tion of the story that Elisha gave twenty loaves of bread to a hundred men. They 
Say the water never turned into wine, but that it is the corruption of the story that the 
Egyptian plague turned the water into blood. They say it is no wonder that Christ 
Sweat great drops of blood; He had been out in the night air and was taken suddenly 


724 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


ill. They say there were no tongues of fire on the heads of the disciples at the Pente- 
cost; that there was only a great thunderstorm, and the air was full of electricity which 
snapped and flew all around about the heads of the disciples. 

They say that Mary and Martha and Christ felt it important to get up an excite- 
ment for the forwarding of their religion, and so they dramatized a funeral, and 


Lazarus played the corpse, and Mary and Martha played the weepers, and Christ was . 


the tragedian. I put it in my own words, but this is the exact meaning of their state- 
ments. They say the Bible is a spurious book, written by superstitious or lying men, 
backed up by men who died for that which they did not believe. 

Now, I take back the limited statement which I made a few moments ago, when I 
said it requires as much faith to be an infidel as to be a Christian. It requires a 
thousandfold more faith to be an infidel than te be a Christian, for if Christianity 
demand that the whale swallowed Jonah, then skepticism demands that Jonah swal- 
lowed the whale. I can prove to you that Christ was God not only by the supernatural 
appearances on that Christmas night, but by what inspired men said of Him, by what 
He says of Himself and by His wonderful achievements. ‘‘Christ came, who is over 
all.” Ah, does not that prove too much? Not over the Czsars, not over the 
Frederick, not over Alexander the Great, not over the Henrys, not over the Louises? 
Yes. Pile all the thrones of all the ages together, and my text overspans them as 
easily as a rainbow overspans a mountain top. ‘Christ came, who is over all.” Then 
He must be a God. 

The Bible says that all things were made by Him. Does not that prove too much? 
Could it be that He made the Mediterranean, that He made the Black Sea, that He 
made the Atlantic, the Pacific, that He made Mount Lebanon, that He made the Alps, 
the Sierra Nevadas, that He made the Hemispheres, that He made the Universe? Yes. 
The Bible says so, and lest we be too stupid to understand, John winds up with a 
magnificent reiteration and says, “Without Him was not anything made that was 
made.” Then He was a God. 

The Bible says at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. All heaven must come 
down on its knees. Martyrs on their knees, apostles on their knees, confessors on 
their knees, the archangel on his knees. Before whom—a man? No. He is God? 
The Bible says every tongue shall confess—Bornesian, Malayan, Mexican, Italian, 
Spanish, Persian, English. Every tongue shall confess.) To whom? God. The Bible 
says, Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever. Is that characteristic of humanity? 
Do we not change? Does not the body entirely change in seven years? Does not the 
mind change? Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever. He must be a God. 

Philosophers say that the law of gravitation decides everything, and that the 


centripetal and centrifugal forces keep the world from clashing and from demo-_ 


lition. But Paul says that Christ’s arm is the axle on which everything turns, and that 
Christ’s hand is the socket in which everything is set. Mark the words, “Upholding— 
upholding all things by the word of His power.’ Then He must be a God. 

Then look at what Christ says of Himself. Now, certainly every one must under- 
stand himself better than any one else can understand him. If I ask you where you 
were born, and you tell me, “I was born in Chester, England,’ or “I was born in 
Glasgow, Scotland,” or “I was born in Dublin, Ireland,” or “I was born in New 
Orleans, the United States,” you being a man of integrity, I should believe you. If I 
asked you how many pounds you could lift and you should say you could lift one 
hundred pounds, or two hundred pounds, or three hundred pounds, I should believe 
you. It is a matter personal to yourself. You know better than anyone else can 
tell you. is 

If I ask you how much estate you are worth and you say $10,000, or $100,000, or 
$500,000, I believe what you say. You know better than any one else. Now, Christ 


Christ Over All—Talmage. 3 725 


must know better than any one else who He is and what He is. When I ask Him how 
old He is, He says “Before Abraham was, I am.” Abraham had been dead 2,028 
years. Was Christ 2,028 years'old? Yes, He says He is older than that. “Before 
Abraham was, I am.” Then Christ says, “I am the Alpha.” Alpha is the first letter 
of the Greek alphabet, and Christ in that utterance declared, “I am the A of the alpha- 
bet of the centuries.” Then He must be a God. 

Can a man be in a thousand places at once? Christ says He is in a thousand 
places at once. ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I 
in the midst of them.’ This everywhereativeness, is it characteristic of a man or of a 
God? And lest we might think this everywhereativeness would cease He goes on and 
He intimates that He will be in all the cities of the earth—He will be in Europe, Asia, 
Africa, North and South America the day before the world burns up. “Lo, I am with 
you alway, even unto the end of the world.” Why, then, He must be a God. 

Besides that He takes divine honors. He declares Himself Lord of men, angels 
and devils. Is He? If He is, He is a God. If He is not, He is an impostor.- A 
man-comes into your store tomorrow morning. He says: “I am the great shipbuilder 
of Liverpool. I have built hundreds of ships.’ He goes on as a man of a large 
experience and great possessions. But the next day you find out that he is not the 
great shipbuilder of Liverpool; that he never built a ship; that he never built anything. 
What is he then? An impostor. Christ says He built the world; He built all things. 
Did He build them? If He did, He isa God. If He did not, He is an impostor. 

A man comes into your place of business, with a Jewish countenance and a 
German accent, and says: “I am Rothschild, the banker of London. I have the 
wealth of nations in my pocket. I loaned that large amount to Italy and Austria in 
their perplexity.” But after awhile you find that he never loaned any money to Italy 
or Austria; that he never had a large estate; that he is no banker at all; that he owns 
nothing. What is he? An impostor. Christ says He owns the cattle on a thousand 
hills; He owns this world; He owns the next world; He owns the universe; He is the 
banker of all nations. Is He? If He is, He is a God. Is He not? Then He is an 
impostor. 

A man enters the White House at Washington. He says: “I am Emperor William 
of Germany. I am traveling incognito. I have come over here for recreation and 
pleasure. I own castles in Dresden and Berlin.” But the President finds out the next 
day that he is not Emperor William; that he owns no castles at Berlin or Dresden; 
that he has no authority. What is he? An impostor. Christ says He is the King 
over all, the King Immortal, Invisible. If He is, He isa God. If He is not, He is an 
impostor. 

Strauss saw that alternative, and he tries to get out of it by saying that Christ was 
sinful in accepting adoration and worship. Renan tries to get out of it by saying that 
Christ—not through any fault of His own, but through the fault of others—lost His 
purity of conscience, and he slyly intimates that dishonorable women had damaged 
‘His soul. Anything but believe that Christ is God. Now, you believe the Bible to be 
true. If you do not, you would hardly have appeared in this church. You would have 
gone over and joined the Broadway Infidel Club, or you would go to Boston and kiss 
the foot of the statue of Thomas Paine. You would hardly come into this church, 
where the most of us are the deluded souls who believe in a whole Bible and take it all 
' down as easily as you swallow a ripe strawberry. 

I have shown you what inspired men said of Christ. I have shown you what 
Christ said of Himself. Now, if you believe the Bible, let us go out and see His 
wonderful achievements—surgical, alimentary, marine, mortuary. 

Surgical achievements. Where is the medical journal that gives any account of 
such exploits as Christ wrought? He used no knife. He carried no splints. He 


726 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


employed no compress. He made no patient squirm under cauterization. He tied 
no artery. Yet behold Him! With a word He stuck fast Malchus’ amputated ear. 

He stirred a little dust and spittle into salve, and with it caused a man who was born 

blind and without optic nerve or cornea, or crystalline lens, to open his eyes on the 

sunlight. He beat music on the drum of a deaf ear. He straightened a woman who 
through contraction of muscle had been bent almost double for well nigh two decades. 
He made a man who had no use of his limbs for thirty-eight years shoulder his mat- 

tress and walk off. 


Sir Astley Cooper, Abernethy, Valentine Mott stood powerless before a withered 
arm; but this Doctor of Omnipotent Surgery comes in and sees the paralytic arm 
useless and lifeless at the man’s side, and Christ says to him, “Stretch forth thine hand,” 
and he stretched it forth whole as the other. He was a God. 


Alimentary achievements! He found a lad who had come out of the wilderness 
with five loaves of bread for speculation. Perhaps the lad had paid five pennies for 
the five loaves and expected to sell them for ten pennies, and so he would double his 
money. Christ took those loaves of bread and performed a miracle by which He fed 
seven thousand famishing people, and I warrant you the lad lost nothing, for there 
were twelve baskets of fragments taken up, and if the boy had five loaves at the start, 
I warrant you he had at least ten at the close. 


The Savior’s mother goes into a neighbor’s house to help get up a wedding party. 
By calculation she finds out that the amount of wine is not sufficient for the guests. 
She calls in Christ for help, and Christ, not by any slow decay of fermentation, but by 
a word, makes one hundred and thirty gallons of pure wine. 


Marine achievements! He turns a whole school of fish into the net of men who 
were mourning over their poor luck until the boat is so full they have to halloo to 
other boats, and the other boats came up, and they are laden to the water’s edge with 
the game, so that the sailors have to be cautious in going from larboard to starboard 
lest they upset the ship. 


Then there comes a squall down through the mountain gorge, and Gennesaret, 
with long locks of white foam, rises up to battle it, and the boat drops into a trough 
and ships a sea, and the loosened sails crack in the tornado, and Christ rises from the 
back part of the boat and comes walking across the staggering ship until He comes 
to the prow, and there He wipes the spray from His brow and hushes the crying storm 
on the knee of His omnipotence. Who wrestled down that euroclydon? Whose feet 
trampled the rough Galilee into a smooth floor? 


Let philosophers and anatomists go to Westminster Abbey and try to wake up 
Queen Elizabeth or Henry VIII. No human power ever wakened the dead. There 
is a dead girl in Capernaum. What does Christ do? Alas, that she should have died 
so young and when the world was so fair! Qnly twelve years of age. Feel her cold 
brow and cold hands. Dead, dead! The house is full of weeping. Christ comes, and 
He takes hold of the hand of the dead girl, and instanly her eyes open, her heart starts. 
The white lily of death blushes into the rose of life and health. She rushes into the 
arms of her rejoicing kindred. Who woke up that death? Who restored her to life? 
Aman? Tell that to the lunatics in Bloomingdale asylum. It was Christ the God. 

But there comes a test which more than anything else will show whether He was 
God or man. You remember that great passage which says, “We must all appear 
before the judgment seat of Christ.” The earth will be stunned by a blow that will 
make it stagger in mid-heaven, the stars will circle like dry leaves in an equinox, the 
earth will unroll the bodies, and the sky will unroll the spirits, and soul and flesh will 
come into incorruptible conjunction. Day of smoke, and fire, and darkness, and 
triumph. On one side, piled up in galleries of light, the one hundred and forty 


Christ Over All—Talmage. 727 


thousand—yea, the quintillions—of the saved. On the other side, piled up in galleries 
of darkness, the frowning, the glaring multitude of those who rejected God. 

Between these two piled up galleries a throne, a high throne, a throne standing on 
two burnished pillars—justice, mercy—a throne so bright you had better hide your 
eye lest it be extinguished with excess of vision. But it is an empty throne. Who 
will come up and take it? Will you? 

“Ah, no!” you say. “I am but a child of dust. I would not dare to climb that 
throne.” Would Gabriel climb it? He dare not. Who will ascend it? Here comes 
one. His back is to us. He goes up step above step, height above height, until He 
reaches the apex. Then He turns around and faces all nations, and we all see who it 
is. It is Christ the God, and all earth, and all heaven, and all hell kneel, crying: “It 
isa God! It isa God!” We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. 

Oh, I am so glad that it is a Divine Being who comes to pardon all our sins, to 
comfort all our sorrows. Sometimes our griefs are so great they are beyond any 
human sympathy, and we want Almighty sympathy. Oh, ye who cried all last night 
because of bereavement or loneliness, I want to tell you it is an omnipotent Christ 
who is come. 

When children are in the house and the mother is dead, the father has to be more 
gentle in the home, and he has to take the office of father and mother, and it seems 
to me Christ looks out upon your helplessness, and He proposes to be Father and 
Mother to your soul. He comes in the strength of the one, in the tenderness of the 
other. He says with one breath, ‘‘As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth 
them that fear Him,” and then with the next breath He says, “As one whom his 
mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” Do you not feel the hush of the Divine 
lullaby? 

Oh, put your tired head down on the heaving bosom of Divine compassion while 
He puts His arms around you and says: “O widowed soul, I will be thy God. O 
orphaned soul, I will be thy protector. Do not cry.” Then He touches your eyelids 
with His fingers and sweeps His fingers down your cheek and wipes away all the tears 
of loneliness and bereavement. Oh, what a tender and sympathetic God has come for 
us! I do not ask you to lay hold of Him. Perhaps you are not strong enough for 
that. I do not ask you to pray, Perhaps you are too bewildered for that. I only ask 
you to let go and fall back into the arms of everlasting love. 

Soon you and I will hear the click of the latch of the door of the sepulchre. 
Strong men will take us in their arms and carry us down and lay us in the dust, and 
they cannot bring us back again. I should be scared with infinite fright if I thought I 
must stay in the grave, if even the body were to stay in the grave. But Christ will 
come with glorious iconoclasm and split and grind up the rocks and let us come forth. 
The Christ of the manger is the Christ of the throne. 


[T. DeWitt Talmage was born at Bound Brook, N. J., January 7, 1832, and 
educated at University City of New York; graduated New Brunswick, N. J., Theologi- 
cal Seminary, 1856. He was ordained in 1856 and served churches at Belleville, N. ie 
Syracuse, N. Y., and Philadelphia until 1869; from 1869 to 1894, Presbyterian Church 
in Brooklyn, and since in Washington. He edited a number of papers at different 
times, but is most widely known as the editor of the Christian Herald. His sermons 
have been published weekly for twenty-nine years, without a single omission, and now 
appear in 3,600 papers, with a circulation of 30,000,000 or more. He has written a 
number of books in addition to his published sermons. 

This sermon is the one Dr. Talmage delivered at the World’s Fair, April 30, 1893, 
and is from the volume of “World’s Fair Sermons,” published by Rhodes & McClure, 
and is reproduced by their permission. ] 


728 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


= 
BLESSED PROSPERITY AND ADVERSE 
HUDSON TAYLOR. 
MEDITATIONS ON THE FIRST PSALM. 

There is a prosperity which is net blessed: it comes not from above but from 
beneath, and it leads away from, not towards heaven. This prosperity of the wicked is 
often a sore perplexity to the servants of God; they need to be reminded of the 
exhortation, “Fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of 
the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.” Many besides the Psalmist have 
been envious at the foolish when seeing the prosperity of the wicked, and have been 
tempted to ask, “Is there knowledge in the Most High?” While Satan remains the 
god of this world, and has it in his power to prosper his votaries, this source of per- 
plexity will always continue to those who do not enter into the sanctuary and consider 
the latter end of the worldling. 

Nor is it the godless only who are tempted by the offer of a prosperity which 
comes from beneath. Our Savior Himself was tempted by the arch-enemy in this 
way. Christ was told that all that He desired to accomplish for the kingdoms of this 
world might be effected by an easier path than the cross—a little compromise with him 
who held the power and was able to bestow the kingdoms, and all should be His own. 
The lying wiles of the seducer were instantly rejected by our Lord; not so ineffective 
are such wiles to many of His people; a little policy rather than the course for which 
conscience pleads; a little want of integrity in business dealings; a little compromise 
with the ways of the world, followed by a prosperity which brings no blessing—these 
prove often that the enemy’s arts are still the same. 

But, thank God! there is a true prosperity which comes from Him and leads 
towards Him. It is not only consistent with perfect integrity and uncompromising 
holiness of heart and life, but it cannot be attained without them, and its enjoyment 
tends to deepen them. This divine prosperity is God’s purpose for every believer, in 
all that he undertakes; in things temporal and in things spiritual, in all the relations 
and affairs of this life, as well as in all work for Christ and for eternity, it is God’s 
will for each child of His that “whatsoever ke doeth shall prosper.” 

Yet many of His children evidently do not enjoy this uniform blessing; some find 
failure rather than success the rule of their life: while others sometimes prospered and 
sometimes discouraged, live lives of uncertainty, in which anxiety and even fear are 
not infrequent. Shall we not each one at the outset ask, How is it with me? Is this 
blessed prosperity my experience? Am I so led by the Spirit in my doings, and so 
prospered by God in their issues, that as His witness I can bear testimony to His 
faithfulness to this promise?. If it be not so with me, what is the reason? Which of 
the necessary conditions have I failed to fulfill? May our meditations on the First 
Psalm make these conditions more clear to our minds, and may faith be enabled to 
claim definitely all that is included in this wonderful promise! 


THE NEGATIVE CONDITIONS OF BLESSING. 
“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.” 
More literally, O the blessings, the manifold happiness of the man whose character 
is described in the first and second verses of this Psalm! he is happy in what he 
escapes or avoids, and happy and prospered in what he undertakes. 


Blessed Prosperity and Adversity—Taylor. 729 


The first characteristic given us is that he walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, 
the wicked. Notice, it does not merely say that he walks not in wicked counsel: a 
man of God clearly would not do this; but what is said is that he “walketh not in the 
counsel of the wicked.” Now the wicked have often much worldly wisdom, and 
become noted for their prosperity and their prudence, but the child of God should 
always be on his guard against their counsel; however good it may appear, it is full 
of danger. 

One of the principal characteristics of the wicked is that God is not in all his 
thoughts; he sees everything from the standpoint of self, or, at the highest, from the 
standpoint of humanity. His maxim, “Take care of number one,” would be very good 
if it were meant.that God is first, and should always be put first; but he means it not 
so; self and not God, is number one to the ungodly. The wicked will often counsel 
to honesty, not on the ground that honesty is pleasing to God, but that it is the best 
policy; if in any particular business transaction a more profitable policy appears quite 
safe, those who have simply been honest because it pays best, will be very apt to cease 
to be so. 

The child of God has no need of the counsel of the ungodly; if he love and study 
God’s Word it will make him wiser than all such counsellors. If he seek for and 
observe all the counsel of God, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he will not 
walk in darkness even as to worldly things. The directions of God's Word may often 
seem strange and impolitic, but in the measure in which he has faith to obey the 
directions he finds in the Scripture, turning not to the right hand nor to the left, will 
he make his way prosperous, will he find good success. 

The history of the early Friends in America, who would not take a weapon to 
protect themselves against the savage Indian tribes, shows how safe it is to follow the 
Word of God and not resist evil. And their later experience in the recent civil war, 
in which no one of them lost his life, though exposed to the greatest dangers and 
hardships because they would not fight, further confirms the wisdom as well as blessed- 
ness of literally obeying the Scripture. The eyes of the Lord still run to and fro 
throughout the whole earth to show Himself strong in behalf of those who put their 
trust in Him before the sons of men. The enlightened believer has so much better 
counsel that he no more needs than condescends to accept the counsel of the ungodly. 

And, more than this, the wise child of God will carefully ascertain the standpoint 
of a fellow-believer before he will value his counsel; for he learns from Scripture and 
experience that Satan too frequently makes handles of the people of God, as, for 
instance, in Peter’s case. Little did the astonished Peter know whence his exhortation 
to the Lord to pity himself came; “Get thee behind me, Satan,” showed that our 
Lord had traced this counsel, which did not seek first the Kingdom of God, to its true 
source. Alas, the counsel of worldly-minded Christians does far more harm than that 
of the openly wicked. Whenever the supposed interests of self, or family, or country, 
or even of church or mission come first, we may be quite sure of the true source of 
that counsel; it is at least earthly or sensual, if not devilish. 

Further, the truly blessed man 

} STANDETH NOT IN THE WAY OF SINNERS. 

Birds of a feather flock together; the way of a sinner no more suits a true believer 
than the way of the believer suits the sinner. As a witness for his Master in the hope 
of saving the lost, he may go to them; but he will not, like Lot, pitch his tent towards 
Sodom; lest he be ensnared as Lot was, who only escaped himself, losing all those he 
loved best, and all his possessions. Ah, how many parents who have fluttered moth- 
like near the flame, have seen their children destroyed by it, while they themselves have 
not escaped unscathed! How many churches and Christian institutions, in the attempt 
to attract the unconverted by worldly inducements or amusements, have themselves 


730 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


forfeited the blessing of God; and have so lost spiritual power, that those whom they 
have thus attracted have been nothing benefited! Instead of seeing the dead quick- 
ened, a state of torpor and death has crept over themselves. 

There is no need of, nor room for, any other attraction than that which Christ 
Himself gave, when He said, “I, if I be lifted up . . . will draw all men unto 
Me.” Our Master was ever “separate from sinners,’ and the Holy Spirit speaks 
unmistakably in 2 Cor. 6: “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? 
and what communion hath light with darkness? . . . for ye are the temple of the 
living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be 
their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and 
be ye separate . . . and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and 
will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord 
Almighty.” 

“NOR SITTETH IN THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL.” 

The seat of the scornful is one of the special dangers of this age. Pride, presump- 
tion, and scorn are closely linked together, and are far indeed from the mind which was 
in Christ Jesus. This spirit often shows itself in the present day in the form of irrey- 
erent criticism. Those who are spiritually least qualified for it are to be found sitting 
in the seat of judgment, rather than taking the place of the inquirer and the learner. 
The Bereans of old did not scornfully reject the, to them, strange teachings of the 
Apostle Paul, but searched the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. 
Now, forsooth, the Scriptures themselves are called in question, and the very founda- 
tions of Christian faith are abandoned by men who would fain be looked upon as the 
apostles of modern thought. May God preserve His people from abandoning the faith 
once for all delivered to the saints, for the baseless ephemeral fancies of the present 
day! 

“ THE POSITIVE CONDITIONS OF BLESSING. 

We have considered the things which are avoided by the truly blessed man. O, 
the miseries and the losses of those who fail to avoid them! We have now to dwell 
upon the special characteristics of the man of God, those which are at once the source 
of his strength and his shield of protection. 

“His delight is in the law of the Lord; 
And in His law doth he meditate day and night.” 

The unregenerate cannot delight in the Law of God. They may be very religious, 
and may read the Bible as one of their religious duties. They may admire much 
that is in the Bible, and be loud in its praise—for as a mere book it is the most wonder- 
ful in the world. Nay, they may go much further than this; and may imagine, as did 
Saul the persecutor, that their life is ordered by its teachings, while still they are far 
from God. But when such become converted, they discover that they have been blind; 
among the “all things” that become new, they find that they have got a new Bible; 
and as new-born babes they desire the unadulterated milk of the Word that they may 
grow thereby. Well is it when young Christians are properly fed from the Word of 
God, and have not their taste corrupted, and their spiritual constitution destroyed, by 
feeding on the imaginations of men rather than on the verities of God. 

It is not difficult to discover what a man delights in. “Out of the abundance of 
the heart the mouth speaketh.” The mother delights to speak of her babe, the 
politician loves to talk of politics, the scientific man of his favorite science, and the 
athlete of his sport. In the same way the earnest, happy Christian manifests his 
delight in the Word of God; it is his food and comfort; it is his study and his guide; 
and as the Holy Spirit throws fresh light on its precious truths he finds in it a joy and 
pleasure beyond compare. Naturally and spontaneously he will often speak of that 
which is so precious to his heart. 


Blessed Prosperity and Adversity—Taylor. 731 


By regeneration the believer, having become the child of God, finds new interest 
and instruction in all the works of God. His Father designed and created them, 
upholds and uses them, and for His glory they exist. But this is peculiarly true of the 
Word of God. Possessing the mind of Christ, instructed by the Spirit of Christ, he 
finds in every part of God’s Word testimony to the person and work of his adorable 
Master and Friend. The Bible in a thousand ways endears itself to him, while 
unfolding the mind and ways of God, His past dealings with His people, and His 
wonderful revelations of the future. 

While thus studying God’s Word the believer becomes conscious of a new source 
of delight; not only is that which is revealed precious, but the beauty and perfection 
of the revelation itself grows upon him. He has now no need of external evidence 
to prove its inspiration; it everywhere bears the impress of Divinity. And as the 
microscope which reveals the coarseness and blemishes of the works of man only 
shows more fully the perfectness of God’s works, and brings to light new and 
unimagined beauties, so it is with the Word of God when closely scanned. 

In what remarkable contrast does this Book stand to the works of men! The 
science of yesterday is worthless today; but history and the discoveries of our own 
times only confirm the reliability of these ancient sacred records. The stronger our 
faith in the plenary, verbal inspiration of God’s Holy Word, the more fully we make it 
our guide, and the more implicitly we follow its teachings, the deeper will be our peace 
and the more fruitful our service. “Great peace have they which love Thy law; and 
nothing shall offend them.” Becoming more and more convinced of the divine 
wisdom of the directions and commands of Scripture, and of the reliability of the 
promises, the life of the believer will become increasingly one of obedience and trust; 
and thus he will prove for himself how good, acceptable, and perfect is the will of God, 
and that Bible which reveals it. 

The words, ‘“‘the Law of the Lord,” which we understand to mean the whole Word 
of God, are very suggestive. They indicate that the Bible is intended to teach us 
what God would have us to do; that we should not merely seek for the promises, and 
try to get all we can from God; but should much more earnestly desire to know what 
He wants us to be and to do for Him. It is recorded of Ezra, that he prepared his 
heart to seek the Law of the Lord, in order that he might do it, and teach in Israel 
statutes and judgments. The result was that the hand of his God was upon him for 
good, the desires of his heart were largely granted, and he became the channel of 
blessing to his whole people. Every one who searches the Scriptures in the same 
spirit will receive and communicate the blessing of God: he will find in it the guidance 
he needs for his own service, and oft-times a word in season for those with whom he 
is associated. 

But not only will the Bible become the Law of the Lord to him as teaching and 
illustrating what God would have him to be and to do, but still more as revealing what 
God Himself is and does. As the law of gravitation gives us to know how a power 
on which we may ever depend, will act under given circumstances, so the Law of the 
Lord gives us to know Him, and the principles of His government, on which we may 
rely with implicit confidence. 

The man of God will also delight to trace God in the Word as the great Worker, 
and rejoice in the privilege of being a fellow-worker with Him—a glad, voluntary 
agent in doing the will of God, yet rejoicing in the grace that has made him willing, 
and in the mighty, divine power that works through him. The Bible will also teach 
him how to view himself as but an atom, as it were, in God’s great universe; and to 
see God’s great work as a magnificent whole, carried on by ten thousand agencies; 
carried on through all spheres, in all time, and without possibility of ultimate failure— 
a glorious manifestation of the perfections of the great Worker! He himself, and a 


732 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


thousand more of his fellow-servants, may pass away; but this thought will not para- 
lyze his efforts, for he knows that whatever has been wrought in God will abide, and 
that whatever is‘incomplete when his work is done the great Worker will in His own 
time and way bring to completion. 

He does not expect to understand all about the grand work in which he is privi- 
leged to take a blessed but infinitesimal part; he can afford to await its completion, 
and can already by faith rejoice in the certainty that the whole will be found in every 
respect worthy of the great Designer and Executor. Weil may his delight be in the 
Law of the Lord, and well may he meditate in it day and night. 

THE OUTCOME IN BLESSING. 
We next proceed to notice the remarkable promises in the third verse of this 
Psalm—one of the most remarkable and inclusive contained in the Scriptures: 
“And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, 
That bringeth forth his fruit in his season; 
His leaf also shall not wither; 
And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper,” 

If we could offer to the ungodly a worldly plan which would ensure their prosper- 
ing in all that they undertake, how eagerly they would embrace it! And yet when God 
Himself reveals an effectual plan to His people how few avail themselves of it! Many 
fail on the negative side and do not come clearly out from the world; many fail on the 
positive side and allow other duties or indulgencies to take the time that should be 
given to reading and meditation on God’s Word. To some it is not at all easy to 
secure time for the morning watch, but nothing can make up for the loss of it. But 
is there not yet a third class of Christians whose failure lies largely in their not 
embracing the promise and claiming it by faith? In each of these three ways failure 
may come in and covenant blessings may be lost. 

Let us now consider what are the blessings, the manifold happinesses which faith 
is to claim when the conditions are fulfilled. 

I. Stability—He shall be iike a tree (not a mere annual plant), of steady 
progressive growth and increasing fruitfulness. A tree planted, and always to be 
found in its place, not blown about, the sport of circumstances. The flowers may | 
bloom and pass away, but the tree abides. 

II. Independent Supplies.—Planted by the rivers of water. The ordinary supplies 
of rain and dew may fail: his deep and hidden supplies cannot. He shall not be careful 
in the year of drought, and in the days of famine he shall be satisfied. His supply 
is thé living water—the Spirit of God—the same yesterday, today, and for ever: hence 
he depends on no intermitting spring. 

III. Seasonable Fruitfulness—The careful student of Scripture will notice the 
parallelism between the teaching of the First Psalm and that of our Lord in the Gospel 
of John, where in the sixth chapter we are taught that he who feeds on Christ abides 
in Him, and in the fifteenth that he who abides brings forth much fruit. We feed 
upon Christ the incarnate Word through the written Word. So in this Psalm he who 
delights in the Law of the Lord, and meditates upon it day and night, brings forth 
his fruit in his season. ' 

There is something very beautiful in this. A word spoken in season how good it 
is; how even a seasonable look will encourage or restrain, reprove or comfort! The 
promise reminds one of those in John about the living water thirsty ones drink, and 
are not only refreshed, but become channels through which rivers of living water are 
always flowing. so that other thirsty ones in their hour of need may find seasonable 
refreshment. But the figure in the Psalm is not that of water flowing through us as 
through a channel; but that of fruit, the very outcome of our own transformed life—a 
life of union with Christ. 


Blessed Prosperity and Adversity—Taylor. 733 


It is so gracious of our God not to work through us in a mere mechanical way, 
but to make us branches of the True Vine, the very organs by which its fruit is pro- 
duced. We are not, therefore, independent workers, for there is a fundamental 
difference between fruit and work. Work is the outcome of effort; fruit, of life. A 
bad man may do good work, but a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. The result of 
work is not reproductive, but fruit has its seed in itself. The workman has to seek 
his material and his tools, and often to set himself with painful perseverance to his task. 
The fruit of the Vine is the glad, free, spontaneous outcome of the life within; and it 
forms and grows and ripens in its proper season. 

And what is the fruit which the believer should bear? May it not be expressed 
by one word—Christliness? It is interesting to notice that the Scripture does not 
speak of the fruits of the Spirit, in the plural, as though we might take our choice 
among the graces named, but of the fruit, in the singular, which is a rich cluster com- 
posed of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, etc. How blessed to bring forth such fruit 
in its season! 

IV. Continuous Vigor.—‘‘His leaf also shall not wither.” In our own climate 
many trees are able to maintain their life through the winter, but unable to retain their 
leaves. The hardy evergreen, however, not only lives, but manifests its life, and all the 
more conspicuously because of the naked branches around. The life within is too 
strong to fear the shortened day, the cold blast, or the falling snow. So with the 
man of God whose life is maintained by hidden communion through the Word; 
adversity only brings out the strength and the reality of the life within. 

The leaf of the tree is no mere adornment. If the root suggests to us receptive 
power in that it draws from the soil the stimulating sap, without which life could not 
be maintained, the leaves no less remind us of the grace of giving, and of purifying. 
They impart to the atmosphere a grateful moisture; they provide for the traveler a 
refreshing shade, and they purify the air poisoned by the breathings of animal life. 

Well, too, is the tree repaid for all that it gives out through its leaves. The thin 
stimulating sap that comes from the root, which could not of itself build up the tree, 
thickens in giving out its moisture, and through the leaves possesses itself of carbon 
from the atmosphere. Thus enriched, the sap goes back through the tree, building it 
up until the tiniest rootlets are as much nourished by the leaves as the latter are fed 
by the roots. Keep a tree despoiled of its leaves sufficiently long and it will surely die. 
So unless the believer is giving as well as receiving, purifying by his life and influence, 
he cannot grow nor properly maintain his own vitality. But he who delights in the 
Law of the Lord, and meditates in it day and night—his leaf shall not wither. 

V. Uniform Prosperity—‘Whatsoever He doeth shall prosper.” Could any 
promise go beyond this? It is the privilege of a child of God to see the hand of God 
in all his circumstances and surroundings, and to serve God in all his avocations and 
duties. Whether he eat or drink, work or rest, speak or be silent; in all his occupa- 
tions, spiritual, domestic, or secular, he is alike the servant of God. Nothing lawful 
to him is too small to afford an opportunity of glorifying God; duties in themselves 
trivial or wearisome, become exalted and glorified when the believer recognizes his 
power through them to gladden and satisfy the loving heart of his ever-observant 
Master. And he who in all things recognizes himself as the servant of God may count 
on a sufficiency from God for all manner of need, and look with confident expectation 
to God to really prosper him in whatever he does. 

But this prosperity will not always be apparent, except to the eye of faith. When 
Chorazin and Bethsaida rejected our Lord’s message, it needed the eye of faith to 
rejoice in spirit and say, “Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight.” 
Doubtless the legions of hell rejoiced when they saw the Lord of Glory nailed to the 
accursed tree, yet we know that never was our blessed Lord more prospered than 


7340. Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


when, as our High Priest, He offered Himself as our atoning sacrifice, and bore our 
sins in His own body on the tree. As then, so now, the path of real prosperity will 
often lie through deepest suffering; followers of Christ may well be content with the 
path which He trod. ; 

But though this prosperity may not always be immediately apparent, it will always 
be real, and should always be claimed by faith. The minister in his church, the 


missionary among the heathen, the merchant at his desk, the mother in her home, the 


workman in his labor, each may alike claim it. Not in vain is it written, ‘““Whatsoever 
he doeth shall prosper.” 

VI. Finally, let us notice that these promises are all jn the indicative mood, and, 
provided the conditions are fulfilled are absolute. There is no “may be” about them. 
And further, they are made to individual believers. If other believers fail, he who 
accepts them will not; the Word is, “Whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” 


THE CONTRAST. 
“The ungodly are not so.” 

It is not necessary to dwell at any length upon the contrast. The ungodly cannot 
enjoy the happiness of the child of God, for they cannot carry out the conditions. 
They neither can, nor desire to, avoid the counsel, the society, or the ways of their 
own fellows; and they Jack that spiritual insight which is essential to delighting in 
God’s Word. Instead of being full of life, like the tender grain, they become hard and 
dry; and the same sun that ripens the one prepares the other for destruction. Instead 
of being “plarited,” the wind drives them away; and He who delights in the way of 
His people, causes the way of the ungodly to perish. 4 


BLESSED ADVERSITY. 


In our meditations on the First Psalm we have dwelt on “Blessed Prosperity.” 
But all God’s dealings are full of blessing: He is good, and doeth good; good only, 
and continually. The believer who has taken the Lord as his Shepherd, can assuredly 
say in the words of the twenty-third Psalm, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow 
me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever;” or, 
taking the marginal reading of the Revised Version, “Only goodness and mercy shall 
follow me.’ Hence, we may be sure that days of adversity are still days of prosperity 
also, and are full of blessing. 

The believer does not need to wait until he sees the reason of God’s afflictive deal- 
ings with him ere he is satisfied; he knows that all things work together for good to 
them that love God; that all God’s dealings are those of a loving Father, who only 
permits that which for the time being is grievous, in order to accomplish results that 
cannot be achieved in any less painful way. The wise and trustful child of God rejoices 
in tribulation, “knowing that tribulation worketh patience,’ experience, hope—a hope 
that ‘“‘maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the 
Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” 

The history of Job is full of instruction, and should teach us many lessons of deep 
interest and great profit. The veil is taken away from the unseen world and we learn 
much of the power of our great adversity; but also of his powerlessness apart from the 
permission of God our Father. 

GOD’S TESTIMONY AND CHALLENGE. 

“The Lord God gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the 
Lord.”’—Job 1: 21. 

In the eighth verse of the first chapter, God Himself bears testimony to His 
servant: that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one 


Blessed Prosperity and Adversity—Taylor, 735 


that feareth God, and escheweth evil;’’ and in the second chapter and third verse, He 
repeats the same testimony, adding: “still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou 
movedst Me against him, to destroy him without cause.’ Stronger testimony to the 
life which God’s grace enabled Job to live can scarcely be imagined. The chastisement 
that came upon him is declared to have been without cause so far as his life and spirit 
were concerned. Let us thank God that the same grace which enabled Job, so long 
ago, to live a life that pleased God, and réceived His repeated commendation, is 
unchanged; and that by it we may also live lives that will be well-pleasing to Him with 
whom we have to do. 

Satan would very frequently harass tne believer in times of sorrow and trial by 
leading him to think that God is angry with him—that this is a punishment for some 
unknown offence, and many of the comforts and consolations that might otherwise be 
enjoyed may thus be clouded. Do we not rather see from the Word of God that He 
is like a glad father, delighting to be able to encourage a strong, healthy son to under- 
take some athletic feat which will entail arduous effort and careful training, or to 
stimulate him to prepare for a difficult literary examination by a prolonged and 
toilsome course of study, knowing he will obtain honors and permanent advantage 
from his attainments? So, our Heavenly Father delights to trust a trustworthy child 
with a trial in which he can bring great glory to God, and through which he will 
receive permanent enlargement of heart, and blessing for himself and others. 

Take the case of Abraham: God so thoroughly trusted him, that He was not 
afraid to call upon His servant to offer up his well-beloved son. And here, in the case 
of Job, it was not Satan who challenged God about Job, but God who challenged the 
arch-enemy, the accuser of the brethren, to find any flaw in his character, or failure in 
his character, or failure in his life. In each case grace triumphed, and in each case 
- patience and fidelity were abundantly rewarded; but more of this anon. 


THE UNSEEN HEDGE. 

The reply of Satan is noteworthy. He does not need to ask, “Which Job?” or, 
“Where does he live?” He had considered God’s servant, and evidently knew all about 
him. How came it that he was so well acquainted with this faithful man of God? 
It may have come about in this way: those subordinate spirits of evil who are evidently 
under the control of Satan had in vain tried ordinary means of temptation with the 
patriarch. Probably reporting their want of success to some of the principalities and 
powers of evil, these likewise had essayed their diabolical arts, but had not succeeded 
in leading Job to swerve from his integrity. Last of all, the great arch-enemy himself 
had found all his own efforts ineffectual to harass and lead astray God’s beloved 
servant. He found a hedge around him, and about his servants, and about his house, 
and about all that he had, on every side—an entrenchment so strong that he had been 
unable to break through, so high that, going about as a roaring lion, he had been 
unable to leap over, or to bring disaster within the God-protected circle. 

How blessed it must have been to dwell so protected! The work of Job’s hands 
was prospered—his substance increased in the land, and he became the greatest as wel! 
as the best of all the men of the East, for in that day God manifested His approval 
largely, though not solely, by the bestowal of temporal blessings. 

Is there no analogous spiritual blessing to be enjoyed now-a-days? Thank God there 
is. Every believer may be as safely kept and as fully blessed, though, perhaps, not in 
the same way, as Job—may be delivered from the power of the enemy, and preserved 
in a charmed circle of perfect peace. The conditions are simple, and are given us by 
the Apostle Paul in the fourth chapter of Philippians, v. 4-7, “Rejoice in the Lord 
alway. . . . Let your moderation [your gentleness, or yieldingness] be known 
unto all men. The Lord is at hand.” Not your power of resistance of evil, and of 
“maintainmg your own rights;” but your spirit of yieldingness, believing that the Lord 


730° Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


will maintain for you all that is really for your good; and that in any case He is at 
hand, and will soon abundantly reward fidelity to His command. And lastly, “Be 
careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving 
let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth 
all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” - 

How is it that believers so often fail to enjoy this promised blessing? Is it not 
that we fail to be anxious for nothing, and to bring everything by prayer and supplica- 
tion with thanksgiving before God? We may bring nine difficulties out of ten to Him, 
and try to manage the tenth ourselves, and that one little difficulty, like a small leak 
that runs the vessel dry, is fatal to the whole; like a small breach in a city wall, it gives 
entrance to the power of the foe. But if we fulfill the conditions, He is certainly 
faithful, and instead of our having to keep our hearts and minds—our affections and 
thoughts—we shall find them kept for us. The peace which we can neither make nor 
keep, will itself, as a garrison, keep and protect us; and the cares and worries will 
strive to enter in vain. 


THE TESTING OF JOB. 

Reverting to the history of Job: the great accuser, having no fault to find with 
his character or life, insinuates that it is all the result of selfishness. “Doth Job fear 
God for nought.” Indeed, he did not, as Satan well knew! Nor has anyone, before 
or since, ever feared God for nought. There is no service which pays so well as the 
service of our Heavenly Master; there is none so royally rewarded. Satan was making 
a true assertion, but the insinuation he connected with it, that it was for the sake of this 
reward that Job served God, was not true. 


To vindicate the character of Job himself in the sight of the angels of God, as well 
as of the evil spirits, Satan is permitted to test Job, and take away all those treasures 
for the sake of which alone Satan imagined, or pretended to imagine, that Job was 
serving God. “All that he hath,” said God, “is in thy power; only upon himself put 
not forth thine hand.” 


SATAN’S MALIGNITY. 

And soon Satan showed the malignity of his character by bringing disaster after 
disaster upon the devoted man. By his emissaries he incited the Sabeans, and they fell 
upon the oxen and the asses feeding beside them, slaying the servants with the edge 
of the sword, suffering one only to escape—and this, not in any pity or sympathy, but 
that he might bear the message to his unhappy master, telling of the destruction of his 
property and servants. The evil one appears, also, to have had power to bring the 
lightning from heaven—by which the sheep, and the servants caring for them. were 
destroyed. Here, again, one servant only was left, by his message to increase the 
distress of the afflicted man of God. 


Working in another direction, the Chaldeans were led to come in three bands and 
carry off Job’s camels, slaying all the servants with the edge of the sword, save the 
one left to convey the evil tidings. And, as if this were not sufficient, even the very 
children of Job, his seven sons and three daughters—children of so many prayers— 
were swept away at one blow, by a terrible hurricane from the wilderness, which smote 
the four corners of the house so that it fell upon them, leaving only one servant to bear 
witness of the calamity. One only of all his family—his wife—seems to have been left 
to Job. But so far from being a spiritual help to him in this hour of sorrow and trial, 
she lost faith in God; and when further calamity came upon him, and he was in sore 
bodily suffering and affliction, his trial was added to by the words of his despairing 
wife: “Curse God, and die.”” We see from this, that even she was left to Job through 
no mercy on the part of the great enemy, but simply to fill the cup of affliction to 
the full in the hour of his extremity. 


Blessed Prosperity and Adversity—Taylor. 737 


GRACE SUFFICIENT. 


But He who sent the trial gave also the needful grace, and in the words which we 
have already quoted, Job replied: ‘“‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; 
blessed be the Name of the Lord.” 

Was not Job mistaken? Should he not have said: “The Lord gave, and Satan 
hath taken away?” No, there was no mistake. The same grace which had enabled 
him unharmed to receive blessing from the hand of God, enabled him also to discern 
the hand of God in the calamities which had befallen him. Even Satan did not pre- 
sume to ask of God to be allowed himself to afflict Job. In the first chapter and the 
eleventh verse he says: ‘Put forth Thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and 
he will curse Thee to Thy face;” and in the second chapter and the fifth verse: ‘‘Put 
forth Thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse Thee to Thy 
face.’ Satan knew that none but God could touch Job; and when Satan was permitted 
to afflict him, Job was quite right in recognizing the Lord Himself as the doer of those 
things which He permitted to be done. 

Oftentimes shall we be helped and blessed if we bear this in mind—that Satan is 
servant, and not master, and that he and wicked men incited by him are only permitted 
to do that which God by His determinate counsel and foreknowledge has before 
determined shall be done. Come joy, or come sorrow, we may always take it from 
the hand of God. 

Judas betrayed his Master with a kiss. Our Lord did not stop short at Judas, nor 
did He even stop at the great enemy who filled the heart of Judas to do this thing; but 
He said: ‘The cup which My Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” How the 
tendency to resentment and a wrong feeling would be removed, could we take an injury 
from the hand of a loving Father, instead of looking chiefly at the agent through whom 
it comes to us! It matters not who is the postman—it is with the writer of the letter 
that we are concerned: it matters not who is the messenger—it is with God that His 
children have to do. 

We conclude, therefore, that Job was not mistaken, and that we shall not be mis- 
taken if we follow his example, in accepting all God’s providential dealings as from 
Himself. We may be sure that they will issue in ultimate blessing; because God is 
God, and, therefore, “all things work together for good” to them that love Him. 


DEEPER TRIALS. : 
Job’s trial, however, was not completed, as we have seen, when his property was 
removed. When the Lord challenged Satan a second time: “Hast thou considered 
my servant Job. . . ?” Satan has no word of commendation, but a further insinua- 


- tion: “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life . . . touch 


his bone and his flesh, and he will curse Thee to Thy face.” Receiving further permis- 
sion to afflict him bodily, but with the charge withal to save his life, Satan went forth 
from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot 
to his crown. 

The pain of his disease, the loathsomeness of his appearance, must have been very 
great; when his friends came to see him they knew him not. His skin was broken and 
had become loathsome; his flesh was clothed with worms and clods of dust. Days ot 
vanity and wearisome nights followed in sad succession; his rest at night. was scared 
by dreams and terrified through visions; so that, without ease or respite, strangling 
would have been a relief to him, and death chosen rather than life. But of death there 
was no danger, for Satan had been charged not to touch his life. 

His kinsfolk failed him, and his familiar friends seem to have forgotten him. 
Those who dwelt in his house counted him as a stranger, and his servant gave no 
answer to his call when he entreated help from him. Nay, worse than all, his own 
wife turned from him, and in his grief he exclaimed: ‘My breath is strange to my 


738 Pulpit Power and Eloquence: 


wife, though I entreated for the children’s sake of mine own body.’’ No wonder that 
those who looked on thought that God Himself had become his enemy. : 

Yet it was not so. With a tender Father’s love, God was watching all the time; 
and when the testing had lasted long enough to vindicate the power of God’s grace, 
and to prepare Job himself for fuller blessing, then the afflictions were taken away; 
and in place of the temporary trial, songs of deliverance were vouchsafed to him. 

THE LOVING KINDNESS OF THE LORD. 

Nor was the blessing God gave to His servant a small one. During this time of 
affliction, which, perhaps, was not very prolonged, Job learned lessons, which all his 
life of prosperity had been unable to teach him. The mistakes he made in the hastiness 
of his spirit were corrected; his knowledge of God was deepened and increased; he 
had learned to know Him better than he could have done in any other way. He 
exclaimed that he had heard of Him previously by the hearing of the ear, and knew 
God by hearsay only; but that now his eye saw Him, and that his acquaintance with 
God had become that which was the result of personal knowledge, and not of mere 
report. All his self-righteousness was gone: he abhorred himself in dust and ashes. 

Then, when he prayed for his friends, the Lord removed the sorrow, restored to 
him the love and friendship of those who previously were for the time alienated, and 
blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning. His sheep, his camels, his 
oxen, and his asses, were doubled. Again seven sons and three daughters were 
granted to him, and thus the number of his children also was doubled; for those who 
were dead were not lost, they had only gone before. And after all this, Job lived 140 
years, and saw his children, and grandchildren, to the fourth generation; and finally 
died, being old and full of days. 

May we not well say that if Job’s prosperity was blessed prosperity, his adversity, 
likewise, was blessed adversity? ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh 
in the morning;” and the night of weeping will bear a fruit more rich and permanent 
than any day of rejoicing could produce. “The evening and the morning were the 
first day.” Light out of darkness is God's order, and if sometimes our Heavenly 
Father can trust us with a trial, it is a sure presage that, if by grace the trial is 
accepted, He will ere long trust us with a blessing. 

In this day, when material catises are so much dwelt upon that there is danger of 
forgetting the unseen agencies, let us not lose sight of the existence and reality of our 
unseen spiritual foes. Many a child of God knows what it is to have sore conflict with 
flesh and blood; and yet, as says the Apostle, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, 
but against . . . wicked spirits in heavenly places” (margin.) It would be com- 
paratively easy to deal with our visible foes, if the invisible foes were not behind them. 
With foes so mighty and, apart from God’s protecting care, so utterly irresistible, we 
should be helpless indeed if unprotected and unarmed. 

We need to put on the whole armor of God, and to be not ignorant of Satan’s 
devices. Let us not, on the other hand, lose sight of the precious truth that God alone 
is Almighty; that God is our Helper, our Protector, and our Shield, as well as our 
exceeding great Reward. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Let us always 
be on His side, seeking to carry out His purposes; then the power of God will always 
be with us, and we shall be made more than conquerors through Him that loved us. 


(739) 


JESUS IN GETHSEMANE. 


FREDERICK A. G. THOLUCK. 


Beloved in the Lord! Christmas and New Year's day are gone, and already I call 
upon you to “go up with me unto Jerusalem.” We shall begin today our Good Friday 
and Easter meditations. There are not many texts suitable for Christmas in the New 
Testament—but for Easter and for Good Friday there are many—so many, that it is 
impossible to exhaust them. We have, on a previous occasion, considered together 
the revelation of the human heart, as it is exhibited beneath the cross of Christ. And 
in this respect we have contemplated the heart of a Caiphas, a Peter, a Thomas, and a 
Mary. We saw that the heart of man is only rightly revealed, when it is brought 
beneath the cross of Christ. It is true, the Christian congregation stands in need of 
moral sermons, and the preacher must descend, with the word of Christ in his hand, 
into the heart of man; but it is ever to him most rejoicing and refreshing, when he 
can look into the heart of Christ Himself. The difference is, as when one, standing 
high in the mountain air, sees the spring rise out of the rocky mountain-side, and 
when, standing in the valley below, he beholds the copious stream, which, as it flows, 
spreads blessing and fertility all around. And may God grant that you may know in 
your deep experience, that a power goes forth from the word which testifies of Jesus, 
which makes men whole. 

We shall view the heart of Jesus in Gethsemane, on the way to Golgotha, on the 
cross. Arise, and let us go this day in spirit to Gethsemane, and there behold the heart 
of our Savior, in order that we may thereby learn how we may drink the cup of sorrow, 
when it shall be handed to us. Listen to the words of the Holy Scripture, as we find 
it in Matthew 26: 36-46: . . . “Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called 
Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. 
And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful 
and very heavy. Then saith He unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto 
death: tarry ye here and watch with me. And He went a little farther, and fell on His 
face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: 
nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt. And He cometh unto the disciples and 
findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What! could ye not watch with me one 
hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, 
but the flesh is weak. He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O 
O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, Thy will be 
done. And He came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy. And 
He left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. 
Then cometh He to His disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on, now, and take your 
rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of 
sinners. Rise, let us be going: behold, He is at hand that doth betray me.” 

It may not have been half an hour before, that the Lord had uttered so solemnly 
the intercessory prayer. That was not like the prayer of a dying man, but rather as 
of one already glorified. And behold! around that sacred head, where but a little time 
before the light of glory shone, ah! what heavy clouds are gathering now! And yet 
this contrast, this change of light and darkness, is not unintelligible. The man who 
has not, in an unnatural way, repressed his feelings, will always find in those hours 


740 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


when he has some heavy trial to bear, that with whatever strength and decision he 
may have surrendered his own will to the will of God, and however clearly and 
distinctly his eye may perceive the real tints of approaching morn looking out from 
behind the night-clouds of sorrow, nevertheless, when he really enters into the cloud, 
a cold chill passes over his ‘soul, and the convulsions of sorrow overpower him. 

These will be moments, isolated indeed, but just on that very account all the more 
severe: in every case suffering demands its due. When once this tribute has been 
rendered, it is enough. Thus how often, even after the sky has cleared up, do we 
see a single storm-cloud discharge its burden of thunder, lightning, and rain, and it is 
not till the last drop has fallen, and the last thunder has pealed, that serenity and calm 
are restored. This natural feeling of pain resembles the heat of summer and the 
cold of winter. There are cold summers and there are warm winters; but, at least for 
some days in the season, winter and summer must assert their right, and when they 
have once done so, it is enough. 

The Savior, too, has in this hour to pay His tribute to suffering. He will do it now 
when unseen by any but His disciples, that He may stand as a hero, when He must 
front His enemies. So may it be with us also, brethren, when the clouds of sorrow 
gather round us with all their terrors. Sorrow must have its due, but let it be paid 
in solitude, where no human eye, or at least none but a friendly one, is by to see. And 
then let the tears be quietly dried, when we go out again before men, that we cause not 
any offence to the Savior’s name. 


“Like a flower whose root’s unseen 
hile the bloom appears, 
A smile beams on the Christian life 
Which springs from hidden tears.” 


If we look into the Savior’s heart we shall see how a yes and a no are in conflict 
there: the no is human, the yes divine, and divine is the final decision. There is a 
human no in His heart as he realizes the hour when His own extremest suffering and 
His people’s extremest guilt shall be brought awfully near to each other, nay, shall 
consume one another. ‘“O Christ! the leaders of thy people, of the people of thy 
choice, will let their enmity against thee rise to the highest pitch of fury; ay, they will 
even lay hands on thee, on thee, the center and seal of all their promises.’ His heart 
cries No! “One of thy chosen will betray thee, another of them will deny, all of 
them will forsake thee.” His heart cries No! “The guilt of the people and of 
mankind, which they have committed against thee, will weigh down thy heart and bow 
thy head, as if it were thy righteous doom.”’ No! cries His heart with abhorrence. And 
indeed how could He then have answered otherwise? Had any other than this been 
His answer, could He then have loved mankind? Could He even have felt as a man 
feels, if, in view of this final catastrophe, He had not with all His might answered 
No! But perhaps you are thinking of Him of world-renown, that greatest among the 
heathen, of Socrates—before whose death-struggle there lay no Gethsemane. Do you 
ask why that man whom no fainting of spirit, no bloody sweat awaits, why, with such 
a calm smile of irony, he takes the cup of poison which his accusers, in the bitterness 
of their hate, present to him? He was great indeed, that greatest among the heathen 
that know not God; but in that cold smile on the very verge of that last, that most 
momentous step which man can take, I find not his greatness. It does indeed appear 
great that he did not tremble at the step he was taking into a land which to him 
was really a land unknown, which was disclosed to him only by the faint and feeble 
light of a presentiment of the heart. But had he not been greater still, if, even in 
him, who with all his wisdom was after all but a sinful child of man, the thought 
that he must soon stand before his Judge, had driven the blood quicker and hotter 


: 


Jesus in Gethsemane—Tholuck, 741 


through his veins? Had he not been greater if a feeling of pitying sympathy for the 
guilt which his accusers were incurring, and for the blindness of his fellow-country- 
men, had crimsoned his cheek and darkened his brow with sorrow? But the man 
who, in the days of his life, instead of pitying the sinners, has ironically laughed at 
the fools, such a one will find something to smile at even in the deepest blindness of 
his people. O! the guilt of such is indeed not once to be measured with the guilt of 
the chosen people, that people who outraged Him on whom all their promises hung, 
the holy Lamb of God; and yet, had there been in the heart of the Grecian sage but a 
spark of the holy sympathy of Jesus with sinful humanity, surely then a shade of 
sorrow must have passed over the smiling countenance! No! the Savior could not 
have been so holy, so loving, and so great, and the guilt of His murderers could not 
have been so enormous as it was, had He thought on that hour without the sweat of 
agony, or had He gone to meet it with only that horror of death which all other 
children of men experience. But was it really sorrow on account of His own suffering 
only, that so afflicted and prostrated His soul? Were this the case, for whom, I ask 
you, had the tears which He shed on His last entrance into the city, when He cried, 
“O! that thou hadst known the things which belong to thy peace!” for whom would 
those tears have flowed? Can you doubt that He who then wept at the thought of the 
guilt His own people were so soon to incur, did now in Gethsemane feel the weight 
of this sorrow also? And when on the way to the cross the women of Jerusalem, in 
their sympathy, mourned for ‘Him, was it his own sorrow that engrossed His 
thoughts and filled His soul when He cried, “Weep not for me, weep rather for your- 
selves?” No, believe me. On every occasion when He is seen to shudder at the 
thought of His sufferings, it is because He is looking down into the abyss of His 
people’s guilt, which these sufferings disclose. Thus it was too on that occasion, when 
long before the wings of death began to flutter around Him, He cried, “I am come 
to kindle a fire on the earth, but I have yet a baptism to be baptized with, and how do 
I long for it to be accomplished!” If then it cannot be denied that the horror with 
which the Redeemer contemplates death is at the same time a horror at the thought of 
the guilt of humanity, then was His answer all the more on that account a real human 
no, when He prayed, “If it be possible, let this cup pass!” 

But along with this human No, there was also, from the very first, as we must 
believe, a Divine deep-seated Yes, in His heart. What I mean is, that from the begin- 
ning He knew to what end He was in the world, He acknowledged a Divine necessity 
which determined every step He took. Must not Christ have suffered those things, 
that He might enter into His glory?” such is the question which He put to His 
disciples after the resurrection, as He opened- up to them the Scriptures. From this 
we see that He had read with His enlightened eye His own history in the prophecies 
of the Old Testament from the first. You know the prophecies of Isaiah, that gospel- 
book of the Old Testament, and there you have learned to recognize the noble form of 
the true suffering servant of God. “He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, 
and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall 
see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. Surely He hath borne our 
griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and 
afflicted.” How often in its musings must the spirit of our Lord have been absorbed 
in these verses! He did not require to ask, like that chamberlain of whom we read, 
“T pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this?” In this crape-covered mirror the 
Savior beheld the reflection of Himself, and saw, long before they arrived, the days 
of His sorrow. They had ever, from the very first, been before His eyes. Does He 
not, already, at the first passover in Jerusalem, speak to Nicodemus of the Divine 
necessity, according to which He is to be raised upon the cross: “As Moses lifted up 
the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” And in how 


742 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


many sayings does this must recur? “Except a grain of corn fall into the earth and 
die, it abideth alone.” ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto 
me.” “The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many.’ Yea, He even 
prays in the passage before us, “If it be possible, let this cup pass;” a saying hard to- 


understand, when we remember that it was but a few hours before that He had actually ~ 


instituted the memorial of His death, when He appointed the sacrament of the Supper, 
that He had actually preached of the blood of the New Testament, which is shed for 
many for the remission of sins. Then the Divine necessity was full before His soul, 
and now He speaks of a possibility: “My Father! if it be possible, let this cup pass. 
from me!” 


And yet he to whom it has been assigned to experience to the uttermost the fire 


of trial, to whom his God has seen méet, at one period or other in the course of his . 


life, to allot such tests as Abraham had, and such hours of affliction as Job knew, 
such a man will be able to understand this, which to others appears so mysterious. 
He will remember how, at such seasons, all. that a man has known and experienced 
retires into the background, and not a single idea or emotion remains before the soul 
save that one, all-absorbing thought of pain, which in its insuperable greatness fills 
the eye of the soul, and shuts out all other thoughts from its memory and regard. One 
may know ever so certainly and distinctly that the cup, bitter cup, must be drunk, and 
yet the soul will cry, ‘Lord, is it possible; Lord, is it possible?” And even if the 
decree of God was graven in stone before the soul: “Soul, thou must!” still the soul 
would cry, “Lord, is it possible!” It is indeed only those among you, who are no 
longer apprentices in the school of affliction, that know this kind of wrestling with 
God; but you also will be able to bear testimony to its truth. With us, indeed, it is 
only for a few hours, or perhaps half-hours, that the inner eye of the soul is so covered 
with tears, that it can indeed see nothing else but those tears. With our Lord, how- 


ever, this state did not last for hours; with Him it is scarcely a minute in duration, for — 


see how He gives expression in almost the same breath to both—both to the wish of 
His heart, bound with anguish, and to His consciousness of the divine, holy necessity 
of the case: “If it be possible, let this cup pass;” but in the same sentence He adds, 
“Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” These two points of view come sep- 
arately before His mind, in His contemplation, only; in reality, they are ever united; 
and they are viewed apart only to be instantly united once more. And also in our 
Savior’s view you see how clearly the two are brought together, when, the second 
time, returning from His disciples, He says, “O my Father, if this cup may not pass 
away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.” The cup is bitter, and, in view 
of its bitterness, purely human feeling can never do otherwise than refuse or be 


unwilling to drink it. But He lets a little drop fall into the cup, which is sufficient to 


make its contents sweet, and that drop is the short phrase, “God wills it.” When He 
comes back from His disciples the first time, that little drop is not as yet thoroughly 
mixed with the other contents of the cup; and the very point of conflict is to make the 
divine sweetness transfuse the human bitterness. And so when Christ says, “Rise, let 
us be going,” the bitterness has been swallowed up by the sweetness, and made wholly 
to disappear; and, as the sun, which in the morning a stormy cloud had covered, rises 
in majesty in the heavens, serene and unclouded, the Savior advances from beneath the 
darkness of that cloud of woe, and accosts His enemies with the question, “Whom 
seek ye?” 

The decision cost our Lord a struggle. O brethren, it does cost man something 
to find that the cup which God holds out to him, and which in itself is so bitter, is 
notwithstanding sweet, just because it is the will of God. The decision cost our Lord 
a struggle. O how bitter must that cup have been to Him at the thought of which 
He could be so faint and disheartened! Can you estimate what a weight must have 


‘ 


Jesus in Gethsemane—Tholuck. 743 


lain upon His heart when from His brow the sweat of agony fell in great drops of 
blood? But what most strikes the reader of this touching narrative is, the longing of 
the Savior for human sympathy. He is in need of loving men to watch with Him. 
“What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” Here may we also, brethren, draw 
something for our hours of suffering. Yes, it is human to be unwilling to watch 
through the hot and parching hours of life without the solace of sympathy and love. 
Human too is it, not to withdraw one’s self when the children of affliction invite us to 
weep through their nights of tears along with them. Our friends, too, will grow 
weary and sleepy when called on to watch with us through long nights of sorrow—for 
O! it is easier to rejoice with those that rejoice than it is to weep with those that weep. 
The friends of the Lord were overcome with sleep, although they were required to 
watch only one single hour with their Master! How bitter must the cup have been 
to Him, for He is now so disheartened: He had fought this very fight already, long 
before the bitter reality, in His foreknowledge of the future. The conflict in Geth- 
semane had been fought through even in the wilderness of Jordan, in the days of His 
temptation. Was there not, then, already at the outset, the whole of the way of the 
cross stretching before the eye of His soul, that way which, according to God’s 
appointment, He had to go; and already at the outset did He make His decision; 
although He might have chosen joy, He chose the cross. And when, at the feast at 
Jerusalem the first rays of the glory which was to follow from His sufferings should 
around Him, on the occasion when the Greeks desired to see Him, as the thought of 
the inexpressible joy which His sufferings were to bring to the whole human race 
came before Him, then, along with the vision of His glory, the thought of what He 
must first endure seized His soul. “Except a corn of, wheat fall into the 
ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it dies, it bringeth forth much 
fruit. Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? “Father, save me 
from this hour?” But for this cause came I unto this hour.” You see, it 
is the same conflict: “Now is my soul troubled, shall I say, ‘Save me from this 
hour?’—but for this cause came I unto this hour!” It is the same human No, the 
same divine Yes, and the same divine-human decision. Thus more than once did the 
Savior fight this fight, more than once did He wring from Himself this decision. It 
is written of Him, “My meat is to do the will of my Father.” Again, it is written of 
Him that “He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” The will of God 
was indeed meat to Him; but to find that meat so distasteful to His humanity to be 
pleasant, was no easy matter. Only by exercise, only by suffering, only in repeated 
fights, in repeated decisions, was it possible that the Son of God could learn to do this. 
And none of you, my brethren, who have not learned obedience to the will of God, and 
the joy of that obedience in the school of affliction, have ever learned it. The fact that 
you wonder at these fierce conflicts, at these repeated decisions of the Lord, may testify 
to you, either that you have not yet an idea, even the faintest, of the load that lay upon 
the holy soul of Jesus, because you are not yourselves holy enough; or, that you have 
not yet felt how great the lesson is which has been given you to learn; to be able in 
everything, even in what to the natural man is distasteful and unpleasant, to say, not 
in the spirit of a servant, but of a child, “Thy will be done!” “How sweet are, thy 
words unto my taste.” 

Ah! most men do not understand even what sort of a decision is required of them 
in their hours of suffering. There are some who, without ever imagining that every 
affliction is sent by God charged with the teaching of a moral lesson, regard their 
endurance of those afflictions in the light of a meritorious work. But do not err: it 
was not by the crown of thorns alone that Jesus became the Christ; it is not, it never 
can be so. Others there are who look upon themselves as heroes, when they can forget 
their sufferings. That is, to say the least, unnatural. Is it not unnatural in an old man 


744 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


to act as if he were young, or when a lame man would leap as if he were whole? Thus, 
too, it is unnatural to wish to ignore and deny a burden under which we lie, by the 
decree of God. Nay, more, it is ungodly; for why has thy God been pleased to smite 
thee with the rod, if thou art not to feel its smart; why has He poured out for thee 
the bitter draught, if thou art not to taste its bitterness? But thou wouldst escape from 
the school where God would teach thee, and because thou art ashamed of the bitter 
draught, thou wouldst drink it with blinded eyes. Thou fool! is not the cup there, and 
must it not be drunk whether thou drink it with thine eyes open or closed? But we 
are not to take blindly, but as seeing men, all that God holds out to us. And to take it 
with open eyes means, to acknowledge the end for which it is given. Now, it is given 
us in order that we may learn the art of tasting what is sweet in the will of God, even 
when that will involves what is in itself bitter. This is what we are intended to learn. 
To pour the little drop “God wills it” into the bitter cup, and to mingle that little drop 
with the bitter contents, until the taste of the whole is sweetened. At present the most 
of you suffer, only because you must, and therefore as servants; but you should suffer 
as children, who suffer because it is the will of their Father that they should, and who, 
because it is His will, make it also theirs. When one learns to view sorrow in this 
light, what a multitude of moral lessons open up to Him! Then one need not wait for 
extraordinary seasons of affliction. Each little daily sorrow, every misunderstanding 
we experience on the part of our fellow-men, every little disappointed hope, every 


cross, every care, 1f only viewed in this light, becomes a great lesson to every Christian 


soul; he must not bear it as a servant, he must bear it as ason! O! ye who know not 
yet the school of affliction, and the lesson that is there taught, go, learn it at Geth- 
semane! Learn it in contemplating the conflict which the holy heart of Jesus knew 
there, and let the thought of Him be your consolation and your strength when the 
cup is passed to you! There you may once and again have to bend the knee, before 
your breast is unburdened, and your brow again unclouded. The struggle may be so 
severe that in it the physical man may be quite shaken and shattered, and you may 
have to fight every inch of the way. And if one decision be not sufficient, another 
and another must be forced from you. O! in all these experiences your Savior has 
gone before you, for He, even He had to learn obedience by the things which He 
suffered. Remember that with every new conflict this obedience becomes more and 
more our own, becomes more and more the law of our new life. Hence it is that the 
conflict recurs so often. If even with the Savior the struggle had to be fought, and 
the decision to be made repeatedly over again, think what a very difficult task it must 
be to sweeten the bitter cup with the consideration that it is God who sends it. And 
even when the fight is over, and the victory won, above the shout of triumph may 
still be heard the groan of suffering nature. Do you not hear after the decision of 
Gethsemane, and before the final “It is finished,” the words, “My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me?’ May the soul-conflict of our Savior in Gethsemane teach us 
that it is one of the highest works of our Christian life at all times so to permeate and 
transiuse the human No with the divine Yes, that the final decision shall be divine! 


“The Christian lives, but lives to fight, “°Tis not the skirmish of an hour; 
He struggles on his way. Sin yields not at a blow: 

Christ’s people are His soldiers too, For pride of heart is ill to slay, 

Christ leads them by His Spirit through, And what seemed overcome today 
From strife to victory. Will be tomorrow’s foe.” 


O Lord! Thou who in all points didst become like unto us, yet without sin. O 
Lord! Thou who in the days of thy flesh didst offer strong crying and tears, in order 
that thy Heavenly Father’s will might be found sweet unto thee, grant unto us thy 
Spirit, that we may understand the lesson that is daily, in every sorrow, given us to 


Jesus in Gethsemane—Tholuck. 745 


_Jearn. Grant us thy Spirit, that we may fight a good fight, and may never by succumb- 
ing enfeeble our spirit. O Lord! how beautiful is the crown which awaits us at the 
goal, do thou hold it ever before our soul! Amen. 


[Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck, D. D., a Protestant theologian of Germany, 
eminent for his evangelical works and eloquence, was born at Breslau, March 30, 1799. 
At the University of Berlin, where he completed his studies, he became engrossed in 
oriental literature, and confessed that he then esteemed Mohammedanism as nearly 
equal to Christianity. Neander did much to lead him to repentance and godliness of 
soul. In 1826 Dr. Tholuck was appointed professor of theology at Halle. This pious 
scholar had to endure many annoyances from rationalists in that theological faculty; 
but his calm faith has been rewarded by seeing the University become a consistent 
defender of Christian truth, Among his chief works are Commentaries on Romans, 
John and Hebrews, besides a “History of Rationalism,” several parts of which have 
appeared. This sermon is from “Light from the Cross,”] 


746 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 


FLOYD D. TOMKINS, S.T.D. 


“And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns.”—St. John 19: 2. 

In the old Court Church at Innsbruck, amongst the bronze figures which surround 
the imposing cenotaph of Maximilian I, stands most prominently that of Godfrey de 
Bouillon, the grand old crusader of the eleventh century. He wears his helmet, and 
on the helmet rests a crown of thorns. The strange contrast brings back the hero’s 
response, when, standing victorious in the streets of Jerusalem, his followers wished 
to make him emperor of the Christian Kingdom: “] will not wear a crown of gold,” 
he cried, “where my Master wore a crown of thorns.” But the union of emblems has 
a deeper truth, to which it points, than the historical reference. It recalls at once the 
heroic meaning which that transition period of history ever attached to warfare and to 
soldiery. The power of principle, which the prosaic and hard contests of the Reforma- 
tion era emphasized, had an extensive bearing; and art and poetry made that principle 
as beautiful as the esthetic can ever make the painful struggle. When the holy wars 
were undertaken to deliver the dear Judzan city from the Saracens, it was ‘the union 
of devotion with bravery which inspired the Crusaders; a union not less real a few 
centuries later when the sword was upheld by earnest men who craved a blessing from 
heaven that their worship might be free. And the unceasing struggle for advancement 
which humanity was making at the same time, as she hungered for knowledge and 
began to find it in her own discoveries and inventions, was again the old lesson of 
Godfrey—the helmet and the crown of thorns. Indeed, the three contests which stand 
as the lights in an otherwise dark and dreadful age, the contests at Jerusalem which 
were the first risings towards emancipation of men who were as yet children in under- 
standing, the contests at the Reformation when soul grappled with medieval force of 
arms, and the lasting battle of mind with the powers of ignorance which all the while 
was going on in the economic life of men—these were all illustrations of that which 
the old German court painter, Sesselschreiber, had in mind when he caused the crown 
of thorns to rest on the helmet of the brave Godfrey of Boulogne. For the battles 
were for principle, and they demanded daring and self-sacrifice; and the men who 
fought and gained the glorious victories have, all of them, as the memorials which are 
imperishable, the bright helmets of heroic success, surmounted by the thorny crowns” 
of pain. May it not well have been prophetic of all these long years, eighteen hundred 
and more, of marvelous growth, that the soldiers, as they faced the King of Kings in 
Pilate’s judgment hall, wove in and out the circle of an acanthine crown and pressed 
it on Jesus’ head? Let pass their cruelty, and forget the horrible sarcasm of the 
occasion; think only of them as Roman soldiers, types, in no way inferior, of the grand 
heroes whose exploits we have always honored; and see them telling their own 
destiny, weaving a symbolic emblem which should henceforth mark out for soldier- 
men greater contests and methods‘of contest than had ever been known in Rome, or 
Greece or Alexandria—contests for right, and methods having the success of the 
many, rather than the glory of the one, as a noble aim. I have taken, for our study, 
this thought, brothers, a thought not of gloom, nor yet of scintillating and fading light, 
but of honest and brave import—the thought of battle for a principle, of victory with 


thorns surmounting its helmet. 
T think we are surprised, when we stop to think of it, how this truth unconsciously 


Christian Warfare—Tomkins. 747 


grows upon us as we pass from boyhood to manhood. The pleasure of flag-flying and 
shouting, the delight in bright glitter and tinsel, deepens not into a somber despite of 
these outward adornings, but into a recognition of the glory and honor which they 
represent. The buttons and the epaulettes are no longer the pretty sights, but the 
tokens of standing earned, and earned by struggle. The sword and bayonet are no 
longer kept bright to reflect the sun-rays on a parade, but they mean contest, and bear 
imaged in their polished depths the story told so often on the battle-field, but never told 
in human individuality of contest, a story of wounds and pain. The boy soon learns 
to place on the helmet a crown of thorns. Indeed, an his own life the same experience 
is written. How “all before Him” seemed the possibilities as He looked out on the 
dew-touched way! “The glory and good of life, the onward and upward of all the 
way, the victory through the strife’—these were easy certainties. So the boy wore the 
naked helmet. But in later years, as he nursed the wounds of disappointment, as he 
learned how hard the higher steps up the mount of experience are, as he found that 
only watching and quick dangerous fighting could make him master of his passions, 
then the helmet found an acanthine crown as part of its glory. So might many a 
student tell us of his post-graduate years passed in that great alumni school of life. 
How limited the sphere of knowledge was at first, when the neophyte selected his list 
of studies. How easy a thing to master the forces of science, to make the law a house- 
hold god, to learn all the idosyncrasies of theology! But the bachelor of science or 
arts, I wot, has found it hard to woo the maiden of necessitous experience, and harder 
to win her. The knowledge once lying neatly folded in the napkin of a college curri- 
culum now has leaped out as vapor from a broken cylinder, and to grasp a part is only 
to find how many parts yet remain unmastered. The pleasure is mingled with anxiety, 
the seeker is baffled, and for one success he finds himself struck by ten insoluble 
mysteries. Upon his helmet slowly grows a crown, but of thorns. So, too, is it with 
the Reformer in any sphere. He sees an evil. He makes no doubt but that others 
must see it too; at least they will when he points it out to them. So he goes to work 
at what he deems a fifteen minutes’ battle. The recital of his experiences would be 
diverting, were they not so tinctured with sadness. As he finds out that even Godfrey’s 
old Jerusalem ‘is still unchristian, and that Luther’s Christian world is still in the throes 
of reformation, and that war is not ended for all the innumerable declarations of peace 
which have been signed and filed away, his sham fight grows suddenly real, and the 
minutes become years. Men’s opinions differ. Men’s passions and prejudices fight 
hard, and die harder; and the old tree of wrong, against which he has contended, even 
if he succeeds in uprooting it, will not grow after he has turned it upside down, but 
sticks its straggling roots up in the air as a ghostly menace to any man who dares to 
do any more reform work. If the reformer stands true, we see him in later years as 
earnest as ever, but wiser, his faith ripened into assurance, and his helmet of salvation 
from the wrong he hates surmounted by thorns as a crown. There is something 
intensely invigorating in all this. For no true soldier cares to take a victory by 
default. It is not in the ease of life that men find a deep satisfaction, nor is there any 
inspiration in the good which comes unearned and undeserved. The very fire of 
struggle is, just in proportion to a man’s manliness, an eminent part of his aim; not 
that the wounding is pleasing, but that it speaks the worth of the object. Not the man 
rejoicing in glitter and show, but sending a substitute in the hour of necessity to meet 
the enemy’s guns—not he is our type of manhood; but the hero who has rushed to beat 
down that which he esteemed wrong, and who comes staggering from the fight with 
all the glitter gone, but having still his soldier garments sanctified by blood-stains—he 
is our man. Not the teacher who can glibly speak generalities, and weave in and out 
in pleasing fashion, in hours of life’s dalliance, the threads of theories which he kas 
never tested—not he is our hero of knowledge; but the beaten yet unconquered master 


748 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


who has stood by his systems and plans and marked their working, who has known 
truth by use, not by name, and who has his heart throbbing for the advance of that 
for which he has endured something—he is the teacher. Show me the man who 
counts the money he has not earned, the man who rejoices over the fall of a wrong 
against which he has never lifted voice or finger, who basks in the sunshine of a good 
he has had no interest in bringing, who knows only one side of things, and though he 
wear a helmet, he can be no soldier, for he has neither platted nor worn a crown of 
thorns. But let the man stand forth, the untitled nobleman of humanity’s best blood, 
who has brought success by work, who has a story to tell of his contest with the evil 
which lies gasping at his feet, who knows the make-up of the morality which has 
grown in some particular through his touch, who knows something oi the ups and 
downs, the back and front, the inner and outer side of life, “who has dared for a high 
cause to suffer, resist, fight, if need be, to die,” and higher and brighter than all of 
success or applause or glory, rests the crown which has been woven by his own hand, 
which his soldier spirit has made out of long battles and weary nights and days of 
self-struggle, which tells, perhaps, of something lost of strength and youth, but lost 
only to be jewelled in the character of a manhood which can never lose save to regain. 

“The longer one lives the more one has to feel that our Lord will have no half- 
measures in our surrender of self,” said that great modern hero, General Gordon. The 
words come fitly from him who, in his brave self-offering, would never enter a battle 
armed save with a cane or a wand. For the seli which gives is the self which finds, and 
the heroism which is fired by a worthy cause to cast itself into the fray is the heroism 
which shall endure “‘when all that seems shall suffer shock.” 

It is when we come to apply our truth to the parts of a soldier-manhood that we 
see most plainly its meaning. I say soldier-manhood, because I think no one of us can 
ever pass from that instinctive recognition of martial valor which generations have 
pressed into our nature. Since contest has been made the password in all work— 
religious, economic, intellectual, political—men will always borrow their synonyms and 


their methods from the military dictionary, always arouse waning enthusiasm by a- 


rehearsal of military feats, always measure order by lines of military discipline. 
Soldier-manhood, in the person of Him who is the Captain of our salvation, will always 
be the norm of manhood. 

I. Of these parts we must place bravery first. And there is nothing which has 
suffered so complete a revolution as men’s conception of bravery. At first in the 
savage mind it was simply brutal. The bully and the brave were one, and the biggest 
and most deadly blow, without any regard to provocation or method, was the key to 
the hero’s castle. Now, the mere matter of brute force is the last consideration. The 
cultivated mind recoils from the great physical muscle reigning in a brainless body and 
nerved by the beatings of a bad, fleshy heart. Courage founded on principle—that is 
our modern measure. We do not fill our regiments with great children of Anak to 
overawe the enemy like the Philistine giant, but with gentlemen, in the true meaning 
of that misused name, men who have brains enough to know what is right, and charac- 
ter enough to hold to it. And yet, brothers, even now, I wonder how many are pos- 
sessed with the courage of their convictions. Do we not all know how easy it is to 
believe what we will not confess? To be heroic in private, and silent with cowardice 
in public? To wish for that which we are afraid to demand? We have passed beyond 
the ideal of brutal contact with any man who may oppose, but have we risen to the 
limit of honest assertion and endeavor as asked for by our educated sense of right? It 
is easy to wear the helmet—but what of the crown? As of old, so now, it costs some- 
thing to be a man. Principles are not taken into corporate life readily. The man 
begins to question (and you know that hesitation against a call to duty is deadly): 
“Why should this be my care, and why should I assume to dictate? A storm of words, 


Christian Warfare—Tomkins. 749 


abuse, false judgment—these will be the rewards for espousing a forlorn cause.” And 
with this soliloquy comes the consciousness that modern courage binds itself, indeed, 
by its very culture. It cannot strike against its accusers, nor give word for word, nor 
return the blow of spiteful criticism. It must just work on and wait, and that seems like 
cowardice! Work in a line of conscience, work where the world says there is nothing 
to work for. But J tell you, my friends, that is the only kind of courage worth having; 
bravery which has principle rather than guns to back it; which trusts not in flags or 
fusillades, but in the slow growth of justice and the sure establishment of right. In 
the midst of our nation’s darkest hour, when no word was too venomous, no assertion 
too false, Abraham Lincoln is said to have laid aside a paper in which he was reading 
a shameless attack upon himself, while he spoke to himself: “Well, Abraham Lincoln, 
are you a man, or are you a dog?” Will not all generations admire the heroic 
steadfastness which held, under such circumstances, calmly, silently, to principle? You 
cannot be brave and keep your armor bright, but what means the armor save as it is 
a token of the fixedness of principle within? You cannot be brave, and yet have 
men at once praise you; the soldier in battle is shot at and his death sought by enemies 
long before his praises are sung. Upon the helmet must be woven the crown of thorns 
which shall prove his sufferings as more glorious than his sword. The question is 
now, and has been ever since the Christ was upon earth, “What are you willing to 
suffer for the truth’s sake?” 


II. If this be true of bravery, much more must it stand in the case of loyalty. 
I do not think love of country has died or can die amongst Americans. Its growth 
is too highly fostered, its roots too deeply and seriously laid. The word “country” 
means something to every son of America. Yet citizenship is with us what it is not 
and never has been with any other nation. There is no sycophancy here. Nor is there 
any blind bowing to authority. The law is the common judgment, and its enforcement 
is the action of the people through their chosen representative. And the loyal man is 
not he who shouts the loudest, but he who has most of self-respect. Ah, and there is 
our danger. For men read self-respect as if it were self-advancement, forgetting how 
the principle of our land is not “self-seeking,” but “sought.” We think of office more 
than duty, and of advancement more than growth; we would leap, rather than walk. 
But loyalty—what is that? At the very word does not your soldierly blood begin to 
move more rapidly? For we know what American loyalty is: truth not to a man but 
to a principle. And principle sets aside the individual, makes him a part of the type, 
and, like nature, forgets, or seems to forget him in the good of the whole people. 
Principle asks for a struggle in her advancement. She sets up a lofty standard, and to 
it the good citizens turn, ready to forget, sacrifice, themselves if only they can establish 
it. I need not, on such an occasion, point you to a past of which we are justly proud, 
to prove this. The wars for independence and for freedom were but expressions of the 
spirit which true loyalty everywhere asks and has found, a giving of all, if necessary, 
for the common establishment of right. Oh, it is an inspiration! Upon the helmet 
of his daring each loyal man carries the perpetual emblem of his sacrifice for the 
general welfare. And the measure of his patriotism is found not in the number of 
offices he has holden, nor in the zeal with which he prosecutes this or that political 
dogma, but in the clear, fearless, honest way in which he demonstrates that he is 
servant of all. His losses are for the gain of his country. His wisdom is the offspring 
he makes upon the altar of his devotion to the land he loves. And the perpetual 
glory of his rule is the thorny crown which tells how much he gives of self for the 
nation, or the town, or the State. Is that a high picture of loyalty? Yet, however far 
short of it we fall, we cannot deny its truth. Alas, if we are seeking each his own 
advance and profit! Alas for us, if we are finding the old principles worn out in prac- 
tice, and only fit for the archives where rest the stories of our enshrined forefathers! 


750 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


I will not believe it. Still, I am sure, the soldier spirit is strong in manly patriotism, 
and the exceptions but make the heroes who love God and right better than self and 
gain stand out as proofs that the old fire is not dead! 


III. One word as to the third element in manhood, purity, and I use the word in 
its broadest sense as freedom from stain, or self-mastery. For he only can be strong 
who knows what it is to keep check upon himself. If the old passions do with him as — 
they will, if they bid him to a ready obedience, surely he can be no true hero. It is an 
inspiration just to think of the old soldiers of past ages. Distance may halo them, 
and yet their characters tell a simple history. They were men of honor, men of forti- 
tude, men who learned endurance by placing an iron hand upon the idle self of weak- 
ness and emotion, by saying to luxury, to vice, to shame, “begone.” And it could have 
been no easy task. For the temptations are ever great, and the cry is specious and 
constant: “It can be but harmless to do as others do.’ Nor does the man readily 
account even his passions as evil. But, brothers, the mystery of the earthly hero is 
that he grows by pruning, in common with lower forms of life. Less a man he may 
seem because he has cut off this or that pleasure or license to obtain purer and clearer 
force. Less a man because he has taken a solitary way towards some mount of perfec- 
tion which bids to singleness of aim. ‘It were better,” say the men of one talent, “to 
use, and abuse not, all these things.”” And yet when for a grand purpose they are left, 
when the man drops the unnecessary in his eager seeking for the noble and the divine, 
then I can see upon his helmet a crown which tells of mastery, though its thorns reveal 
the old age-lasting struggle. I have never known purity save as this crown was found. 
Men cannot be stainless, men cannot have mastery save through blood! And the 
victor comes from the fight not in the fullness of perfection as he entered, but maimed, 
and battle-torn, and bleeding; yet we know he is a man by the things he has suffered. 


Upon his helmet rests the crown of thorns; his loss, his self-control, glorifies his 
manhood. 


It would be strange for me to end without a higher application of our truth. And 
yet I am sure I have been preaching the truest Christianity to you all the time. For 
our lot now, however it may be in the future, for whose calls we must ever be prepared, 
is in the passive yet terribly real warfare of day and hour amongst men and in our own 
hearts. To be brave, to be loyal, to be pure and strong after the principles of right 
and soldierly manhood, what is that but to follow Him who long before the days of 
Godfrey, the crusader, wore the crown of thorns? He is our bravest and best example. 
He has Himself lived the life and fought the battle. Oh, brother-men, He was a 
Man!—I am sadly conscious that my text may have another interpretation. Soldiers 
may plat a crown of thorns for another and not for themselves. By cowardice, by 
disloyalty, by dishonor, we too may press into the aching body of a long-suffering 
humanity, which is the body of Christ, thorns of misery. We may be false, traitors 
to our trusts, losing the world we were sent to save. But I am sure that as we crown 
ourselves we shall be safe. To be manly, to set upon our helmets the thorny proof of 
our adherence to principle, regardless of suffering, that is to bring the glorious day 
of emancipation from sin. And that day is coming. Through all the ages it has been 
approaching. A little longer, brothers, a few more battles, and we shall have peace. 


“Say not, the struggle nought availeth, “For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
The labor and the wounds are vain, Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
And as things have been, they remain, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 
“Tf hopes were dupes, fears may be liars, “And not by eastern windows only, 
It may be in yon smoke concealed, When daylight comes, comes in the light: 
Your comrades chased e’en now the fliers, In front the sun climbs slow—how slowly! 


And, but for you possess the field. But westward, look, the land is bright!” 


(751) 


CHRIST CRUCIFIED ; 


THE CENTRAL THEME OF THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 
KERR BOYCE TUPPER, D.D., LL. D. 


“I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him 
crucified.”—1 Cor. 2: 2. 

It is a thoughtful and suggestive saying of the distinguished Pascal, whose 
Thoughts on Religion has invested his name with an immortal glory, that there are 
three different orbits in which great men move and shine—the orbit of heroism, of 
intellectuality and of personal moral worth. ‘There are those first,” says he, “who, 
as heroes, have filled the world with their exploits. They are greeted by the acclama- 
tions of the multitudes. They are ennobled, whilst living, and their names descend 
with lustre to all posterity. Others there are, who, by the brilliancy of their imagina- 
tion, or the vigor of their intellect, attain to the honor of a purer and a higher kind. 
The fame of these is confined to a more select number, for all have not a discriminating 
sense of their merit. A third description remains, distinct from each of these and far 
more exalted than either. It is those whose chief excellence consists in a renunciation 
of self and a compassionate love of mankind. In this role the Savior was pleased to 
appear, and those persons obtain the highest rank in it, who, by His grace, are 
enabled most closely to imitate His example.” In consonance with this sentiment 
the poet sings: 


To honor God, to benefit mankind, 

To serve with lowly gifts the lowly needs 

Of the poor race, for which the God-man died, 
And do it all for love—oh! this is great! 
And he who does this will achieve a name 
Not only great, but good. 


Now, it is in this last orbit—to use the figure of our Christian philosopher—that 
the author of our evening’s text, the Apostle Paul, seems to move and shine in con- 
spicuous splendor. Though a magnificent hero, whom the world strove in vain to 
bend or conquer, revealing elements of will and courage such as have been exhibited 
by few, whose deeds of daring have been told in classic story or on the more sober 
pages of prosaic history—though a superb intellectual potentate whose thoughts and 
words, from the day of his speech on Mars’ Hill, even to the present hour, have stirred 
mankind as the teachings of Greek and Roman philosophers have had no power to do, 
still neither heroism, in the popular sense of that word, nor mere intellectuality, is the 
distinguishing mark of Paul’s character and life, after the one has become renewed and 
the other remodelled by the spirit of God. His is a loftier differentiating character- 
istic. Self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, self-immolation even—and this illustrated, not 
as in Marcus Curtius at the Roman Forum or Arnold Winkelried in the presence of a 
serried line of antagonistic spearmen, but as in the self-denying Lord of Light and 
Glory, who, though He was rich for our sakes, became poor—self-renunciation and 
self-immolation for God’s highest glory and humanity’s highest good—this, than which 
there can be revealed in human character nothing nobler, nothing more God-like, 


aS i 
752 _. Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


stands out in bold relief as the master impulse and the sublimest motive power of our 
noble Apostle. It is this man, who surpassing Wilberforce or Howard in the depth 
and extent, and beneficience of his philanthropy, could look out upon his nation, and ~ 
exclaim, “I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen, 
according to the flesh,” and then look up to heaven, and with ecstacy declare, “I count 
all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of God which is in Christ Jesus my 
Lord.” The difference between Paul and many others of his day who approached him 
most nearly in the vigor and supremacy of their powers, and in the faculty for appre- 
hending and communicating truths was not, as another has said, so much a difference 
of degree as of kind—not simply the difference “between fluent water and crystal ice— 
between the small mountain and the mighty Matterhorn—between the circumscribed 
lake and the boundless ocean, but the more essential, intrinsic, remarkable difference 
of personal moral elements”—the difference between the star and the lighthouse, nay, 
between light itself and the darkness which contrasts it. The fact.is, Paul stood on a 
higher pedestal, breathed a purer atmosphere, was inspired by a holier, diviner spirit 
than any of his competitors or coadjutors. Ina peculiar, unique sense, for him to live 
was Christ. 

This line of thought suggests itself, fathers and brethren, in the presence of the 
text which this hour demands our thought. “I determined not to know anything 
among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” Where find you'a more beautiful 
_ exhibition, a more attractive illustration of pure, absolute, self-forgetfulness, linked 
with a consuming devotion to Jesus Christ and His redemptive cross than is furnished 
in this weighty expression of deep conviction and intense religious fervor? And the 
circumstances amid which it is uttered, invest it with singular force. Paul is here 
addressing the Corinthian Church, extraordinarily heterogenous and painfully 
divided—a people craving an exhibition on his part of worldly wisdom and philo- 
sophical speculation—nay, a people among many of whom the Gospel in its purity was 
an unwelcome evangel and Golgotha’s brow a rock of offence. And yet his message 
among these surroundings is—what? An appeal to intellectual, social or wsthetic 
taste? A proclamation looking towards self-exaltation or self-interest? A word 
shaped to please rather than probe a people proud with philosophy? Far from it. His 
attitude is diametrically opposite. Commissioned of God to preach the Gospel in the 
fullness and supremacy of its truth and power, Paul seems to sink self out of sight, and 
standing on the high levels of divine life, with mind and spirit quickened and eyes 
drinking in with delight inexpressible, the infinite glories of Calvary, proclaims the 
unsearchable richesrof grace centered in, and flowing out of, an ever-blessed Redeemer. 
Brethren, the picture is magnificent. Jesus Christ and Him crucified was to the proud, 
ritualistic Jew a stumbling-block, and to the scholarly cultured Greek the very consum- 
mation of foolishness; but here in. Corinth—great, refined, wicked Corinth, made up of 
Jews and Greeks—the man of God plants his banner and points to its inscription, 
emblazoned in letters of gold—aye, of blood: “Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” “God 
forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” 

Analyzing these words of the text as expressive of Paul’s great purpose and motive 
power in life, certain features impress us and impress us deeply. Let us examine this 
hour into three of them. 

I. In the first place, it is a single purpose, an all-absorbing determination which 
here thrills and moves our devoted apostle. “I determined not to know anything save 
Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” It is said of Wordsworth that, when engaged in 
writing his Excursion, one thing covered the whole range of his thought. More may 
be said of Paul: one thing covers the whole range of his being—thoughts, words, 
acts—and that is Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This great, ennobling truth of the 
Cross fills his very consciousness, stirs the very depths of his inmost soul, constrains 


Christ Crucified—Tupper. 753 


him, drives to the proclamation ever of that grandest and most marvellous fact in all 
divine and human history. God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself—not 
through a strange, mysterious incarnation, though Christ was ‘“‘God manifest in the 
flesh”—nor through the illumination of matchless doctrine, though of Christ it was 
said, “Never man spake like this man,” nor through the glory of spotless character, 
though Christ ‘knew no sin neither was guile found in his mouth,” nor through the 
majesty of miraculous deeds, though Christ cured the sick and healed the blind and 
raised the dead, but God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself through the 
blood of a transcendent, an all-sufficient, an unrepeatable atonement for human redemp- 
tion—Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 

This, I say was the key-note of Paul’s preaching, and its power too. Much of 
the preaching in our day, even in evangelical pulpits, is struck to a lower key. It is 
Christ to be sure, but not Christ crucified. It deals much with the life of Christ, in its 
tender human sympathies—the Christ whose face was sculptured benevolence, whose 
hand was friendship’s symbol, whose eye was liquid sympathy for all human burdens 
and woes; much with the works of Christ as the pattern and inspiration of all helpful 
doing; much with the words of Christ as a divine philosophy, with heights to which 
no human imagination has ascended, depths which no human plummet has fathomed 
and breadths which no human mind has compassed. Now, these are well enough, 
brethren, in their place, but they are not central and fundamental. They are incidental 
rather than essential, ephemeral rather than eternal, facts rather than truths, mere 
‘chippings, as it were, from the grand corner-stone on which is reared the everlasting 
and ever-glorious superstructure of divine glory and human redemption. The Cross 
is the center-truth of the Gospel; Paul recognizes it, and hence Jesus Christ and Him 
crucified becomes the single, all-absorbing, all-animating theme of his heart and life, 
that which satisfies his own soul and thrills with the ecstatic delight, the longing 
multitudes that hear his words of life, becoming unto them, believing, the power of 
God unto salvation. To him as never to Constantine had the vision appeared: “By 
this sign thou shalt conquer.” 

It is interesting to study the recorded history of Paul with a view to how Jesus 
Christ pervades his whole thought and being. From the moment of his conversion till 
that of his death, writes a biographer, one increasing purpose ran through his career, 
gathering force and volume as it ran: this, namely, that he might serve Christ, know 
Christ, become like Christ. The Apostle John is full of love, the Apostle James, of 
good works; the Apostle Peter, of faith; the Apostle Paul, of him for whom should 
be all human love and faith and works—Jesus, the crucified. You must have noted 
this in reading the Book of Acts and the matchless Pauline epistles—how all Paul’s 
preaching, all his discussions, all his defences, all his writings, all his conduct—even 
his denunciations and exorcisms, point directly to Christ. Indeed it passed into a 
proverb, so that the vagabond Jewish exorcists said to the evil spirits, “We adjure 
you by the Jesus that Paul preacheth.” The disciples were first called Christians, 
where? at Antioch, where Paul preached. “Not at the holy city that reclined on the 
slopes of Mt. Zion, but in the pagan town that lay on the northern side of Mt. 
Sylphius; not by the Jordan which had parted its waters at the pressure of the ark, 
but by the Orontes, the banks of which were disgraced by heathen legends and prac- 
tices; not on the spot where three thousand on one day were added to the church, but 
where luxury and dissipation held perpetual sway.” Here men were first called 
Christians, where Paul preached Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This is wonderful. . 

‘The ambitious student of Gamaliel, the cruel witness of Stephen’s shameless and 
shameful martyrdom, the fiery and self-righteous zealot of Phariseeism, who in the 
past, had breathed out threatenings and slaughter against defenceless disciples and 
made havoc of the Church of Jesus, has been conquered and won over by this same 


754 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Jesus and He alone can be the God of his life. Marvelous change! He has entirely 
changed front! Henceforth his face is toward, not Jerusalem, but Calvary—not the 
stifling synagogue but the empty tomb! j 

Do you ask the reason of the change, so radical, so deeply-wrought? Go back in 
our apostolic history a few years. In an earlier time a strange thing has happened to 
this man. On his way to Damascus one day he saw a vision, he heard a voice, he 
beheld a ligt, and that vision, voice and light—ourward seals of an inward revelation 
encased in his spirit—were more than stamped on his memory; they were burned into 
the very core of his existence, and their influence pervaded his whole being as light 
and heat pervade the surroundings of fire. For three days he saw nothing, heard 
nothing, tasted nothing but the Lord Jesus. For three years, immediately succeeding, 
during a period of which time he retired into Arabia, without conferring with the flesh 
and blood, he was doubtless wrapped up in the study and adoration of this new God 
of his life. And now, henceforth, wherever he goes, whatever he does, that name is 
the inspiration of his powers. Whether in the great center of religious truth, Jeru- 
salem, or in' the extreme limits of his missionary field among the heathen; whether in 
the synagogue of the Jews or in the school-house of the Greeks; whether locked up 
in prison or tossed about on the sea; whether beaten with stripes or extolled as a god; 
whether in barbarous Lystra, or. elegant Athens, or cultured Corinth; whether in the 
flood-tide of success or offered a victim on the altar of martyrdom—everywhere the 
Cross shines before him in resplendent glory—his light in darkness, solace in per- 
plexity, peace in death. 


The light not vainly glowed 

On that Damascus road; 

O! not for naught that Voice Divine was heard; 

The foeman was o’erthrown, 

The champion made thine own 

When right against thee in hot haste he spurred; 

Then streamed forth the world to win 

The mighty burning flame of love which hate had been. 


Henceforth, Saul of Tarsus takes his stand, not at Bethlehem, though there became 
incarnate the Ancient of Days, nor at Bethany; though there omnific power raised the 
dead, nor at Capernaum, though in its synagogue taught the great Teacher of the 
Ages, but by the Cross of Calvary where was shed once for all the redemptive blood of 
the Son of God! Christ and Him crucified becomes now and forever the theme of 
his preaching, the burden of his service, the ground of his boast, the source of his 
inspiration, the foundation of his hopes, the occupant of his heart and the law of his 
life. “Two things,” once exclaimed Goethe, ‘‘two things awaken sublimity within me— 
the starry heavens and man’s moral nature.” ‘““Two things,” Paul might have 
exclaimed, “two things awaken enthusiasm within me—the Cross of Jesus and men’s 
moral nature redeemed and elevated by its divine influence and power.” 

II. Again it is a bold, heroic purpose set forth in the text. Sometimes, when in 
search for examples of heroism, we bring before our minds such scenes as Chrysostom 
before Eudoxia, or Athanasius before Constantine in the streets of Constantinople, or 
Ambrose before Theodosius in the porch of Milan cathedral or Luther at Worms, but, 
to my mind, the annals of human history present us few grander pictures of boldness 
of purpose, stability of character, moral heroism than the one in the text: such a man 
as Paul at such a time as this, declaring such words as these—a man, almost friendiess 
and alone, behind him Athens and its scepticism and Philippi and its prison and 
scourgings; before him martyrdom for the sake of truth; about him a city where human 
wisdom is exalted, the Cross despised and its victim hated, and yet, bold as a lion, 


Christ Crucified—Tupper. 755 


his face turns still towards Calvary and his voice lifts up the cry: “I determined to 
know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” How grandly does 
he actualize, in his superb attitude, the poet’s conception: 


As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form, 

Swells from the vale and mid way leaves the storm, 
Though round its head the rolling clouds are spread 
Eternal sunshine settles on its head. 


Ah! this is the man that for the Gospel of the Cross can sacrifice the pride of birth 
and position and learning and religion to join himself to a despised sect, be stoned at 
Lystra, assaulted at Lykonia, attacked at Ephesus, can reprove the ruler who holds his 
life in his hands, pronounce terrible anathemas against the corrupters of the Gospel, 
preach the truth in the household of brutal Nero, and, at last await the martyr’s death 
with the calm, brave words: “I am ready to be offered.” Heroic soul! Well 
deservest thou the crown which now thou dost wear in glory amid the ineffable 
splendors of the New Jerusalem! 

III. In the third place, not only is the purpose of the text single, all-absorbing 
and heroic, it is also rational, well grounded and divinely-guided. Our apostle was 
always intelligent in his utterances. His emotions never ran away with his judgment, 
his knowledge and zeal kept equal pace. His naturally superb powers were quickened 
by grace in all their parts. His intellect was too vast to be cramped in any narrow 
view of truth, any restricted range of sentiment, any circumscribed conception of 
Christianity. And when, in the text, he speaks as he does, he utters no language of 
fanaticism or ignorance, but speaks the words of soberness and truth, of intelligence 
and wisdom. “Jesus Christ and Him crucified,” is the central, fundamental, energizing 
truth of the Christian system—not Christ the perfect man, nor Christ the elevating 
teacher, nor Christ the self-sacrificing philanthropist, but Christ “mighty to save” 
through the unlimited power of His redeeming blood. 


As another has said, “the heart of the gospel is redemption, and the essence of 
redemption is the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Christianity’s 
center is the Cross. From this scene of shame and glory, anguish and victory, all the 
radia of the Gospel go out in lines of living light. Redemption is the grand principle 
into which all our religion—doctrinal, experimental and practical—may be generalized. 
There is no truth in revelation that does not point to the atoning Son of God; no right 
desire of human nature that does not meet in Him; no duty in life of which He is not 
either the perfect fulfillment or the most cogent incentive. 


In the Cross, says Spurgeon truly, man may behold the concentration of eternal 
thought, the focus of infinite purpose, the center of divine and illimitable wisdom; for 
Christ Crucified is the corner-stone of all Christian creed and practice, worship and 
discipline, union and extension. 


From this great center-truth—therefore, Paul expands his intellect in every 
direction, compassing the whole circumference of divine revelation from the eternal 
decrees of Jehovah to the eternal destiny of the human soul. 


The epistle to the Romans is one of the most comprehensive, the epistle to the 
Galatians one of the most complete, the epistle to the Hebrews one of the most 
wonderful emanations of the Divine Spirit, through the human mind: and the center 
of each, the inspiration of each is “Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” The wisdom of 
Corinth might esteem our author a contracted bigot, and Herod himself and Festus 
sneer at him as “mad,” but his was the most expansive philosophy, the most elevated 
morality, the most God-like philanthropy and the most genuine piety the world had 
ever known, as taught and illustrated by a mere man, and all, all had its source and 


- | 


756 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


power in the simpie, yet sublime, the contemptible, yet glorious, the repulsive, yet 
attractive doctrine of an Incarnate Christ and His redemptive cross. 

Let us look more carefully and minutely into the intelligence of Paul’s position in 
the text. Among the many thoughts connected with the cross in its relation to 
Christianity, three stand out in bold relief: ' 

1. Jesus Christ and Him crucified is pre-eminently and gloriously a Bible theme. 
Note I do not say, New Testament, but Bible, theme. The whole word of God finds 
its central doctrine and reaches its most glorious culmination in the person and work 
of an atoning Redeemer. 

It is a noted saying of the great French preacher Massillon, that all the lines of 
past human history converge in Jesus, and all the lines of history to come diverge from 
Him. : 

With equal truth we may say that all the revelation of God gathers in and about 
the crucified Christ. All the older revelation points to Him and centers in Him; all 
the newer revelation proceeds from Him. The lines of God’s eternal truth cross and 
tecross in Him. Here emphatically 


The Old Testament is the New Testament concealed, 
The New Testament is the Old Testament revealed. 


In arguing this proposition, we need, I think, devote no time to proving that the 
Cross is the center of the New Testament teaching, for it is but an axiom 
to say that Christ crucified is the heart of Christianity. But we would emphasize— 
because the fact is not sufficiently realized—that so also is it in the Old Testament. 
He reads this grand old Book amiss, who fails to see running, like a thread of gold, 
through all its warp and woof—through genealogy, type, prophecy, psalm and history, 
both national and individual—the glorious doctrine of redemption through a future 
Messiah, slain from the foundation of the world. The former revelation is the shadow 
of that of which the latter is the substance, the illustration of that of which it is the 
reality. At the heart of the Old dwells the glory of the New, “as a rich jewel may 
flash from the center of a curious, antique setting.”” We mistake when we calculate our 
Christian era as only 2,000 years old. Christ, the eternal Son, lived in our world before 
He was born into our world. Nineteen hundred and four years ago He was born of 
Mary, but six thousand years ago He was born of human hearts, the basis and center 
of human hopes. As Robertson so beautifully and forcefully puts it: “The eternal 
Word whispered in the souls of men before it spoke articulately aloud in the Incarna- 
tion. It was a divine thought before it became a divine expression. It was the light 
that lighteth every man that cometh into the world before it blazed into the day-spring 
from on high which visited us. The mind of Christ—the spirit of the years yet future— 
blended itself with life before He came, for His words were the eternal verities of our 
humanity.” Eternally Jesus existed. Abraham saw His day and rejoiced. The dying 
Jacob hailed Him as Shiloh. He was the Star of Balaam’s prophecy. Job beheld Him 
as the divine daysman, laying His hand on both God and man. He was the branch 
of Isaiah, consumed for human salvation. He was Micah’s being of Pre-existence 
and Malachi’s Angel of the Covenant. Yea, from that glad day when Jehovah whis- 
pered in the ear of Eve: “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head,” 
even down to the hour when angels chanted the cradle hymn over the New Born Babe 
of Bethlehem, Christ had lived on earth, a mighty, though invisible power, inspiring 
patriarchs to rejoice in His coming, psalmists to sing His praises, and prophets to 
ring out clarion notes in honor of His name. And the grand climax of this Christ- 
teaching in the older Revelation is contained in the magnificent and wondrous 
language of the fifth evangelist: “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was 
bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him and by His 


Christ Crucified—T upper. 757 


stripes we are healed.” Christ the Redeemer not in the Old Testament! As well tear 
out this heart from my breast and call my body a living being as extract Jesus crucified 
from the pages of this old writing, and call it the Word of God. Beautifully has 
Bushnell said, Christ is the “Sun to hold all the minor orbs of revelation in their places 
and power—a sovereign, self-evidencing light into all religion.” 

To proclaim, then, “Jesus Christ and Him Crucified,” is to proclaim Bible truth in 
its most exalted heights, its most magnificent breadths, its most unfathomable depths. 
For this reason, if for no other, Paul was intelligent in the position he takes before the 
Corinthians—for this reason, if for no other, the Cross may well be what a great mind 
has urged that it be, the perpetual text of all preaching, the perpetual theme of all 
religionists, the perpetual object of all devout scholarship. 


In the Cross of Christ I glory, _ 
Towering o’er the wrecks of time, 

All the light of sacred story, 
Gathers round its head sublime. 


2. In the second place, ‘Jesus Christ and Him Crucified,’ presents the truest, 
most authoritative and most consoling revelation of God—the only perfect mirror of 
the moral and affectionate nature of the Eternal Father. Instinctively the human 
heart yearns to know God, ‘“‘Shew us the Father and it suffices us,” is as truly the cry 
of universal humanity, as of the ancient disciple, Philip. And yet when men try to 
grasp God in the abstract, as a purely spiritual, invisible, intangible being, the concep- 
tion is altogether unsatisfactory. The idea is too sublime and awiul, if not too vague. 
We recall the oft-quoted passage from Macaulay, ‘“Logicians may reason about 
abstractions, but the great mass of mankind never feel the least interest in them. They 
must have images. God, the uncreated, the invisible, the incomprehensible, attracted 
few worshippers. It was before Deity embodied in human form, walking among men, 
partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, 
slumbering in their manger, bleeding on the Cross, that the prejudices of the syna- 
gogue and the doubts of the academy and the pride of the portico and the fasces of 
the victors and the swords of thirty legions were humbled in the dust.” Nothing is 
truer. To awaken and keep in exercise greatest energy and deepest affection, of human 
nature, there must be something real and tangible before the heart. The merely ideal 
cannot long sustain enthusiasm and devotion. ; 

And men, in going out after images or revelations of God, have been disappointed 
in every direction, except in Jesus Christ—‘‘God manifest in the flesh’—disappointed 
as they sought Him in Nature—this great gorgeous material universe of sun, and star 
and planet, of land and air, and ocean—in providence, the daily movement of individual 
and national history, with its strange intermixture of joy and sorrow, perplexity and 
adversity, or even in the Old Testament, that early revelation of God through patriarch, 
psalmist and prophet, with their yearning soul and anticipatory song and future hope. 
No one of these media presents God in that fullness and glory of His moral affection- 
ate attributes which cause the tired human heart to lean upon Him as Father. In 
each He is Jehovah, far-off, inaccessible, awful. Though nature is the living garment 
in which the Invisible One has robed His mysterious loveliness, yet within all her 
domain there is no revelation of moral attributes. Though the Old Testament speaks 
of God as “a great rock in a weary land” and “a sun and shield,” still something more 
is needed. “To see the sun,” says Emerson, “a man must have a sunny eye.” So to 
understand a personal God requires a Personal Revealer. The Boundless One must 
be limited. The Spiritual One must be incarnated. The Invisible One must be seen. 
The intangible One must be felt. “No man hath seen God at any time, the only 
begotten hath revealed Him,” or better, led Him forth. Christ is represented as the 


758 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person—more literally, 
the outflashing of His being and the character of His essence. In other words, He is 
for humanity Deity’s expression, actualization, without which no man hath ever seen 
God, nay more hath ever-felt the perfect joy of His glorious presence. We sympathize 
with the poet’s lines: 


Till God in human flesh I see, 
My thoughts no comfort find; 

The sacred, just and awful Three 
Are terrors to my mind. 


But when Immanuel’s face appears, 
My hopes, my joys begin, 

His grace relieves my slavish fears, 
His blood doth cleanse my sin. 


Let Jews on their own law rely, 
And Greek of wisdom boast, 

I love the Incarnate mystery, 
And there I fix my trust. 


And nowhere has our Lord and Master revealed God in all the beauty and glory 
of His moral attributes, as on the Cross. Divinity’s reflection is here complete. Is 
God a God of love? See Him here yielding up His life for the world’s redemption— 
love in its illimitableness and in its far-reaching aim. Is God a God of forgiveness? 
Gaze upon Jesus as throwing the arms of divine sympathy around hardened soldier 
and mocking Pharisee, He intercedes for their pardon. Is God a God of salvation? 
Hear the words of eternal life which Jesus here speaks to the dying robber. O! 
brethren and friends, is it too much to declare that in the amplitude of the infinite love 
of “Jesus Christ and Him Crucified” every other element and characteristic of divinity 
has been manifested to the world. If poor Carlyle had seen God thus, he would never 
have been overheard saying, just before his death, ‘I can believe in a God only that 
does something, God has done nothing.” His was the intuitive belief of mind, a belief 
drawn from nature and history. Had he laid hold by faith on the historic Christ he 
would never have exclaimed: “God has done nothing,’ but would have beheld 
Jehovah as a God who had rent the veil of heaven and come forth Incarnate—a God 
with whom every soul may have personal, conscious, responsible relations in duty—a 
God to fear, a God to love, a God to adore, a God to serve—a God who in the infini- 
tude of His compassion has given His only begotten Son as a sacrifice for sin. O! 
blessed Christ, He that hath seen Thee hath seen the Father in all the might of His 
power, the magnificence of His glory, the tenderness of His compassion! 

3. Finally, Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the only propitiation for human sin 
and the divinely-wrought magnet to draw human hearts to God. From the earliest 
day of man’s existence on earth, the supreme question of his immortal being has been 
the vexed old question that puzzled even the “‘perfect and upright” patriarch of Uz, 
How shall man be just with God? “It may be,” says an eminent writer, “an offering 
of first-fruits or the shedding of blood of rams or bullocks; it may be the sacrifice of 
the fairest of the captives; it may be sprinkling of human blood upon an idol; it may 
be a father burning his children on the brazen knees of Moloch or a mother throwing 
her babe in the Ganges, or a devotee submitting his own person to torture on an iron 
hook, or lying down on a bed of spikes, or living year by year tormented by sackcloth 
and flagellations, fastings and vigils,’ yet everywhere there is the same heart-moving 
cry: How shall man be just with God? And it is not within the province of science 
or philosophy or ethics to answer. None of these can bind together the sinless and 


Christ Crucified—T upper. 759 


the sinful, the Infinite and the finite, the creator and the creature—none can bridge the 
deep and awful chasm that yawns between heaven and earth, God and man. Nor does 
natural religion hold out any hope here. Buddhism, Brahminism, Confucianism—the 
cry of each of these systems is but the echo of Lady Macbeth’s exclamation of anguish: 


Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? 


“Plato, Plato,” said Socrates, “it may be that the gods can forgive deliberate sin, 
but how, I can never tell.”’ 

Now before the bowed head and bleeding heart of impotent humanity steps forth 
Christianity with its crucified Christ, and declares, as it points to the world’s Redeemer, 
“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.’” 
“He tasted death for every man.” “He is the propitiation for the sin of the whole 
world.” “His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” And then that 
magnificent declaration that seems to sum up all, “If the blood of bulls and goats and 
ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh, how 
much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself 
without spot to God, purge your consciences from dead works to serve the living God.” 
And in that Christ, and Him alone, find we a personal revelation and a satisfactory 
demonstration of an atoning sacrifice for sin. 

To use Krummacher’s beautiful figure, the Cross is the condition which carries off 
the destroying flash from our race by Christ attracting it to Himself. “I, if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men to me,” that is the divine decree, the eternal fiat. “Lifted up.” 
Not through physical force. Mohammed and the Picardian hermit may trust to the 
sword. Not through merely intellectual supremacy. Plato and Socrates excelled in 
that. Not simply through moral teaching. Seneca is conspicuous as a moralist. Not 
through any nor through all of these would the Son of Man lift the universe to the 
throne of God, but through the reconciliation of man to God and God to man by the 
all-efficacious blood of an everlasting Covenant. ‘Sacrifice,’ says Baron Bronson, “‘is 
the fundemental mystery of all religion, whether considered as worship or life,’ and 
the death is the glorious revelation of what before was concealed, or as Luthardt so 
beautifully expresses it, “Heathenism was the seeking religion and Judaism the hoping 
religion. Christianity is the reality of all that heathenism sought and Judaism hoped 
for.” “Only this I know,” writes DeWette in closing his commentary, “in no other 
is there salvation save in Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” 

Let me today, Fathers and brethren, emphasize that truth, with all the fervor and 
power of deep, ineradicable conviction. This doctrine is in danger, I am convinced, 
of at least partial eclipse in our day. Opening a book lately, I read these words: 
“According to the doctrines of the old-school men, we are condemned for a sin not our 
own and rescued by a righteousness equally not our own. But intelligent men are 
casting away that superstition today, and holding that man stands before his Creator 
for what he and not another, is.” And again, “Jesus is a Savior, not because He died. 
but because He lived. There was no magic power in His death. The cross plays no 
part in human redemption.” What? No part in human redemption! “T, if I be lifted 
up’”’—“this,” adds the evangelist, “said he, signifying what death He should dic.” If 
language means anything, if words have any force, here is projected the glorious, 
magnificent, heaven-born conception of the cross as the power 0: God unto salvation 
to all believing spirits. 

Believe me, friends, there is no peradventure here. The cross is no experiment. 
As sure as Jesus was crucified and as sure as the oath of God is true, so true is there 
redemption on Calvary. The wisdom which conceived the plan of the satisfaction of 
the divine government by the sacrifice of the Son of God Himself in the place of the 


760 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


sinner is unerring wisdom. The authority which commanded the execution and 
promised redemption is as unquestioned as the right of the Almighty to the throne of 
the universe. The power which is arranged for the accomplishment of the purpose is 
the power able to bring under contribution to this end the whole machinery of nature 
and grace—even the power of the Lord God Omnipotent. And the love which 
inspired the wisdom to conceive and the authority to command and the power to 
execute is the unchangeable nature of Jehovah himself. : 


O glorious cross! Faith trusts the day to see 
When hope shall turn all eyes, love draw all hearts to thee! 


Two practical lessons from the truth of the text may be briefly stated in conclusion: 
(1.) Jesus Christ and Him Crucified, should be the central theme of the Christian 

ministry. Dr. Payson realized this when, in addressing a body of ministers, he 
earnestly said, “I beseech you, brethren, paint Jesus upon your canvas, and then hold it 
up for the applause of an admiring world.” The great French preacher, Bourdalone, 
realized this, when told by Louis XIV that all the world was moved by his eloquence 
and learning, he humbly expressed the wish that all the human praise which his 
eloquence and learning evoked might be hung as a garland on the Cross of Calvary. 
The consecrated Father of the early Christian Church realized this, when, full of the 
Spirit of God, he exclaimed, “Were the highest heaven my pulpit and the whole host 
of the redeemed my audience and eternity my day, Jesus alone would be my theme.” 
Ah! well do they speak thus. The message of the pulpit should be characteristically 
and invariably Christo-centric—Christ the God, Christ the man, Christ the God man, 
the dying Christ, the risen Christ, the reigning Christ, Christ the end of the law to 
every one that believeth. Of all the themes that inspire human hearts and fire human 
lips, this alone is sufficient to magnify the name of God, exalt the divine Son, convict 
and convert human souls and transform a Paradise Lost with all its blight and woe 
into a Paradise Regained with all its celestial songs and eternal triumphs; and prompted 
by this conviction—nay, held by it as yon planet is held in its orbit by the law of 
gtavity—each ambassador of Christ should, with his face turned to his Master, lift the 
prayer— 

In offering thy salvation free 

Let all absorbing thought of thee 

My mind and soul engross; 

And when all hearts are moved and stirred 

Beneath the influence of thy Word, 

Hide me behind Thy cross! 


Christ! Christ! Not ethics, nor moral philosophy, not astronomy, nor geology, 
not history, nor political economy, but Christ on Calvary’s summit, the center of 
humanity’s highest hopes, noblest aspirations and divinest life. As Fra Angelico, the 
saintly Italian painter, would never go to his palette and brush to do work on the 
figure of Jesus without first partaking of the communion, so let us, brethren of the 
ministry, precede our pulpit duties by a prayerful visit to Calvary and its cross. 

(2.) Jesus Christ and Him crucified should be our grandest inspiration in all 
church work and missionary enterprise. “Wherever,” writes the author of Chris- 
tianity’s Challenge, “wherever Christ crucified has been expunged from the creed and 
the life, there has been no aggressive force, no regenerative influence, no transforming 
power.” This may seem to some the language of exaggeration, if not fanaticism, but it 
is a great, solemn fact—a fact taught in God’s Word, confirmed by observation and 
verified by experience: “Without me ye can do nothing.” “T, if I be lifted up, will 
draw all men to me.” Eradicate the cross and faith fails, hope dies, love grows cold 


Christ Crucified—T upper. 761 


and the whole Christian profession becomes as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal; 
emphasize the cross, and all Christians develop in beauty and strength, and under the 
ennobling influence the believer is inspired to exclaim, “The love of Christ constrains 
us, because He died for all, that they who live should not henceforth live unto them- 
selves but unto Him who died for them and rose again.’ The Cross is Christianity’s 
hope as well as its center. Already the mightiest currents of feeling flowing through 
the world have their source in the crucified Son of God, and under His triumphant 
banner the Church of the Living God is marching forth, bright as the sun, fair as the 
moon, terrible as an army against every opposing element hastening 


“The one far off, divine event 
To which the whole creation moves’— 


the subduing of the Kingdom of this world by the Kingdom of our Lord and His 
Christ! 
For lo! the days are hastening on, 
By prophet-bards foretold, 
When with the ever-rolling years 
Comes back the age of gold 
When peace shall over all the earth 
Her final splendors sing 
And the. whole world send back the song 
Which now the angels sing. 


God give each of us some humble part in this glad consummation for His Name’s 
sake! Amen. 

[Kerr Boyce Tupper was born at Washington, Ga., February 2, 1854, graduating 
from Mercer University in 1871, receiving degree of D. D. from Central University. 
For some years has been pastor of the First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, Pa. Among 
his published works are Gladstone and other Addresses, Seven Great Lights, Popular 
Treatise on Baptism, English Synonyms, etc.] 


762 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


SALT. 


HENRY VAN DYKE) D. DS LEA 


“Ye are the salt of the earth.’—St. Matthew 5: 13. 


One of the books which used to be considered indispensable to the library of a 
well-furnished clergyman in the last century was called ‘‘The Complete Duty of Man.” 
It is an excellent, large volume, of many pages. But the Divine Master has put the 
essence of it into this one word—Salt. 

The figure of speech is plain and pungent. Salt is savory, purifying, preservative. 
Tt is one of those superfluities which the great French wit defined as “things that are 
very necessary.” From the very beginning of human history men have set a high 
value upon it and sought for it in caves and by the sea-shore. The nation that had a 
good supply of it was counted rich. A bag of salt, among the barbarous tribes, was 
worth more than a man. The Jews prized it especially, because they lived in a warm 
climate where food was difficult to keep, and because their religion laid particular 
emphasis on cleanliness, and because salt was largely used in their sacrifices. 

Christ chose an image which was familiar, when He said to His disciples, “Ye are 
the salt of the earth.” This was His conception of their mission, their influence., They 
were to cleanse and sweeten the world in which they lived, to keep it from decay. to 
give a new and more wholesome flavor to human existence. Their character was not 
to be passive but active. The sphere of its action was to be this present life. There is 
no use in saving salt for heaven. It will not be needed there. Its mission is to 
permeate, season and purify things on earth. 


Now, from one point of view, it was an immense compliment for the disciples to 
be spoken to in this way. Their Master showed great confidence in them. He set a 
high value upon them. The historian Livy could find nothing better to express his 
admiration for the people of ancient Greece than this very phrase. He called them 
sal gentium “the salt of the nations.” 

But it was not from this point of view that Christ was speaking. He was not 
paying compliments. He was giving a clear and powerful call to duty. His thought 
was not that His disciples should congratulate themselves on being better than other 
men. He wished them to ask themselves whether they actually had in them the 
purpose and the power to make other men better. Did they intend to exercise a 
purifying, seasoning, saving influence in the world? Were they going to make their 
presence felt on earth, and felt for good? If not, they would be failures and frauds. 
The Savior would be out of them. They would be like lumps of rock-salt which has 
lain too long in a damp storehouse; good for nothing but to be thrown away and 
trodden under foot; worth less than common rock or common clay, because it would 
not even make good roads. Men of privilege without power waste material. Men of 
enlightenment without influence are the poorest kind of rubbish. Men of intellectual 
and moral and religious culture, who are not active forces for good in society, are not 
worth what it costs to produce and keep them. If they pass for Christians they are 
guilty of obtaining respect under false pretences. They were meant to be the salt of 
the earth. And the first duty of salt is to be salty. 

This is the subject on which I want to speak to you today. The saltiness of salt 
is the symbol of a noble, powerful, truly religious life. You college students are men 


Salt—V an Dyke. 763 


of privilege. It costs ten times as much, in labor and care and money, to bring’ you 
out where you are today, as it costs to educate the average man, and a hundred times 
as much as it costs to raise a boy without any education. This fact brings you face to 
face with a question: Are you going to be worth your salt? 

You have had mental training, and plenty of instruction in various branches of 
learning. You ought to be full of intelligence. You have had moral discipline, and 
the influences of good example have been steadily brought to bear upon you. You 
ought to be full of principle. You have had religious advantages and abundant induce- 
ments to choose the better part. You ought to be full of faith. What are you going 
to do with your intelligence, your principle, your faith? It is your duty to make active 
use of them for the seasoning, the cleansing, the saving of the world. Don’t be 
sponges. Be the salt of the earth. 

I. Think, first, of the influence for good which men of intelligence may exercise 
in the world, if they will only put their culture to the right use. Half the troubles of 
mankind come from ignorance—ignorance which is systematically organized with 
societies for its support and newspapers for its dissemination—ignorance which consists 
less in not knowing things, than in wilfully ignoring the things that are already known. 
There are certain physical diseases which would go out of existence in ten years if 
people would only remember what has been learned. There are certain political and 
social plagues which are propagated only in the atmosphere of shallow self-confidence 
and vulgar thoughtlessness. There is a yellow fever of literature specially adapted and 
prepared for the spread of shameless curiosity, incorrect information, and complacent 
idiocy among all classes of the population. Persons who fail under the influence of 
this pest become so triumphantly ignorant that they cannot distinguish between news 
and knowledge. They develop a morbid thirst for printed matter, and the more they 
read the less they learn. They are fit soil for the bacteria of folly and fanaticism. 

Now the men of thought, of cultivation, of reason, in the community ought to be 
an antidote to these dangerous influences. Having been instructed in the lessons of 
history and science and philosophy, they are bound to contribute their knowledge to 
the service of society. As a rule they are willing enough to do this for pay, in the 
professions of law and medicine and teaching and divinity. What I plead for today is 
the wider, nobler, unpaid service which an educated man renders to society simply by 
being thoughtful and by helping other men to think. 

The college men of a country ought to be its most conservative men; that is to 
say, the men who do most to conserve it. They ought to be the men whom dema- 
gogues cannot inflame, nor political bosses pervert. They ought to bring wild theories 
to the test of reason, and withstand rash experiments with obstinate prudence. When 
it is proposed, for example, to enrich the whole nation by debasing its currency, they 
should be the men who demand time to think whether real wealth can be created by 
artificial legislation. And if they succeed in winning time to think, the danger will 
pass—or rather it will be transformed into some other danger, requiring a new applica- 
tion of the salt of intelligence. For the fermenting activity of ignorance is incessant, 
and perpetual thoughtfulness is the price of social safety. 

But it is not ignorance alone that works harm in the body of society. Passion is 
equally dangerous. Take, for instance, a time when war is imminent. How easily 
and how wildly the passions of men are aroused by the mere talk of fighting. How 
ready they are to plunge into a fierce conflict for an unknown motive, for a base motive, 
or for no motive at all. Educated men should be the steadiest opponents of war while 
it is avoidable. But when it becomes inevitable save at cost of a failure in duty and a 
loss of honor, then they should be the most vigorous advocates of carrying it to a 
swift, triumphant. and noble end. No man ought to be too much educated to love 
his country and, if need be, to die for it. The culture which leaves a man without a 


764 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


flag is only one degree less miserable than that which leaves him without a God. To 
be empty of enthusiasms, and overflowing with criticisms, is not a sign of cultivation, 
but enervation. The best learning is that which intensifies a man’s patriotism as well 
as clarifies it. The finest education is that which puts a man in closest touch with his 
fellow-men. The true intelligence is that which acts, not as cayenne pepper to sting 
the world, but as salt to cleanse and conserve it. 

II. Think, in the second place, of the duty which men of moral principle owe to 
society in regard to the evils which corrupt and degrade it. Of the existence of these 
evils we need to be reminded again and again, just because we are comparatively clean 
and decent and upright people. Men who live an orderly life are in great danger of 
doing nothing else. We wrap our virtue up in little bags of respectability and keep it 
in the storehouse of a safe reputation. But if it is genuine virtue it is worthy of a 
better purpose than that. It is fit, nay it is designed and demanded, to be used as salt, 
for the purifying of human life. 

here are multitudes of our fellow-men whose existence is dark, confused, and 
bitter. Some of them are groaning under the burden of want; partly because of their 
own idleness or incapacity, no doubt, but partly also because of the rapacity, greed, 
and injustice of other men. Some of them are tortured in bondage to vice, partly by 
their own false choice no doubt, but partly also for want of guidance and good counsel 
and human sympathy. Every great city contains centers of moral decay which an 
honest man cannot think of without horror, pity and dread. The trouble is that many 
honest folk dislike these emotions so much that they shut their eyes, and walk 
through the world with their heads in the air, breathing a little atmosphere of their 
own, and congratulating themselves that the world goes very well now. But is it well 
that the things which eat the heart out of manhood and womanhood should go on in 
all our great towns? 


“Ts it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, 
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? 


“There, among the glooming alleys, Progress halts on palsied feet; 
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street. = 


“There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, 
And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.” 


Even in what we call respectable society, forces of corruption are at work. Are 
there no unrighteous practices in business, no false standards in social life, no licensed 
frauds and falsehoods in politics, no vile and vulgar tendencies in art and literature and 
journalism, in this sunny and self-complacent modern world of which we are a part? 
All these things are signs of decay. The question for us as men of salt is: What are 
we going to do to arrest and counteract these tendencies? It is not enough for us to 
take a negative position in regard to them. If our influence is to be real it must be 
positive. It is not enough to say “Touch not the unclean thing.” On the contrary, 
we must touch it, as salt touches decay to check and overcome it. Good men are 
not meant to be simply like trees planted by rivers of waters, flourishing in their own 
pride and for their own sake. They ought to be like the Eucalyptus trees which have 
been set out in the marshes of the Campagna, from which a healthful, tonic influence 
is said to be diffused to countervail the malaria. er ought to be like the Tree of 
Paradise, “whose leaves are for the healing of nations.” 

Where good men are in business, lying and cheating and gambling should be 
more difficult, truth and candor and fair dealing should be easier and more popular, 
just because of their presence. Where good men are in society grossness of thought 
and speech ought to stand rebuked, high ideals and courtliness and chivalrous actions 


Salt—Van Dyke. 765 


and the desire of fame and all that makes a man, ought to seem at once more desirable 
and more attainable to every one who comes into contact with them. 

There have been men of this quality in the world. It is recorded of Bernardino 
of Siena that when he came in to the room his gentleness and purity were so evident 
that all that was base and silly in the talk of his companions was abashed and fell into 
silence. Artists like Fra Angelico have made their pictures like prayers. Warriors 
like the Chevalier Bayard and Sir Philip Sidney and Henry Havelock and Chinese 
Gordon have dwelt amid camps and conflicts as knights of the Holy Ghost. Philoso- 
phers like John Locke and George Berkeley, men of science like Newton and Herschel, 
poets like Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning, have taught virtue by their lives. 
as well as wisdom by their works. Humanitarians like Howard and Wilberforce and 
Raikes and Charles Brace have given themselves to noble causes. Every man who 
will, has it in his power to make his life count for something positive in the redemption 
of society. And this is what every man of moral principle is bound to do if he wants 
to belong to the salt of the earth. 

There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop 
down and lift mankind a little higher. There is a nobler character than that which is 
merely incorruptible. It is the character which acts as an antidote and preventive of 
corruption. Fearlessly to speak the words which bear witness to righteousness and 
truth and purity; patiently to do the deeds which strengthen virtue and kindle hope in 
your fellow-men; generously to lend a hand to those who are trying to climb upward; 
faithfully to give your support and your personal help to the efforts which are making 
to elevate and purify the social life of the world—that is what it means to have salt in 
your character. And that is the way to make your life interesting and savory and 
powerful. The men that have been happiest, and the men that are best remembered, 
are the men that have done good. 

What the world needs today is not a new system of ethics. It is simply a larger 
number of people who will make a steady effort to live up to the system that we have 
already. There is plenty of room for heroism in the plainest kind of duty. The 
greatest of all wars has been going on for centuries. It is the ceaseless, glorious. 
conflict against the evil that is in the world. Every warrior who will enter that age- 
long battle may find a place in the army, and win his spurs, and achieve honor, and 
obtain favor with the great Captain of the Host, if he will but do his best to make life 
purer and finer for every one that lives it. 


It is one of the burning questions of today whether university life and training 
really fit men for taking their share in this supreme conflict. There is no abstract 
answer; but every college class that graduates is a part of the concrete answer. 
Therein lies your responsibility, gentlemen. It lies with you to illustrate the meanness 
of an education which produces learned shirks and refined skulkers; or to illuminate 
the perfection of an unselfish culture with the light of devotion to humanity. It lies 
with you to confess that you have not been strong enough to assimilate your privileges; 
or to prove that you are able to use all that you have learned for the end for which it 
was intended. I believe the difference in the results depends very much less upon the 
educational system than it does upon the personal quality of the teachers and the men. 
Richard Porson was a university man, and he seemed to live chiefly to drink port and 
read Greek. Thomas Guthrie was a university man, and he proved that he meant 
what he said in his earnest verse: 


“T live for those who love me, For the wrongs that need resistance, 
For those who know me true, For the cause that lacks assistance, 
For the heaven that bends above me, For the future in the distance, 


And the good that I can do; And the good that I can do.” 


766 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


III. It remains only to speak briefly, in the third place, of the part which religion 
ought to play in the purifying, preserving and sweetening of society. Hitherto I have 
spoken to you simply as men of intelligence and men of principle. But the loftiest 
reach of reason and the strongest inspiration or morality is religious faith. I know 
there are some thoughtful men, upright men, unselfish and useful men, who say that 
they have no such faith. But they are very few. And the reason of their rarity is 
because it is immensely difficult to be unselfish and useful and thoughtful, without a 
conscious faith in God, and the divine law, and the gospel of salvation, and the future 
life. I trust that none of you are going to try that desperate experiment. I trust that 
all of you have religion to guide and sustain you in life’s hard and perilous adventure. 
If you have, I beg you to make sure that it is the right kind of religion. The name 
makes little difference. The outward form makes little difference. |The test of its 
reality is its power to cleanse life and make it worth living; to save the things that are 
most precious in our existence from corruption and decay; to lend a new luster to our 
ideals and to feed our hopes with inextinguishable light; to produce characters which 
shall fulfill Christ’s word and be “‘the salt of the earth.” a 

Religion is something which a man cannot invent for himself, nor keep to himself. 
If it does not show in his conduct, it does not exist in his heart. If he has just barely 
enough of it to save himself alone, it is doubtful whether he has even enough for that. 
Religion ought to bring out and intensify the flavor of all that is best in manhood, and 
make it fit, to use Wordsworth’s noble phrase— 


“For human nature’s daily food.” 


Good citizens, honest workmen, cheerful comrades, true friends, gentle men—that is 
what the product of religion should be. And the power that produces such men is the 
great antiseptic of society, to preserve it from decay. : 

Decay begins in discord. It is the loss of balance in an organism. One part of 
the system gets too much nourishment, another part too little. Morbid processes are 
established. Tissues break down. In their debris all sorts of malignant growths take 
root. Ruin follows. 

Now this is precisely the danger to which the social organism is exposed. From 
this danger, religion is meant to preserve us. Certainly there can be no true Chris- 
tinanity which does not aim at this result. It should be a balancing, compensating, 
regulating power. It shouid keep the relations between man and man, between class 
and class, normal and healthful and mutually beneficient. It should humble the pride 
of the rich and moderate the envy of the poor. It should soften and ameliorate the 
unavoidable inequalities of life, and transform them from causes of jealous hatred into 
opportunities of loving and generous service. If it fails to do this, it is salt without 
savor, and when a social revolution comes, as the consequence of social corruption, 
men will cast out the unsalted religion and tread it under foot. 

Was not that what happened in the French Revolution? What did men care for 
the religion that had failed to curb sensuality and pride and cruelty under the oppress- 
ion of the old regime, the religion, that’ had forgotten to deal bread to the hungry, 
to comfort the afflicted, to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free? What did 
they care for the religion that had done little or nothing to make men understand and 
love and help one another? Nothing. It was the first thing that they threw away 
in the madness of their revolt and trampled in the mire of their contempt. 

But was the world any better off without that false kind of religion than with it? 
Did the revolution really accomplish anything for the purification and preservation of 
society? No, it only turned things upside down, and brought the elements that had 
been at the bottom, to the top. It did not really change the elements, or sweeten life, 
or arrest the processes of decay. The only thing that can do this is the true kind of 
religion, which brings men closer to one another by bringing them all nearer to God. 


God Calling to Man—V’aughan. 767 


Some people say that another revolution is coming in our own age and our own 
country. It is possible. There are signs of it. There has been a tremendous 
increase of luxury among the rich in the present generation. There has been a great 
increase of suffering among the poor in certain sections of our country. It was a 
startling fact that nearly six millions of people in 1896 cast a vote of practical discontent 
with the present social and commercial order. It may be that we are on the eve of a 
great overturning. I do not know. I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet. 
But I know that there is one thing that can make a revolution needless, one thing that 
is infinitely better than any revolution; and that is a real revival of religion—the 
religion that has already founded the hospital and the asylum and the free school, the 
religion that has broken the fetters of the slave and lifted womanhood out of bondage 
and degradation, and put the arm of its protection around the helplessness and inno- 
cence of childhood, the religion that proves its faith by its works, and links the 
preaching of the fatherhood of God to the practice of the brotherhood of man. That 
religion is true Christianity, with plenty of salt in it which has not lost its savor. 

I believe that we are even now in the beginning of a renaissance of such religion, 
greater than the world has seen since the days of the Reformation. I believe that 
there is a rising tide of desire to find the true meaning of Christ’s teaching, to feel the 
true power of Christ's life to interpret the true significance of Christ’s sacrifice, for 
the redemption of mankind. I believe that never before were there so many young 
men of culture, of intelligence, of character, passionately in earnest to find the way of 
making their religion speak, not in word only, but in power. I call you today, my 
brethren, to take your part, not with the idle, the frivolous, the faithless, the selfish, 
the gilded youth, but with the earnest, the manly, the devout, the devoted, the golden 
youth. I summon you to do your share in the renaissance of religion, for your own 
sake, for your fellow-men’s sake, for your country’s sake. On this fair Sunday, when 
all around us tells of bright hope and glorious promise, let the vision of our country, 
with her perils, with her opportunities, with her temptations, with her splendid powers, 
with her threatening sins, rise before our souls. What needs she more in this hour, than 
the cleansing, saving, conserving influence of right religion? What better service 
could we render her than to set our lives to the tune of these words of Christ, and be 
indeed the salt of our country, and through her growing power, of the whole earth? 
Ah, bright will be the day, and full of glory, when the bells of every church, of every 
school-house, of every college, of every university, ring with the music of this message, 
and find their echo in the hearts of the youth of America. That will be the chime of 
a new age. 


“Ring in the valiant man and free, Ring out the darkness of the land, 
The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring in the Christ that is to be.” 


[Henry Van Dyke was born at Germantown, Pa., November 10, 1852; graduate 
Brooklyn Poytechnic 1869, Princeton College 1873, Princeton Theological Seminary 
1877, Berlin University 1879. He received degrees from Princeton, Harvard, Yale 
and Union. His first pastorate was at the United Congregational Church, Newport, 
R. I., 1878, and from 1882 to 1900 was pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church, New York. 
He was preacher to Harvard, and is trustee of Princeton. He is said to have attained 
the highest literary reputation of any preacher in America, his short stories for maga- 
zines commanding as high compensation as is paid to any one. His Little Rivers is 
the Izaak Walton complete angler of the nineteenth century, and his Gospel for an 
Age of Doubt is one of the strongest contributions to Christian literature. Since 1900 
he has occupied a chair at Princeton. 

This was the baccalaureate sermon delivered at Columbia University in 1898. ] 


768 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


GOD CALLING TO MAN. 


CHARLES JOHN VAUGHAN, D.D. 


“And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?”— 
Genesis 3: 9. 

“I wish,” said a great man of our day, “that some one would preach under the 
dome of St. Paul’s, on the text, ‘Where art thou, Adam?’?” A noble subject, my 
brethren, when we think of it! But who is equal to the task of handling it? The 
word of God is quick and powerful—may it be so now, He Himself using it, and pros- 
pering it in the thing whereto He sent it. 

I shall ask you to look very closely into the text itself. I need not tell any one 
whence it comes; from the midst of that awful story which tells us of the first sin, and 
of its immediate consequences. That same story is in substance acted over and over 
again in every marked sin that is ever done by any man: the same mode of temptation; 
first the inward question, ‘““Yea, hath God said? is this thing which I wish to do really 
forbidden?” and then the thought of the hardship; “God doth know that this which 
He has forbidden is something desirable, something delightful; it is hard that it should 
be denied me;’’ and then the growing confidence, ‘I shall not surely die for it;” and 
then the last review of all the advantages, ‘‘good for food—pleasant to the eyes—to be 
desired to make me wise, or to make me happy, or to make me independent;” and 
then the act itself—the taking and the eating; and then the sense of leanness entering 
into the very soul. But that is not all which sin brings after it. The text tells us of 
a summons, and after the context of an arraigning, and an examination, and at first a 
self-excusing, and then of a conviction, and a silencing, and a judgment: only one 
little word of comfort, one little streak of light, amidst all the sorrow, and all the curse, 
and all the gloom. 


But I intend to sever the text now somewhat from its context, and to look into 
it, with you, by itself alone. “The Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, 
Where art thou?” There is the speaker—God, the Lord God. There is the person 
spoken to—Adam, the first man; Adam, from whom we all sprang; the father, and 
the likeness, and the representative of us all. There is the nature of the address—a 
call, a summons, decisive, authoritative, majestic. There are, at last, the words 
uttered: few and plain, yet, when looked into, big with meaning—‘Where art thou?” 
And we shall not end without appealing to all of you, to each one of you separately, 
to answer that question; to answer it truly, as we shall all have to answer it one day. 

' 1. Now I shall not occupy your time, or use many words, about the speaker. 
There are those who profess to doubt the being of God; and there are those, on the 
other hand, who profess to prove it. I shall not suspect you of the one, and I shall not 

endeavor to do the other. I am quite sure that in your inmost hearts you do not 
' doubt His being; and I am quite certain that, if you do, I cannot prove it to you. The 
being of God is not a matter of argument, it is a matter of instinct. The doubt or 
denial of it may pass muster with scoffing men in robust health and prosperous circum- 
stances; but nine out of ten of those same men, finding themselves in sudden danger, 
by land or sea, from accident or disease, will be heard praying: they may conceal it, 
they may disown it, they may be ashamed of it afterwards—but they did it: and that 
prayer was a witness, an unimpeachable witness, that down in the depths of their 


God Calling to Man—V aughan. 769 


heart there was a belief in God all the time; in their works alike and in their words 
they deny Him, but in their inmost souls, like the very spirits of evil, they believe and 
tremble. God, then, speaks here. I tell you not who He is: you know it; you know 
that there is such a person, your Creator, your Ruler, your Judge: happy if you know 
also that He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! 

2. Now, to whom does He here speak? I will say two things of His call as here 
described. First, that it is an individual call; and, secondly, that it is a universal call. 
We try to make God's call a vague one. It is for some one, no doubt; but every 
natural man tries to put it away from himself. In hearing a sermon, every one thinks 
how suitable this reproof or that warning is to his neighbor; he goes away to wish that 
such a person had heard it, to hope that such a person listened to it; but the person 
who thus hopes, and, probably too, the person thus hoped about, never thought of 
taking it home—never said to himself, though he was but too ready to say to another, 
“Thou art the man.” Nevertheless, God’s call is an individual one. The only use of 
it is to be so. O that we could hear it in that spirit! O that we could practice our- 
selves in so hearing it! Where art thou? not, where is He? still less, generally, where 
are they? Read the Bible thus, my brethren, as written for you, for your learning, for 
your reproof, for your comfort—yours individually and personally—and you will never 
read it in vain. 

But this individual call is also universal. Let us not flatter ourselves that we are 
more to God than others are: it is a very common, though a well disguised notion. 
We think that our souls are more important than any others; and that is the least form 
of the error: but we go on to think our faults are more excusable, our sins more venial, 
than those of others; we go on to think that God will spare us when He does not spare 
others; we go on to think that our virtues are greater, our self-denials more meritori- 
ous, than those of others; and by this time we have got farther away from the truth 
and the gospel, than the poor self-accusing, self-condemning sinner who feels, and 
denies it not, that he is yet in the gall of bitterness, in the very bond of iniquity. 

The call of God, like the care of God, is universal. It is to the race. It is to His 
creatures. Hear the word—The Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him.” 
If it had been, God called to Abraham, or to Moses, or to David, there would have 
been some particularity, perhaps some limitation, in the summons; but none of us can 
say he is not included when Adam is spoken to: he is, indeed, the father of us all: of 
him we all come. What God says to him, He certainly says to us—to us all, as to each 
of us. ; 

3. But we ask, perhaps, thirdly, How does God call to us? I will say, in three 
ways. He calls within—in conscience. Can you tell me what that thing is in each of 
us which seems at orce so intimate with us, yet so independent of us, that it knows, 
everything we do, or say, or even think, and yet sits in judgment upon us for every- 
thing? Is it not a strange thing? We should expect that the whole man would move 
together; that, if we did a thing, if we said a thing, if we thought a thing, we should 
go along with it, we should approve of that thing: but is it so? No; we carry about 
within us a whole machinery of judicature; a witness, a jury, a judge, yes, an execu- 
tioner, too; and, strange to say, it is in early life that the process is most perceptible, 
just while we are most ignorant, least reflecting, least logical in our judgments. It 
is the work of many men through life to stifle the voice within, and at last they almost 
succeed: but do not tell me that you have no such voice within—certainly you will not 
say that you never had it; and I will tell you what that voice is, or was. It was the 
voice of the Lord God within, calling to Adam, and saying, “Where art thou?” “He 
calls also without—in providence. I really know not whether this be not the most 
persuasive of all His modes of calling to us; certainly it is the most authoritative of all. 
Conscience may be stifled, but providence grasps us very tightly—we cannot escape 


770 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


from it. Tell me, who caused you to be born where and what you were? who settled 
that you should be born in this country and not in that? who decided that you were to 
have poor parents or rich, Christian parents or unchristian? who has managed your 
circumstances for you since you had a being? who gave you, who has continued to 
you, your vigor of mind and body, your power of enjoyment, or your experience of 
kindness, or your principles of judgment, or your instincts of affection? who took 
away from you that friend for whom you are now mourning—that parent, that brother, 
that sister, that wife, that child? Yes, we may forget it, or we may fret under it, but 
in the hands of a Providence we all are; we are utterly powerless in that grasp: and 
whether we will believe it or no, that power is a voice too—a call from God without, 
even as conscience is His voice and His call within. Once more, God calls from 
above also—in revelation. My friend, believest thou the Scriptures? I know that 
thou believest. Your presence here seems to say that you do. And yet in this multi- 
tude how many must there be who do not in their hearts believe! let me rather say, 
who do not in their lives believe; for in your hearts I think you do: sure I am that 
there are some parts of the Bible which you cannot read and disbelieve; of course you 
may leave them unread, that is always possible—easier than to read them—but I do 
not think you can read the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, for example, in the Old Testa- 
ment, and I do not think you can read one chapter of St. John’s gospel in the New 
Testament, and shut the book, saying, ‘‘There is nothing in it.’ I suspect that is why 
we so often leave the Bible unread—just because we believe it; we feel, when we do 
read it, that it is God’s voice, and we do not want te hear that voice. The Bible is 
more its own witness than we like oftentimes to admit. 


“Who that has felt its glance of dread 
Thrill through his heart’s remotest cells, 
About his path, about his bed, 
Can doubt what spirit in it dwells?” 


4. God speaks; and speaks to us—to each of us and to all of us; and speaks, 
chiefly, in three ways—in conscience, in providence, in revelation: and now, fourthly, 
what is His call? how is it here briefly expressed? It might have been put, it is put 
in the Bible, in different forms—but how is it here expressed? ‘‘The Lord called unto 
Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” This is a call, first, to attention. As 
though God had said, Listen to me. That is the first step in all religion. What we 
want first is a spirit of attention. It is the great art of our enemy to keep our thoughts 
off religion. That is the meaning of the overwhelming cares of life, The devil would 
occupy our whole time and thoughts with something which is not, and has nothing 
(as he persuades us) to do with God. That is the meaning of the excessive amuse- 
ments of life. The cares of life are not enough to engross the attention of all men 
always; and therefore the enemy provides something which shall alternate with them 
for some men, and take the place of them for others. It is this art which God, in His 
mercy, in His long-suffering, in His desire that we should not perish, has to counteract 
by His divine skill. He takes a man aside now and then, from time to time—blessed 
be His name for it!—and makes him listen. He interposes by some chastisement, 
some sickness, some bereavement, and constrains him to hearken what He, the Lord 
God, has to say concerning him and to him. This is the first point gained. Behold, he 
listens! better still, Behold, he prayeth! It is a call, next, to the recognition of God’s 
being, and of our responsibility to Him. ‘Where art thou?” It is as if He had said, 
I am, and thou art mine. As if He had said, I have a right to know about thee, and 
thou canst not evade me. As if He had said, I am about, now, to enter into judgment 
with thee: give an account of thy stewardship. Yes, my brethren, it is an awful 
moment, when a man first becomes distinctly conscious that God is, and is something 


God Calling to Man—V aughan. 771 


to him. He may have talked of God before: he may have fancied that he knew all 
about Him: he may even have prayed before, and confessed himself before, and asked 
grace and help before: but now, for the first time, he sees how much more there is in 
all this than he has yet dreamed of; and the only words which he can find at all to 
express his new feeling, are those of the patriarch of old—‘I have heard of thee by 
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself, and 
_Tepent in dust and ashes.” 

It is a call, once more, and yet more particularly, to reflect upon our place or our 
position. I know not how else to express the force of the inquiry, “Where art thou” 
It may be read literally—of place. May not some one of those here assembled have 
been, ere now, perhaps often, perhaps quite recently, in some place in which the 
question, ‘“‘Where art thou?” would have had a startling and condemning sound?— 
some place where he was sinning? some place where he had gone to sin? some place 
where he would not for the world have been seen by any human eye, and where he 
gladly forgot that there was yet one eye which did see him? Oh, if God stood this 
night upon the earth, and called aloud to the “Adam” of this generation—to the men 
and the women who form now the-sum of the living human creation; if He should call 
them suddenly from the east and from the west to avow exactly where they were, and 
to come forth from that place as they were, without an instant allowed them to cover 
up and disguise themselves; oh, what a revelation would it be of action and of charac- 
ter; oh, who might abide the scrutiny of that question? oh, who could stand when that 
inquirer appeared? But, even if the literal local question could be well answered, 
there would remain yet another behind applicable to all men. ‘Where art thou?” is 
an inquiry as to position no less than place. It says, “What is thy present place as a 
man with a soul, as an immortal being? What is thy present standing, thy present 
state? Art thou safe? art thou happy? art thou useful? art thou doing the work I 
gave thee to do? Is it well with thee in the present? is it well with thee in the future? 
Say not, I cannot answer, I know not. I have taught thee how to judge of thyself; 
now therefore advise, and see what answer thou wilt return to Him that made thee.” 

5. My brethren, I propose, in the last place, that we all answer this question. It 
is a very serious thing to do; and it is what no man can do for his brother. Each one 
of us has one secret place, one sanctuary within the veil, into which, not even once a 
year, not even in the character of a High-priest, can earthly foot ever enter. Yet in 
that secret place shines forth the light of God's presence; a light never put out 
altogether in any man, so far at least, as its disclosing and revealing character is con- 
cerned, until sin and perverseness have done their perfect work, and the awful words 
are at length fulfilled, “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that 
darkness!’ At present, we will humbly hope, this last ruin has not been wrought in 
any one who hears me. And if not, I repeat it, we can all, if we will, answer God’s 
question, when He calls to each of us, as He does this night, and says, “Where art 
thou?” 

One of us, perhaps, answers, if he speaks truly, I am wandering. I have left my 
Father’s home; I took my portion of his goods, and carried them away into a far 
country. Yes, He was very generous to me; He grudged me nothing; life and health, 
food and clothing, even success in the world, even human friendship and human love, 
He gave me all these, and upbraided not: He warned me that I should be sorry one 
day if I left Him; He cautioned me against the perils of my way; He told me that I 
should not find happiness; He bade me, if I wished for that, to stay; He bade me, 
if I should ever be sorry that I had gone, to arise instantly and return. My heart was 
young then, and I thought I knew best: I left Him, with little feeling, with much 
expectation; His last look was one of regretful love that I left Him and I am a 
wanderer still. Sometimes I have arisen to go to my Father, but I went not: I was 


1 


772 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


ashamed, I was afraid, I thought I was too sinful, I felt myself unstable, I feared that 
I might relapse, I dreaded reproach, I dreaded ridicule, I dreaded, above all, the sight 
of that face:—and thus stayed where I was, in the far country—I am a wanderer, an 
outcast still. And another answers, like him to whom the question in the text was first 
put, I am hiding. I have sinned and I have not repented. I have eaten of the tree 
of which God said to me, “Thou shalt not eat of it, neither shalt thou touch it, lest 
thou die.” I believed the creature more than the Creator—the tempter more than the 
Savior. I went to the edge of temptation; I desired forbidden knowledge first, and 
then I could not rest until I knew by experience also; and now my heart is defiled, 
my conscience is defiled, my life is defiled;-I have lost all right to the beatific vision, 
for I am no longer pure in heart; now, when I hear the voice of the Lord God, I hide 
myself, because I know myself sinful, and because I know that He is of purer eyes 
than to look upon or tolerate iniquity. And another answers, I am resting. Earth is 
very pleasant to me; I have toiled and I have reaped; I have gathered myself a com- 
petence, I have found the happiness of lawful love; I have built myself a nest here, I 
have fenced it against the blasts of fortune, I am warm and tranquil within: let me 
alone a little while; it is not long that I can enjoy it; soon calamity may come, loss, 
sickness, death, into my peaceful home; then I will turn and seek Thee—not yet, O 
not just yet! And another says, I am working. Am I not doing Thy work? Am I 
not discharging the duties of my station? Am I not setting an example of diligence 
and sobriety? Am I not availing myself of the faculties which thou hast given to make 
myself respectable, and useful, and exemplary in my generation? How can I do all 
this, and yet be religious? How can I find time for both worlds at once? But yet, 
indeed, am I not providing for that other world in making a proper use of this? Let 
me alone a little while; when I have a convenient season, I will call for Thee. And 
another says, honestly, I am trifling. The world is so gay, so amusing, so exciting: 
hast Thou not made it so for our enjoyment? Oh, grudge me not my brief time of 
mirth and forgetfulness; I shall be serious enough one day. And another says, I am 
coming. Yes, Iam on my way. This is no world, I see it, of rest for me. There is 
no peace but in God: I sought it once elsewhere, and found it not: now I know my 
error: yes, I am coming, I am coming, I am on my way: but give me time: so great 
a change cannot be wrought all at once: heaven cannot be won in a day: give me 
time, and I will reach Thee. I am now using the means: I pray, I read the Bible, I 
go to Thy house, I partake in Christ’s supper: surely this is the way to Thee! 

Yes, my brother, but why this delay? Why this postponement of the desired 
result? Wilt thou be any fitter tomorrow than today for that step across the barrier 
which now seems so premature, so presumptuous? The word is very nigh thee: it is 
in thy mouth, it is in thy heart—thou knowest it well, even the word of faith—‘Believe 
on the Lord Jesus Christ,” at once, “and thou shalt be saved. Come unto me’—not 
to-morrow, but to-day—“all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
rest.” Are there any here present—God grant that they be many!—who have yet one 
other answer to return to the question on which we have dwelt? Thou sayest to me, 
O Lord, “Where art Thou?” Lord, I am a sinner in a world of danger: and I have 
learned that danger in myself; for I have fallen, and I have sinned against Thee, times 
without number; yet by Thy grace I have risen, and I have returned to Thee, and 
Thou hast accepted me in Thy Son, and hast endued me, according to my need, with 
Thy Holy Spirit. And now, Lord, my life is hid with Christ in Thee: He is my trust, 
He is my life, He is my hope; and the life that I now live upon earth, I live by faith 
in Him. Under Thy care, doing Thy work, thankful for Thy mercies, trusting in Thy 
strength, even now I am Thine, and hereafter I shall see Thee. Guide Thou my steps, 
make Thy way plain before me, in the days that remain to me, and at last receive me to 


God Calling to Man—V aughan. 773 


Thyself, disciplined, humbled, sanctified, that I may rest in Thee forever, and forever 
see Thy glory! 

My brethren the work of God in each of us would be almost accomplished, if this 
one call were heard within. Once let us know that God is speaking to us, and that He 
waits an answer; once let us feel that He is, and that He has a right in us, and that 
He cares for us, and that He is seeking us, and that He will have us to be saved, 
and all the rest will follow. May it be so now! May some wanderer this 
night, return to his Father; some hiding soul, this night, come forth from its lurking- 
place; some builder upon the sand lay, this night, his foundation upon the rock; some 
trifler be made serious; some worldly man turned heavenward—so that all may have 
cause to bless God for His word here spoken, and ascribe to Him, through eternal 
ages, thanksgiving, and blessing, and praise! 


[Charles John Vaughan, D. D., was born in 1816, was senior classic 1838, head- 
master of Harrow 1844-59, vicar of Doncaster 1860-69, master of the Temple 1869, and 
dean of Llandoff in 1879, refusing further promotion. His notes on the Epistles 
are highly valued, and his sermons are said by Dean —— of Denver to be the best 
examples of the spiritual and effectual of the century. He was at one time chaplain in 
ordinary to the Queen. 

The sermon was delivered at the cathedral church of St. Paul’s, London, the 
evening of January 22, 1860,] 


° 


774 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE GOSPEL INVITATION: 


W. F. WARREN, D. D. 


“The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.”—Reyv. 22:17. 

This little word, Come, is the keynote of the Bible, the call and catchword of all 
dispensations. Ever since man fell away from God, God has been calling him back. 
Five and twenty centuries ago it was by the lips of the venerable Isaiah. The then 
loud accents have grown soft and faint in the distance, but they are still distinct and 
musical: ‘‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye,..... come, .»... yea, come.” 
Eighteen centuries ago it was by the lips of His Son: “Ho, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, come.” Here in our text, the last living apostle, closing the last book of 
Divine Revelation, projects the same word forward into the coming ages, as the one 
thing never to be forgotten: “Come, and let him that heareth say, come, and who- 
soever will, let him take of the water of life freely.” That sweet voice of invitation 
is ringing on and on to-day. We all hear it. The Spirit is saying, Come. The Bride, 
which is the Church, is saying, Come. Everyone that heareth—to purpose—becomes 
transformed into a new herald and cries, Come. The athirst do come, and thus this 
glorious Gospel of the Kingdom is getting preached in all the world for a witness 
to all nations. 

Beloved, I stand here simply to vocalize once again this gracious call of the Spirit 
and Bride. Not to speculate, not to argue, not to rhapsodize,—simply to say out loud 
what God so often whispers in your hearts, to add the cords of a man to the drawings 
of the Father. I view myself simply as one more of the servants sent out: by the 
Master of the Feast, to cry in the highways and hedges, “‘All things are ready. Come!” 


And first of all, I fain would catch the ear of any in my audience who may be 
very far from the kingdom of heaven, who in heeding the call will have far to come. 
And-who is farthest from the kingdom? Our thoughts are apt to turn to the thief, 
the drunkard, the harlot, to descend to those dens of crime and infamy which have 
been fitly termed the breathing-holes of perdition. But are these people, after all, 
the most hopeless subjects for God’s invitation? Has not Christ rebuked such judg- 
ments in those scathing words which he addressed to the moral and highly respecta- 
ble Pharisees of his time: ‘Behold, the publicans and harlots enter into the kingdom 
before you.” I am inclined to think that in our land and time no class of men are 
farther from the kingdom than that small, intelligent, moral, and highly respected 
class of persons who aspire to be religious connoisseurs. They manifest not the least 
shyness in speaking of religious subjects, only this is noticeable, they are more apt 
to speak of religions than of religion. You, friend, yonder, are one of them. You 
think the religions are a most interesting study. You love to read what philotogists 
and philanthropists have written about their origin, their laws of development, their 
comparative merits. You are fond of philosophizing yourself in a modest way on these 
lofty subjects. Christianity, you deign to say, is a very good religion, but your trouble 
is that it is only one of many systems, any one of which is about as good as another, 
and no two of which can possibly be true. 

Very good. Let me ask you a question in this interesting field of research. 
Have you, in all your studies, ever found any other religion than the Christian which 
says, Come? 


od 


The Gospel Invitation—W arren. 775 


Allah does not say, “Come;” Allah says, rather, “Go, do this, do that, abstain from 
this, abstain from that.” Allah is a repellant sovereign, a domineering autocrat; not 
a Father, bowing the heavens and beckoning his children to come to him. 

Then there is Buddha. Buddha never says, “Come.” Buddha never says any- 
thing. According to his own followers he is dead; worse than that, the flame of his 
being has been “blown out;” Nirvana swallowed him up more than two thousand 
years ago. Out of that abyss of non-being no word of invitation can ever come. 
Even if there could, its ‘“‘come” would only signify annihilation. 

Here are the pantheistic religions. How is it here? Pantheism is even muter 
than Buddhism. Buddha did have a voice the fourscore years he lived, and did say to 
men, Come, but the pantheist’s god never had either voice or consciousness. He is 
an eternal deaf-mute, hopelessly such; no deaf and dumb asylum in the world would 
attempt his cure. The pantheistic god is the sum total of being, and sum totals are 
not given to speech. When pantheism gets a god who is alive and can speak, we 
shall be glad to hear what he has to say; that moment, however, it will cease to be 
pantheism. 

There was classic heathenism. Did Jupiter ever say to men, Come? Did he 
ever plead with them to lay off the earthly and put on the heavenly? Did he yearn 
to lift them into fellowship with himself, to make them sharers of his divine nature, 
co-occupants of the heavenly Olympus? You know he never did. You know he 
never sought to draw humanity to his bosom and bless it. On the contrary, he was 
from the beginning the sworn foe of humanity. He was jealous of human happiness, 
and grudged men the simplest blessings. Take their own story of him. Our infant 
race was shivering in the frigid earth, perishing. Prometheus in pity brought us fire. 
Did Jupiter send him? Did he thank him? No, You know what he did. He 
seized our generous benefactor, bound him with massy chains to a desolate cliff, 
blasted him with thunderbolts, and stationed an immortal vulture to prey unscared for- 
ever upon his wasteless vitals. That was a fair exponent of Jupiter’s love for men. 

Take modern heathenism. Its gods are numbered by the million, but none of 
them ever ask men to come and share their higher state. They don’t want men in 
their abodes. Even if they did, who would wish to enter? Who could dwell with 
such horrid monstrosities as crowd the pantheons of India, Africa and the Feejee 
isles? The bare sight of their dead images, dragon-mouthed, serpent-girdled, gore- 
bespattered, haunts one for months with visions of horror. Their worshippers only 
fear them. They want no invitation to go to them, they only wish deliverance from 
their fiendish plagues. 


And so you may go through the catalogue of all religions that now are or ever 
have been, and only in Christianity will you find a God who wants to draw men to 
himself, to bless them, to make them share his own eternal felicity. Now, is there not 
something very singular about this? Does it not show that in one thing, at least, 
and a most important thing, too, Christianity differs from all other religions? Does 
it not show that its God is infinitely above all other gods? that He alone is love— 
alone God? 

But, my friend, there is another thing I want you to note. Singular as is this 
peculiarity of Christianity, there is another yet more singular. Did you ever notice 
that while the gospel sets before us a higher and more blessed heaven than any other 
religion, its hell is also deeper and darker than any other? That, my friend, is the 
wonderful thing. Not so much that Christianity says, “God is love,” though com- 
pared with other religions this would be much; it is rather that right over against this 
declaration it affirms, “Our God is a consuming fire.’ What does that mean? 

Think of ita moment. Did Zeus ever send men messengers to warn them of the 
judgments which would overtake them if they persisted in their sins? Did any 


776 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


heathen divinity ever do it? Where is the instance? Not one of them ever loved 
men enough to warn them of the fruits of sin. On the contrary, many of them are 
represented by their worshippers as seducing men into crime that they might have a 
pretext for tormenting them. How different the attitude of our God, standing with 
hands outstretched to even the most rebellious of the race, and crying, as only infinite 
tenderness can-cry, “Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die?” 


Look at the hells of your other religions. Pantheism has neither hell nor 
heaven. Denying personal immortality it necessarily denies both. Brahminism and 
Buddhism have no other hell than transmigration, and in that we are already. The 
old Zoroastrian heli was only a temporary purgatory, issuing in universal and ever- 
jasting blessedness. Classic heathenism had a Tartarus, but it was no hell. As a 
residence it was far preferable to some of the lower dens of sin in this world. Even 
the Old Testament is almost utterly silent on this dread theme. Christ is the first to 
plainly disclose to the world the awful reality. Possibly he was the first through whom 
God could make it known without repelling the race forever from Him. In Him love 
so offset divine justice that men could look upon its most appalling exhibition and 
adore. 


I have heard of a strange class of people who claim that Jesus Christ was father: 
and founder of the doctrine that there is no hell. You may have met such. They 
are scattered all through our Christian New England. Their only mistake is that 
Jesus Christ, instead of being the first denier of eternal punishment, was the first to 
teach it. Christ a denier that there is a hell! Let me read you a single passage from 
one of his discourses, just one consecutive paragraph. ‘And if thy hand offend thee, 
cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to 
go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: where their worm dieth not, 
and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee 
to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that 
never shall be quenched: where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. 
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom 
of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: where their worm 
dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” 


Does that sound like a leaf from the gospel of John Murray? Take another of 
His solemn warnings. “Fear not them that kill the body and after that have no 
more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom you shall fear. Fear him 
which after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell, yea, I say unto you, fear him.” 


Is this the first, the original denier of an eternal hell? I need not tell you, who 
are students of ancient religions, that these people who attempt to father this denial 
upon Christ are wofully mistaken. Instead of being the first repudiator of eternal pun- 
ishment, he was the first great religious teacher of the world, who ever clearly, 
unfalteringly and authoritatively taught it. You may search through the sacred books 
of every nation anterior to Christ, and I challenge you to find in any of them such 
appalling language as that I have just read. Christ was the first to use it; and to this 
day no religious teacher has been able to state in stronger terms or to paint in darker 
shades the doom of a lost soul. The “outer darkness,” the “weeping,” the “gnashing 
of teeth,” the ‘‘unquenchable fire,” the “undying worm,” the “binding,” the “torments,” 
the “devil and his angels,” the interminable duration, all these dread elements and 
emblems of eternal perdition enter into Christ’s own original picture of the final state 
of the impenitent. 


But I wander. I was saying that the wonderful thing about Christianity is that 
it presents two such opposite peculiarities. Of all religions it alone sets before us 


The Gospel Invitation—W arren. 777 


a perfect heaven and a perfect hell. The mightiest imagination can never conceive a 
higher bliss or a deeper woe. Its invitations are the richest, but its warnings the 
dreadest ever brought home to the human mind. It is as peculiar in its awfulness as 
in its winningness. It excels ail other religions as much in the one direction as in 
the other. 

My friend, think a moment of this astonishing phenomenon. You are accustomed 
to philosophize on these things. What does it mean? There must be some reason for 
it. Can you explain it? Perhaps you would like to hear my explanation. 

Well, my explanation is a very simple one. It is that Christianity is the one 
absolutely true religion. Other religions, containing only certain fragmentary 
elements of truth, are all included, swallowed up as it were, in the more comprehensive 
truth of Christianity? They have the conception of sin and of holiness, but their con- 
ception of sin can never go so deep, their conception of holiness can never rise so 
high as the Christian conception. Created by man’s weak imagination, their gods 
can never be so strict as absolute justice, never so high as infinite love, hence, 
Christianity at once underlies and overtops all other religions. What a proof is this 
that it is the only true religion! 

Ah, yes! Good friend, connoisseur of religions, Christianity is true. In all its 
great foundation doctrines, you know it to be true. You know, for instance, that you 
have sinned against your Maker. You know you have no fellowship with Him, The 
thoucht of standing before His judgment-seat fills you with alarm. There are times 
when in view of that great white throne you could wish you had never been born. 
And then when you think of your treatment of the blessed Savior’s invitation, you feel 
that God ought to withdraw His oft-grieved Spirit and cast you off forever. Oh! the 
burden that has sometimes rested upon your heart. What a realization of guilt and 
worthlessness! What self-reproach and condemnation! What a fearful looking for 
of judgment and fiery indignation! How are the very localities of some of these 
experiences branded, as it were, into your inmost memory. As the lightning stroke 
sometimes leaves upon the human body pictures of adjacent objects, so these memora- 
ble flashes of God’s convicting Spirit have photographed upon your very soul, as if 
for eternal preservation, the very spots where God sought you out only to be 
spurned. That village chapel, that woody nook, that midnight chamber, that lonely 
field where God said, son, daughter, give me thine heart, and you refused—you never 
can forget them. If lost, they will forever silence your every murmur against God. 
Oh, are not some of these convictions agitating your heart to-day? Is not the Spirit 
saying with me, “Come?” Oh, heed the call. Rouse from this fatal lethargy! Come 
to Jesus. By the mercies of God, I adjure you; by the love of Christ, by the patience 
of the Spirit, by the uncertainty of life, by the certainty of death, by the terrors of the 
judgment, by the bliss of the saved, by the woes of the lost, by every motive which 
can be drawn from heaven, or earth, or hell, come out from the doomed world of 
transgressors, and come to Jesus. 

This is the first form of God’s invitation to lost men. It is the call which seeks to 
wake the spiritually dead, and bids the sleeper rise. 

But the Gospel has another “Come” a summons for another class. We must not 
forget the secret seekers after God, who are found in almost every Christian congrega- 

‘tion; souls not far from the kingdom, weary ones, who are sick of sin, who timorously 
sigh for a Savior, saying, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, that I might 
come even unto His seat.” I fear we preachers too often overlook these precious 
ones over whom Christ’s heart yearns so tenderly. You were afraid I was about to 
forget you, this time? No, no! I love too well to bring the Gospel invitation to 
such as you. Oh, it is such a different ““Come” from that which is needed to awaken 
the slumbering sinner. Both are prompted by love, but this is so much gentler, 


778 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


tenderer, how can you hesitate to act upon it? Could any other invitation be so 
welcome to your burdened heart? Does He not offer all you sigh for? If you will 
but come to Him and confess your sins, is He not faithful and just to forgive you 
your sins, and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. 


“Oh, yes,” you say, ‘I believe it all; but somehow when it comes to the point of 
casting myself upon Him as my perfect and everlasting Savior, I lack the needed con- 
fidence and fall back.” 


That is it exactly. You lack confidence; in other words, faith, How are you 
going to get it? May I tell you how? If you cannot go, you can at least look to 
Him, Behold Him surrendering His pristine glory and assuming your lowly nature, 
that here in pain and sorrow he might work out your redemption. Is He not 
worthy of your confidence? Open another sense and listen, as in tones which have 
hushed the world He tells you His errand: ‘‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to 
save that which is lost.’”’ That means you; you know it does. Listen again, as He 
breathes over the ages the sweetest invitation of heaven: “Come unto me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” That is what I call the second 
“Come” of the Gospel. It is Christ’s “Come” to the penitent and broken-hearted. 
It is meant precisely for you. And to give you the greater confidence, He has said 
in words which shall live till time’s last hour, ‘Him that cometh unto Me I will in no 
wise cast out.” Mark that pledge. MRed-letter it in your Bibles. Inscribe it on the 
walls of your closet. “Him’’—no matter who you are, young or old, rich or poor, 
black or white—“Him that Cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.’ And lest 
you should not believe Christ, the prophet declares that in His day He was a “mighty 
Savior.” And lest you should not believe the prophet, the evangelist says that “to 
as many as receive Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.” And 
lest you should not believe this evangelist, Paul declares that He was the chief of 


sinners, and yet that even he obtained mercy. And lest you should fail to believe 


Paul, Peter tells even the murderers of his Lord, “Whosoever shall call upon the 
name of the Lord shall be saved.” And lest you should fail to believe Peter, John 
cries out, “The blood of Jesus Christ, His son, cleanseth us from all sin.” And lest 
you should slight the testimony of former ages, the whole church militant rolls round 
the world the ceaseless confession: 


He breaks the power of canceled sin, 
He sets the prisoner free; 
His blood can make the foulest clean, 
His blood avails for me! j 


And lest you should fail to believe the Church militant the Church triumphant chants 
in your very hearing, “Thou art worthy to take the book and to open the seals thereof; 
for thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, out of every kindred 
and tongue and people and nation.” And the number of these witnesses of Christ’s 
saving power is ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands. And 
as they behold in heaven’s light from what they were saved, and Him who saved them, 
they shout with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power 
and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.” 

O timorous seeker, do you need any further testimony? Are you not ashamed 
in the face of such witnesses to doubt? Is not this High Priest able to save to the 
uttermost all who will come to God through Him? O come then, and test His power, 
test His willingness, that then you may chime in with the chorus of earth and heaven. 
Do not tarry to make up any presentation robes or speeches. Come just as your 
predecessors have come. Come, timing your hasting footstep to the utterance: 


The Gospel Invitation—W arren. 779 


“Just as I am without one plea, 

But that thy blood was shed for me, 

And that thou bid’st me come to thee, 
O Lamb of God, I come.” 


But the Gospel has a third Come. It is Christ’s call to the disciples. Do you 
remember how it runs? “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and 
take up his cross and follow me.” It is not a coming to a stationary Christ, but a 
coming after a forerunning one. 

In a memorable battle of history an army of patriots were sore bestead. They 
were yielding their ground at every point. Vainly the captains shouted ‘‘forward.” 
Vainly the colonels smote the retreating with their swords, yelled, **Back, ye cowards! 
Charge the foe!” Ever backward fell the staggering squadrons, tintil at length retreat 
_ was giving place to wildest rout and panic. Just at this critical moment, when all 
seemed lost, the commanding general flashed through their broken ranks, waving a 
sword which had never known dishonor, and shouting, “Follow me, boys!” At that 
word every nerve tingled, every pulse leaped, every heart bounded, every backward 
step was turned, and an invincible army charged under that leadership to victory. 

That, brethren, is Christ’s style of command. He never stands in the rear 
crying, “There’s the enemy; up and at them!” O, no. The Captain of our salvation 
is a leader, and the hardest command He lays upon His soldiery is that oft-repeated 
“Follow me.” No private in His army can ever complain that his general exposes 
him more than he does himself. What a blessed and cheering thought is this. How 
it inspires the weary and fainting. How it stops the mouth of complaint, and makes 
petulance ashamed of itself. O, disconsolate brother! Does your way seem rough 
and thorny? Your Lord has trodden it with bleeding feet before you. Does His 
service necessitate great sacrifice? It may be, but tell me, is it equal to His sacrifice 
ior you, who though He was rich yet for your sake became poor, that you through 
His poverty might be rich? Have you for His sake surrendered such riches, or 
welcomed such poverty? You find His commandments hard, do you? Mention one 
which He did not Himself obey before laying it upon you. Is much prayer irksome? 
How many whole nights have you spent praying in lonely mountains apart? Is fasting 
grievous to the flesh? When did you try it for forty days and forty nights in succes- 
sion? O! I love to march under such a leader, one who never says, “Go” on, but 
always ‘‘Come” on. 

Yes brethren, we are soldiers. We are on hostile soil. But when I survey my 
own soldiering for Christ, and that of most of my comrades, I am astonished that with 
such an army he has ever won a single skirmish. What blundering, what sloth, what 
mutinies have characterized our service! How many of our number have been play 
soldiers, delighted, it may be, with the evolutions of the drill-room, but always stack- 
ing arms at the close of the exercise with no thought of resuming them again until 
the next appointed drill. Do you recognize the class? These are they who are always 
found with clock-like regularity at church and in the social meeting, who are perchance 
foremost in prayer and exhortation, but who can go home and work all the week 
with a swearing neighbor without ever venturing to rebuke his sin or invite him to 
Christ. Then how many on the other hand neglect and trample on Christ's army 
discipline, in a fanatical zeal to do more fighting. These you all know. They are the 
men and women, who, without self-restraint, or system, or consistent piety, are 
always pitching into everybody and everything, anxious only for a fight. Many of 
them mean well, and at first dash forth to battle more brilliantly than the regulars, but 
when the long marches and steady actions come on, when vigils and fastings, and 


780 Pulpit Power and Eloquence 


sleeping upon arms become necessary, Oh, how worse than useless, how demoralizing 
they are. Again how many forget both discipline and fighting, and not only impede 
the movements of the army, but also dampen its ardor and destroy its esprit. These 
are the backsliders, the greatest of all curses to the army of Christ. Were they only 
open mutineers or deserters, they could at least be shot. That would at once relieve 
the service of their cumbrance and heighten the discipline of the body. But these 
cowardly, moping, stupid laggards, who neither love their general nor hate the foe, 
to what earthly purpose can they be put? I wonder not that Christ has said of them, 
“They are henceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden under 
foot of men.” Then again how many whole divisions of the army have wavered, 
revolted, and gone over to the enemy. How many more are fighting amongst them- 
selves just because of a different banner or uniform. How few are the good soldiers, 
the undemoralized regiments, the victorious divisions! 

But let us not be disheartened. There never was less reason for being so. Our 
leader can never be defeated. Each season is chronicling stupendous victories. The 
last great heathen powers are crumbling, and the outposts of Christ’s kingdom already 
encircle the world. With each new victory the spirit of the army rises. Many of the 
lukewarm are catching inspiration, many of the faint-hearted are waxing valiant, many 
of the quarrelsome are making peace, many of the divided, union. Long stationary 
regiments are wheeling into line, long-lost divisions are coming into view. The whole 
magnificent array, many-tinted, many-tongued, is getting into action. Immanuel’s 
“Come” echoes from the far front to farthest rear. All burn to share in the common 
victory. Thank God it is so. God speed each separate company and corps. 

But I hear a voice, feeble and broken, and it asks, “Is there not one other Come, 
for such as I? I once heard the first Come and the second. I obeyed. I came to the 
blessed Jesus, and since that time I have been coming after Him. I have loved to 
hear His voice in the van, and to fight under His banner. I have been His soldier 
these thirty, forty, fifty years. But now I am old and feeble. My eyes are dim, and 
I halt upon my staff. I can no more go forth to battle. Is there no different Come 
for me?” 

Oh, yes, aged comrade. Or ever you are aware, a new, delightful call shall reach 
you, a voice from heaven, saying, “Come up higher.’’ And these ears, now dull of 
hearing, shall be unstopped, and ravishing music shall flow in. These fading eyes 
shall be relighted, and you shall see angels waiting to translate you to your Lord. 
Oh, to come thus convoyed into His presence! Oh, to see Him face to face! And 
before you half explore that wondrous Paradise, there'll be another coming, grander 
than ever angel dreamed. And they shall come from the east and from the west, and 
from the north and from the south. And all nations shall be gathered together. And 
the great white throne shall be set up and Christ shall sit upon it. And he shall sepa- 
rate them one from another, even as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. 
Then, white-haired brother, then shalt thou hear the final “Come” of history. Oh, 
what joy will there be upon the right hand. How lustrous will beam those angel faces! 
What light will fill the eyes of ancient king and prophet—eyes that longed to see 
Christ’s day, but died without the sight. What exultation will swell the heart of holy 
martyrs and apostles. Yea, what sweet suspenseful blessedness shall fill and sway 
and agitate thy heart, my time-bowed brother, as there, replenished with immortal 
youth, star-crowned and robed and palmed, thou, too. shalt wait with all the saints 
that final, promised utterance. And when at length over that hushed sea of being the 
voice of the King shall send forth His last concluding invitation, that concluding invi- 
tation shall be like the first: “Come! Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the 
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world!” 

Such, my brethren, is the outcome of this gospel invitation. Redemption from 


SS 


The Gospel Invitation—W arren. 781 


all sorrow and all sin, likeness to the white and holy Christ, eternal life with God in 
heaven. To this we cali you to-day. The Spirit and the Bride say, Come. Oh, ye 
that hear, say Come. Oh, ye that are in any wise athirst, come. And whosoever 
will, let him take this water of life freely. Blessed word, “whosoever will.” As one 
has ‘said, that “whosoever” is the great bell of God’s eternal and impartial love. It 
rings all home alike. Its mighty boom of promise drowns each doubt and cavil. 

Come, thou swearer; come, thou that has trifled with gracious convictions; come, 
backslider; come, thou that hast deemed thyself a reprobate; come, thou that fearest 
to have quenched the Spirit evermore: “whosoever,” “whosoever will, let him take of 
the water of life freely.” 


782 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


PETER, A BACKSLIDERS 


JOHN WATSON, D.D. (“Ian Maclaren.’) 

(Copyrighted, 1900, by Dodd, Mead & Company, and reproduced by their permission.) 

The second appearance of our Lord on Easter Day is veiled in a certain mystery 
of circumstances, for there is no record of where it took place or of what passed 
between the two. Few words may, however, record a chief fact, and their very brevity 
is invested with significane; and it is with marked emphasis that St. Luke reports the 
joyful greeting of the disciples on the evening of the great day, when they said to the 
friends returning from Emmaus, “The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to 
Simon.” And in St. Paul’s chapter of immortal hope, when he declares the doctrine 
of the resurrection to the Corinthian church, he writes, “He was seen of Cephas, then 
of the twelve.” 

The understanding of the disciples on that day of spiritual intensity was quick, 
and their hearts were tender; and one gathers that they entered into the singular grace 
of our Lord’s revelation to Simon Peter. Before the chief day in human history—a 
day more charged with hope and strength than all other days put together—had come 
to an end, the Master would show Himself unto the body of His disciples, but it was 
His will for reasons of His goodness to meet in private with certain of His friends. 
First He showed Himself to Mary Magdalene in the morning because she loved so 
much, and forever in the experience of the soul love will have the earliest vision and 
the gentlest, though it may see through tears. The second was at noontide of the day, 
and it was to an apostle, because he had sinned so much and was so utterly broken- 
hearted, and repentance will never fail to secure the Lord’s presence and the showing 
of His face. First to Mary Magdalene (and to other women also.) Next to St. Peter, 
earliest witness from among the apostles. 

Were merit the rule of our Lord’s dealing with His disciples, then it would fare 
differently with many of us, and He had not appeared after this fashion to Simon 
Peter. Ii this honor had gone by deserts, then one apostle might have claimed it for 
his own, and he had received it by consent, both of his Lord and of his brethren. 
They were not lifted above petty jealousies, those twelve apostles of the Lord, nor 
were they overwilling to honor one another, but yet they did acknowledge that one 
was nearest to the Master. They gave John his place where he could lay his head on 
the Master’s breast; through him they put their questions to the Master; he had 
followed the Master to the high priest’s palace; he had stood beside the Master's 
cross; into his hands Jesus had intrusted His mother, and this apostle had in his home 
the dearest treasure of the Lord. It might have been expected that, as John had been 
the last apostle with whom Jesus spake before He laid down His life, he would have 
been the first whom Jesus would greet after He had taken up His life again. There 
would have been a fitness in the words, ‘‘The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared 
unto John;” and none of the apostles would have had the heart to grudge. 

It is like the Lord to be guided not by His personal liking, but by that spirit of 
service which He ever preached; and so He went not first to John, because He loved 
him most, but to Peter, because Peter needed Him most. One dares to believe in 
justice to the apostles that, if the Lord had asked them to choose that one from among 
their number to whom they desired Him to go without delay, they would have men- 
tioned Simon Peter; for none of them, not even Thomas, was in such a strait, and 
none of them, not even John, was in his heart more loyal. It was like the Lord to do 


Peter, a Backslider—W atson. 783 


this thing, and made the Lord dearer to them than ever, and it was a sure evidence 
that He had risen from the dead, that, out of the eleven, He had appeared first to 
Simon Peter. 

It had been St. Peter’s fault that he ever wished to be first, and first he had been, 
but not in honor, nor in service, but first, without any rivalry, in treachery. There is 
a competition in sin, and sins have their comparative value of demerit, and there can 
be no question that St. Peter outdistanced all his brethren, when one looks at the 


pathetic and intimate circumstances of his sin. The other disciples had boasted what _ 


they would do for their Lord; but they were only Peter’s chorus, compelled to keep 
tune with him when he declared his valiant loyalty. The other disciples had also siept 
in the garden, but they had not promised to be the Lord’s body-guard. They all fled 
and left their Lord; but none of them, except this man, had gone into the high priest's 
palace, and thrust himself among the guards of Christ, as if on very purpose to put 
the Lord to shame, and do Him greater insult than when His enemies spat upon His 
face and pressed the jagged thorns upon His brow. 

Judas Iscariot had plotted against the Lord, and betrayed Him to the priests, and 
sold Him for money, and kissed Him on the mouth. It was a hideous and incredible 
crime, and—taken simply in itself as a bare, black fact—that is the master crime of the 
human race. But Judas had always been a man of mean, lean soul, hedged round and 
blinded by this present world, and incapable of spiritual vision. He had never been 
the friend of Jesus, and never had been touched by the divine fascination of the Master; 
he had never entered into the Master’s mind, or had a glimpse of the glory of the 
kingdom of God. 

Simon Peter was one of the Lord's first disciples, who had been prepared by the 
Baptist for Christ, and had thrown himself into the Master’s cause with generous, 
uncalculating enthusiasm. He had hung upon the Master’s lips, he had laid himself 
at the Master’s feet, he had loved the Master with all his heart, and had been willing, 
as he believed, to die for the Master’s sake. This man had made the chief confession 
of the New Testament, and this man had received the Lord’s chief promise. And it 
was he who had gone out of his way to deny the Lord, and invested his denial with, 
every circumstance of offence. Choosing the time when the Lord needed friends 
most, taking for his witnesses the ignoble rabble of the high priest’s servants, tramp- 
ling upon his flag at the invitation of a serving girl, asserting that not only was he 
not a friend of Jesus, but that he did not even know Him, and crowning all this false- 
hood and ignominy by curses which he had learned at his fishing trade, but had 
forgotten for a while in Jesus’ company. If in the world Judas must have the place of 
chief sinner, within the church it belongs to Simon Peter, to whom the Lord revealed 
Himself alone on Easter Day. 


According to Simon Peter’s sin was the keenness of his remorse, and among the 
disciples there was none, and could be none, with a heart so sore on Easter Day. 
They all mourned because they had lost their Lord, but between their regret and his 
there was a great gulf fixed, since they had only lost, but he had also denied. They 
had seen the Lord last in the moonlight of Gethsemane, sad enough sight; he had seen 
Him last in the firelight of the high priest’s palace, far sadder sight. In the garden 
Jesus had interceded for the eleven that they might go free; but in the courtyard He 
had looked on him, and he had gone bound with sorrow into the darkness. 

They all longed to see their Lord again, but none of them had reason so keen, 
for the ten only desired to satisfy themselves with His visible presence, who had been 
the light of their lives, but he had to ask His forgiving mercy for the last outrage on 
friendship. If only he could have one minute alone with his Lord, although he never 
saw Him again, to explain himself, and to beseech forgiveness! He could not even 
now tell how he had come to do so cruel and wicked an action, but he could entreat 


Wand 


784 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


the Lord to believe that his heart was not utterly that of a traitor, and that he was not 
whatever it might appear, the same as Judas. What he had done he had done, and 
there was no one to biame but himself, his pride, his boasting, and his cowardice; but 
still he loved, and in the depths of his heart was true. : 

~ He lashed himself with scorn and bitter self-upbraiding, more cruel than the 
thongs which lacerated the shoulders of the Master, but Jesus did not know. He 
cried aloud, and broke the night air with his weeping, but Jestis could not see. All 
Jesus had seen was ftlis apostle keeping company with the high priest’s servants, and 
swearing aloud that he had never known his Lord. Too late now to repent, too late 
now to ask forgiveness; it mattered nothing to the Lord now who denied Him or who 
insulted Him, for He had passed beyond all earthly words, and was at rest, but Peter 
never more could be at rest. O that the dead could be brought back for the briefest 
time that we might tell them that we had not intended so to wound them, or so to. 
neglect them! But they sleep in peace; it is for us there cannot be peace forever. 

ie It was like the Lord that His pity should rest upon this man, and others like him, 

eyond all who have sinned and sorrowed; for Jesus ever counted the agony of the 

heart greater than the agony of the life. He had compassion on the widow who lost 
her only son, and on the ruler who lost his little girl, because He loved children and 
they loved Him; but the chief sorrow of the world is not the death of friends. He 
wept over Jerusalem, which knew not the day of her visitation and had rejected the 
anointed of the Lord; He was cast down by Judas’s betrayal, and was in pain till Judas 
left; but even unbelief and treachery of evil hearts are not the chief sorrow. The 
cruelest of all spiritual agonies is that of the backslider who has been received into the 
Father’s house with mercy and “with joy, and has gone again into the far country; 
who has been decked with the robe and with the ring, and has sold them for riotous 
living; who has abused the very love of God and made His grace an opportunity for 
sin. When he cometh to himself, it is with weeping and with trembling, and with the 
sorrow of his heart none can meddle. Therefore is it that there are no promises in 
Scripture so appealing and so tender as those which are sent after the backslider by 
the voice of the prophets, as if God, who had been Himself so deeply wounded, alone 
could estimate the broken heart of them who wounded Him. None understood Simon 
Peter like the Master, and none could enter so entirely into his remorse. While Peter 
thought of Jesus, his Master was thinking of him, and one of the first errands of the 
risen . Lord was to bind up the broken heart of His” penitent “apostle. _ 


“Where they met we are not ‘told, but we may allow ourselves to guess. It was 
not in the upper room, for Peter could not appear among the disciples till he had been 
restored by the Lord; it would not be in John’s kindly house, nor could it be in any 
public place, for this meeting must be in secret. It is not likely that on that day 
Vat which had opened with the message of Mary Magdalene and the sight of the empty 
RX grave, that agitated heart could contain itself within any walls, however friendly, and 
,, _ we may assume that St. Peter went out and sought for some place where he could 

‘9 spend the time surrounded by the memory of his Lord. Was it not probable that he 


aK rfied to that garden whither he had gone with the Lord from the upper room, and 


yf Where he had been afforded so great an intimacy, so that where the Lord’s own soul 

had been wrung till He sweated as it were great drops of blood, he might also suffer 
and there—who knows?—might be remembered of the Lord? Did he seek out the 
very spot where he had seen Jesus lie, and there cast himself? 

What passed between them, when of a sudden the Lord with the marks of the 
passion upon Him, but the cup of the Father’s will now filled with joy, stood beside 
His prostrate apostle, no evangelist has recorded, because neither Peter nor the Lord 
ever told. There was to be a public conversation between them, full of beautiful 
emotions which would be recorded for our instruction, but that was to come later. 


Peter, a Backslider—W atson. 785 


There are secrets of religion which cannot be put in words, and which it were a 
spiritual indecency to breathe. There are revelations of God given to the soul which 
belong to the third heavens and not to earth. There are convictions which are surer 
than anything which can be seen, but of which we can give no proof to our fellow men. 
“I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord,” so wrote the penitent back- 
slider of the Old Testament, “and Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.” Here were 
the prayer and the answer, but in between came that moment where there can be no 
witness, of which there can be no description. 


He could not trust his melting soul 
But in his Maker’s sight;— 
Then why should gentle hearts and true 
Bare to the rude world’s withering view 
Their treasure of delight? 


Within that hour St. Peter was again converted and came forth a new man. 
Never again would he exalt himself above his brethren, save in his willingness to 
suffer; never again would he talk of himself, save of his own unworthiness. He would 
be tried in days to come as he had never been before, and he who had denied the Lord 
at the word of a girl would confess the same Lord before the rulers of the people; and 
he who had shrunk from the contempt of serving men would take a scourging for the 
Lord’s sake joyfully. Boldly would he preach the gospel, bravely would he lead the 
church, and humbly at last would he die. 


[John Watson (“Ian Maclaren”), minister Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, 
Liverpool, from 1880, was born at Manningtree, Essex, November 3, 1850. He 
received his education at Stirling Grammar School, the University and New College, 
Edinburgh, and Tubingen, Germany. Licensed to preach in 1874 by the Free Church 
of Scotland, serving Logiealmond Free Church, and Free St. Matthew’s, Glasgow. 
He is best known as the author of “The Bonnie Brier Bush.” He was Lyman 
Beecher lecturer at Yale in 1896. 

This sermon is from the volume Children of the Resurrection, and is reproduced 
by permission of Dodd, Mead & Co., by whom it is copyrighted and published in 
book form.] 


786 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JESUS OF NAZARETH 


FRANCIS WAYLAND. 


Luke 9: 10-17. 


It was the sagacious opinion of, I think, the late Professor Porson, that he would 
rather see a single copy of a daily newspaper of ancient Athens, than read all the 
commentaries upon the Grecian tragedies that have ever been written. The reason 
for this preference is obvious. A single sheet, similar to our daily newspapers, pub- 
lished in the time of Pericles, would admit us at once to a knowledge of the habits, 
manners, modes of opinion, political relations, social condition, and moral attainments 
of the people, such as we never could gain from the study of all the writers that have 
ever attempted to illustrate the nature of Grecian civilization. 

_ The same remark is true in respect to our knowledge of the character of indi- 
viduals who have lived in a former age. What would we not, at.the present day, give 
for a few pages of the private diary of Julius Caesar, or Cicero, or Brutus, or Augustus; 
or for the minute reminiscences of any one who had spent a few days in the company 
of either of these distinguished men? What a flood of light would the discovery of 
such a manuscript throw upon Roman life, but especially upon the private opinions, 
the motives, the aspirations, the moral estimates, of men whose names have become 
household words throughout the world! A few such pages might, perchance, dissipate 
the authority of many a bulky folio on which we now rely with implicit confidence. 
Not only would the characters of these heroes of antiquity stand out in bolder relief 
than they have ever done before, but the individuals themselves would be brought 
within the range of our personal sympathy; and we should seem to commune with 
them as we do with an intimate acquaintance. 

It is worthy of remark, that we are favored with a larger portion of this kind of 
information, respecting Jesus of Nazareth, than almost any other distinguished person 
that has ever lived, He left no writings Himself; hence all that we know of Him has 
been written by others. The narrators, however, were the personal attendants, and 
not the mere auditors or pupils of their Master. The apostles were members of the 
family of Jesus; they traveled with Him, on foot, throughout the length and breadth 
of Palestine; they partook with Him of His frugal meals, and bore with Him the trial 
of hunger, weariness, and want of shelier; they followed Him through the lonely 
wilderness and the crowded street; they saw His miracles in every variety of form, and 
listened to His discourses in public as well as to His explanations in private. Hence 
their whole narrative is instinct with life; a vivid picture of Jewish manners and 
customs, rendered more definite and characteristic by the moral light which then, for 
the first time, shone upon it. Hence it is that these few pages are replete with moral 
lessons that never weary us in the perusal, and which have been the source of unfailing 
illumination to all succeeding ages. 

The verses which I have read, as the text of this discourse, may well be taken as 
an illustration of all that I have here said. They may, without impropriety, be styled 
a day of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. By observing the manner in which our blessed 
Lord spent a single day, we may form some conception of the kind of life which He 
ordinarily led; and we may, perchance, treasure up some lessons which it were well if 
we should exemplify in our daily practice. 


A Day in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth—W ayland. 787 


The place at which these events occurred was near the head of the Sea of Galilee, 
where it receives the waters of the upper Jordan. This was one of the Savior’s favorite 
places of resort. Capernaum, Chorasin, and Bethsaida, all in this immediate vicinity, 
are always spoken of in the Gospels as towns which enjoyed the largest share of His 
ministerial labors, and were distinguished most frequently with the honor of His 
personal presence. The scenery of the neighborhood is wild and romantic. To the 
north and west, the eye rests on the lofty summits of Lebanon and Hermon. To the 
south, there opens upon the view the blue expanse of the lake, enclosed by frowning 
rocks, which here and there jut over far into the waters, and then again retire towards 
the land, leaving a level beach ‘to invite the labors of the fisherman. The people, 
removed at a considerable distance from the metropolis of Judea, cultivated those 
rural habits with which the simple tastes of the Savior would most readily harmonize. 
Near this spot was also one of the most frequented fords of the Jordan, on the road 
from Damascus to Jerusalem; and thus, while residing here, He enjoyed unusual facili- 
ties for disseminating throughout this whole region a knowledge of thosé truths which 
He came on earth to promulgate. 

Some weeks previously to the time in which the events spoken of in the text 
occurred, our Lord had sent His disciples to announce the approach of the kingdom 
of heaven, in all the cities and villages which He Himself proposed to visit. He 
conferred on them the power to work miracles, in attestation of their authority, and of 
the divine character of Him by whom they were sent. He imposed upon them strict 
rules of conduct, and directed them to make known to every one who would hear 
them the good news of the coming dispensation. As soon as He sent them forth, He 
Himself went immediately abroad to teach and to preach in their cities. As their 
Master and Lord, He might reasonably have claimed exemption from the personal 
toil and the rigid self-denials to which they were by necessity subjected. But He laid 
claim to no such exemption. He commenced without delay the performance of the 
very duties which He had imposed upon them. He felt Himself under obligation to 
set an example of obedience to His own rules. “The Son of Man,” said He, “came 
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.” 
“Which,” said He, “is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? but I am 
among you as He that serveth.” Would it not be well, if, in this respect, we copied 
more minutely the example of our Lord, and held ourselves responsible for the per- 
formance of the very same duties which we so willingly impose upon our brethren? 
We best prove that we believe an act obligatory, when we commence the performance 
of it ourselves. Many zealous Christians employ themselves in no other labor than 
that of urging their brethren to effort. Our Savior acted otherwise. In this respect, 
His example is specially to be imitated by His ministers. When they urge upon 
others a moral duty, they must be the first to perform it. When they inculcate an act 
of self-denial, they themselves must make the noblest sacrifice. Can we conceive of 
anything which would so much increase the moral power of the ministry, and rouse 
to a flame the dormant energy of the churches, as obedience to this teaching of Christ 
by the preachers of His gospel? 

It seems that the Savior had selected a well-known spot, at the head of the lake, 
for the place of meeting for His apostles, after this their first missionary tour had been 
completed. “The apostles gathered themselves unto Jesus, and told Him all the 
things, both what they had done, and what they had taught.” There is something 
delightful in this filial confidence which these simple-hearted men reposed in their 
Almighty Redeemer. They told Him of their success and their failure, of their 
wisdom and their folly, of their reliance and their unbelief. We can almost imagine 
ourselves spectators of this meeting between Christ and them, after this their first 
separation from each other. Yhe place appointed was most probably some well-known 


788 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


locality on the shore of the lake, under the shadow of its overhanging rocks, where 
the cool air from the bosom of the water refreshed each returning laborer, as he came 
back beaten out with the fatigues of travel, under the burning sun of Syria. You can 
imagine the joy with which each drew near to the Master, after this temporary absence; 
and the honest greetings with which every new comer was welcomed by those who 
had chanced to arrive before him. We can seem to perceive the Savior of men listen- 
ing with affectionate earnestness to the recital of their various adventures; and 
interposing, from time to time, a word either of encouragement or of caution, as the 
character and circumstances of each narrator required it. The bosom of each was 
unveiled before the Searcher of hearts, and the consolation which each one needed was 
bestowed upon him abundantly. The toilsomeness of their journey was no longer 
remembered, as each one received from the Son of God the smile of His approbation. 
This was truly a joyful meeting. Of all that company there is not one who has for- 
gotten that day; nor will he forget it ever. With unreserved frankness they told Jesus 
of all that they had done, and what they had taught; of all their acts, and all their 
conversations. Would it not be better for us, if we cultivated more assiduously this 
habit of intimate intercourse with the Savior? Were we every day to tell Jesus of all 
that we have done and said; did we spread before Him our joys and our sorrows, our 
faults and our infirmities, our successes and our failures, we should be saved from 
many an error and many a sin. Setting “the Lord always before us, he would be on 
our right hand, and we should not be moved.” “He that dwelleth in the secret place 
of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” 


The Savior perceived that the apostles needed much instruction which could not 
be communicated in a place where both He and they were so well known. They had 
committed many errors, which He preferred to correct in private. By doing His will, 
they had learned to repose greater confidence in His wisdom, and were prepared to 
receive from Him more important instruction. But these lessons could not be 
delivered in the hearing of a promiscuous audience. Nor was this all. He perceived 
that the apostles were worn out with their labors, and needed repose. Surrotinded as 
they were by the multitude, which had already begun to collect about them, rest and 
retirement were equally impossible. “There were many coming and going, and they 
had no leisure, even so much as to eat.’ He therefore said to them, “Come ye your- 
selves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.”’ For this purpose, He “took ship, 
and crossed over with His disciples alone, and went into a desert place belonging to 
Bethsaida.” 


The religion of Christ imposes upon us duties of retirement, as well as duties of 
publicity. The apostles had been for some time past before the eyes of all men, preach- 
ing and working miracles. Their souls needed retirement. ‘Solitude,’ said Cecil, 
“is my great ordinance.” They would be greatly improved by private communion 
both with Him and with each other. It was for the purpose of affording them such 
a season of moral recreation, that our Lord withdrew them from the public gaze into 
a desert place. Nor was this all. Their labor for some weeks past had been severe. 
They had traveled on foot under a tropical sun, reasoning with unbelievers, instructing 
the ignorant, and comforting the cast-down. Called upon, at all hours, both of the 
day and night, to work cures on those that were oppressed with diseases, their bodies, 
no less than their spirits, needed rest. Our Lord saw this, and He made provision 
for it. He withdrew them from labor, that they might find, though it were but for a 
day, the repose which their exhausted natures demanded. The religion of Christ is 
ever merciful, and ever consistent in its benevolence. It is thoughtful of the benefactor 
as well as of the recipient. It requires of us all, labor and self-sacrifice, but to these 
it affixes a limit. It never commands us to ruin our health and enfeeble our minds by 
unnatural exhaustion. It teaches us to obey the laws of our physical organization, 


A Day in the Life of Jesus of Nazarcth—W ayland. 789 


and to prepare ourselves for the labors of tomorrow by the judiciously conducted 
labors of today. It was on this principle that our Lord conducteth His intercourse 
with His disciples. “He knew their frame, and remembered that they were dust.” 


May we not from this incident derive a lesson of practical instruction? I well 
know that there are persons who are always sparing themselves, who, while it is 
difficult to tell what they do, are always complaining of the crushing weight of their 
labors, and who are rather exhausted with the dread of what they shall do, than with 
the experience of what they have actually done. It is not of these that we speak. 
Those who do not labor have no need of rest. It is to the honest, the painstaking, 
the laborious, that we address the example in the text. We sometimes meet with the 
industrious, self-denying servant of Christ, in feeble health, and with an exhausted 
nature, bemoaning his condition, and condemning himself because he can accomplish 
no more, while so much yet remains to be done. To such a one we may safely 
present the example of the blessed Savior. When His apostles had done to the utmost 
of their strength, although the harvest was great, and the laborers few, He did not 
urge upon them additional labor, nor tell them that because there was so much to be 
done they must never cease from doing. No: He tells them to turn aside and rest 
for a while. It is as though He had said, “Your strength is exhausted; you cannot be 
qualified for subsequent duty until you be refreshed. Economize, then, your power, 
that you may accomplish the more.” The Savior addresses the same language to us 
now. When we are worn down in His service, as in any other, He would have us 
rest, not for the sake of self-indulgence, but that we may be better prepared for future 
effort. We do nothing at variance with His will, when we, with a good conscience, 
__ use that liberty which He has conceded to us. 


Jesus, with His disciples, crossed the water, and entered the desert; that is, the 
sparsely inhabited country of Bethsaida. Desert, or wilderness, in the New Testament, 
does not mean an arid waste, but pasture land, forest, or any district to which one 
could retire for seclusion. Here, in the cool and tranquil neighborhood of the lake, 
He began to instruct His disciples, and, without interruption, made known to them 
the mysteries of the kingdom. It was one of those seasons that the Savior Himself 
rarely enjoyed. Everything tended to repose: the rustling leaves, the rippling waves, 
the song of the birds, heard more distinctly in this rural solitude, all served to calm the 
spirit ruffled by the agitations of the world, and prepare it to listen to the truths which 
unveil to us eternity. Here our Lord could unbosom Himself, without reserve, to His 
chosen few, and hold with them that communion which He was rarely permitted to 
enjoy during His ministry on earth. 


Soon, however, the whole scene is changed. The multitude, whom He had so 
recently left, having observed the direction in which He had gone, have discovered the 
place of His retreat. An immense crowd approaches, and the little company is 
surrounded by a dense mass of human beings pressing upon them on every side. 
These are, however, only the pioneers. At last, five thousand men, besides women and 
children, are beheld thronging around them. 


Some of these suitors present most importunate claims. They are in search of 
cure for diseases which have baffled the skill of the medical profession, and, as a last 
resort, they have come to the Messiah for aid. Here was a parent bringing a con- 
sumptive child. There were children bearing on a couch a paralytic parent. Here 
Was a sister leading a brother blind from his birth, while her supplications were 
drowned by the shout of a frenzied lunatic who was standing by her site. Every one, 
believing his own claim to be the most urgent, pressed forward with selfish impor- 
tunity. Each one, caring for no other than himself, was striving to attain the front 
rank, while those behind, disappointed, and fearing to lose this important opportunity, 


790 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


were eager to occupy the places of those more fortunate than themselves. The nec- 
essary tumult and disorder of such a scene you can better imagine than I can describe. 


This was, doubtless, by no means a welcome interruption. The apostles needed 
the time for rest; for they were worn out in the public service. They wanted it for 
instruction; for such opportunities of intercourse with Christ were rare. But what did 
they do? Did our Lord inform the multitude that this day was set apart for their own 
refreshment and improvement, and that they could not be interrupted? As He 
beheld them approaching, did He quietly take to His boat, and leave them to go home 
disappointed? Did He plead His own convenience, or His need of repose, as any 
reason for not attending to the pressing necessities of His fellow-men? 


No, my brethren, very far from it. The providence of God had brought these 
multitudes before Him, and that same providence forbade Him to send them away 
unblessed. He at once broke up the conference with His disciples, and addressed 
Himself to the work before Him. His instructions were of inestimable importance; 
but I doubt if even they were as important as the example of deep humility, exhaustless 
kindness, and affecting compassion which He here exhibited. When the Master places 
work before us which can be done at no other time, our convenience must yield to 
other men’s necessities. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to 
minister.” You can imagine to yourself the Savior rising from His seat, in the midst 
of His disciples, and presenting Himself to the approaching multitudes. His calm 
dignity awes into silence this tumultuous gathering of the people. Those who came 
out to witness the tricks of an empiric, or listén to the ravings of a fanatic, find them- 
selves, unexpectedly, in a presence that repels every emotion but that of profound 
veneration. The light-hearted and frivolous are awe-struck by the unearthly majesty 
that seems to clothe the Messiah as with a garment. And yet it was a majesty that 
shone forth conspicuous, most of all, by the manifestation of unparalleled goodness. 
Every eye that met the eye of the Savior quailed before Him; for it looked into a soul 
that had never sinned; and the spirit of the sinner felt, for the first time, the full power 
of immaculate virtue. ‘ 


Thus the Savior passed among the crowd, and “healed all that had need of heal- 
ing.” The lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the blind received their sight, the 
paralytic were restored to soundness, and the bloom of health revisited the cheeks of 
those that but just now were sick unto death. 


The work to be done for the bodies of men was accomplished, and there yet 
remained some hours of the summer’s day unconsumed. The power and goodness 
displayed in this miraculous healing would naturally predispose the people to listen 
to the instructions of the Savior. This was too valuable an opportunity to be lost. 
Our Lord therefore proceeded to speak to them of the things concerning the kingdom 
of God. We can seem to perceive the Savior seeking an eminence from whence He 
could the more conveniently address this vast assembly. You hear Him unfold the 
laws of God’s moral government. He unmasks the hypocrisy of the Pharisees; He 
rebukes the infidelity of the Sadducees; He exposes the folly of the frivolous, as well 
as of the selfish worldling; He speaks peaceably to the humble penitent; He encour- 
ages the meek, and comforts those that be cast down. The intellect and the conscience 
of this vast assembly are swayed at His will. The soul of man bows down in reverence 
in the presence of its Creator. ‘He stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their 
waves, and the tumult of the people.’”” As He closes His address, every eye is moist- 
ened with compunction for sin. Every soul cherishes the hope of amendment. Every 
cone is conscious that a new light has dawned upon his soul, and that a new moral 
universe has been unveiled to his spiritual vision. As the closing words of the Savior 
fell upon their ears, the whole multitude stood for a while unmoved, as though trans- 


A Day in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth—Wayland. 791 


fixed to the earth by some mighty spell; until, at last, the murmur is heard from 
thousands of voices, “‘Never man spake like this man.” 

But the shades of evening are gathering around them. The multitudes have 
nothing to eat. To send them away fasting would be inhuman, for divers of them 
came from far, and many were women and children, who could not perform their 
journey homeward without previous refreshment. To purchase food in the surround- 
ing towns and villages would be difficult; but even were this possible, whence could 
the necessary funds be provided? A famishing multitude was thus unexpectedly cast 
upon the bounty of our Lord. He had not tempted God by leading them into the 
wilderness. They came to Him of themselves, to hear His words and to be healed of 
their infirmities. He could not “send them away fasting, lest they should faint by the 
way.” In this dilemma, what was to be done? He puts this question to His disciples, 
and they can suggest no means of relief. The little stock of provisions which they had 
brought with them was barely sufficient for themselves. They can perceive no means 
whatever by which the multitude can be fed, and they at once confess it. 

The Savior, however, commands the twelve to give them to eat. They produce 
their slender store of provisions, amounting to five loaves and two small fishes. He 
commands the multitude to sit down by companies on the grass. As soon as silence is 
obtained, He lifts up His eyes to heaven, and supplicates the blessing of God upon 
their scanty meal. He begins to break the loaves and fishes, and distribute them to 
His disciples, and His disciples distribute them to the multitude. He continues to 
break and distribute. Basket after basket is filled and emptied, yet the supply is 
undiminished. Food is carried in abundance to the famishing thousands. Company 
after company is supplied with food, but the five loaves and the two fishes remain 
unexhausted. At last, the baskets are returned full, and it is announced that the wants 
of the multitude are supplied. The miracle then ceases, and the multiplication of food 
is at an end. . 

But even here the provident care of the Savior is manifested. Although this food 
has been so easily provided, it is not right that it be lightly suffered to perish. Christ 
wrought no miracles for the sake of teaching men wastefulness. That food, by what 
means soever provided, was a creature of God, and it were sin to allow it to decay 
without accomplishing the purposes for which it was created. “Gather up the frag- 
ments,” said the Master of the feast, “that nothing be lost.” “And they gathered up, 
the fragments that remained, twelve baskets full.” 

Dissimilar as are our circumstances to those of our Lord, we may learn from this 
latter incident a lesson of instruction. 

In the first place, as I have remarked, the Savior did not lead the multitude into 
the wilderness without making provision for their sustenance. This would have been 
presumption. They followed Him without His command, and He found Himself with 
them in this necessity. He had provided for His own wants, but they had not pro- 
vided for theirs. The providence of God had, however, placed Him in His present 
circumstances, and He might therefore properly look to Providence for deliverance. 
This even, then, furnishes the rule by which we are to be governed. When we plunge 
ourselves into difficulty, by a neglect of the means or by a misuse of the faculties which 
God has bestowed upon us, it is to be expected that He will leave us to our own 
devices. But when, in the honest discharge of our duties, we find ourselves in circum- 
stances beyond the reach of hyman aid, we then may confidently look up to God for 
deliverance. He will always take care of us while we are in the spot where He has 
placed us. When He appoints for us trials, He also appoints for us the means of 
escape. The path of duty, though it may seem arduous, is ever the path of safety. We 
can more easily maintain ourselves in the most difficult position, God being our helper, 
than in apparent security relying on our own strength. 


792 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


The Savior, in full reliance upon God, with only five loaves and two fishes, com- 
menced the distribution of food amongst this vast multitude. Though His whole store 
was barely sufficient to supply the wants of His immediate family, He began to share 
it with the thousands who surrounded Him. Small as was His provision at the 
commencement, it remained unconsumed until the deed of mercy was done, and the 
wants of the famishing host were supplied. Nor were the disciples losers by this act 
of charity. After the multitude had eaten and were satisfied, twelve baskets full of 
fragments remained, a reward for their deed of benevolence. 

From this portion of the narrative, we may, I think, learn that if we act in faith, 
and in the spirit of Christian love, we may frequently be justified in commencing the 
most important good work, even when in possession of apparently inadequate means. 
If the work be of God, He will furnish us with helpers as fast as they are needed. In 
all ages God has rewarded abundantly simple trust in Him, and has bestowed upon it 
the highest honor. We must, however, remember the conditions upon which alone we 
may expect His aid, lest we be led into fanaticism. The service which we undertake 
must be such as God has commanded, and His providence must either designate us for 
the work, or, at least, open the door by which we shall enter upon it. It must be God’s 
work, and not our own; for the good of others, and not for the gratification of our 
own passions; and, in the doing of it, we must, first of all, make sacrifice of ourselves, 
and not of others. Under such circumstances, there is hardly a good design which we 
may not undertake with cheerful hopes of success, for God has promised us His 
assistance. ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?” The calculations of the men 
of this world are of small account in such a matter. It would have provoked the smile 
of an infidel to behold the Savior commencing the work of feeding five thousand men 
with a handful of provisions. But the supply increased as fast as it was needed, and 
it ceased not until all that He had prayed for was accomplished. 


Perhaps, also, we may learn from this incident another lesson. If I mistake not, 
it suggests to us that in works of benevolence we are accustomed to rely too much on 
human, and too little on divine, aid. When we attempt to do good, we commence by 
forming large associations, and suppose that our success depends upon the number of 
men whom we can unite in the promotion of our undertaking. Every one is apt thus 
to forget his own personal duty, and rely upon the labor of others, and it is well if 
he does not put his organization in the piace of God Himself. Would it not be better 
if we made benevolence much more a matter between God and our own souls, each 
one doing with his own hands, in firm reliance on divine aid, the work which Proyi- 
dence has placed directly before him? Our Lord did not send to the villages round 
about to organize a general effort to relieve the famishing. In reliance upon God, He 
set about the work Himself, with just such means as God had afforded Him. All the 
miracles of benevolence have, if I mistake not, been wrought in the same manner. 
The little band of disciples in Jerusalem accomplished more for the conversion of the 
world than all the Christians of the present day united. And why? Because every 
individual Christtan felt that the conversion of the world was a work for which he 
himself, and not an abstraction that he called the Church, was responsible. Instead 
of relying on man for aid, every one looked up directly to God, and went forth to the 
work. God was thus exalted, the power was confessed to be His own, and, in a few 
years, the standard of the cross was carried to the remotest extremities of the then 
known world. 

Such has, I think, been the case ever since. Every great moral reformation has 
proceeded upon principles analogous to these. It was Luther, standing up alone in 
simple reliance upon God, ihat smote the Papal hierarchy; and the effects of that blow 
are now agitating the nations of Europe. Roger Williams, amid persecution and 
banishment, held forth that doctrine of soul-liberty which, in its onward march, is 


A Day in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth—W ayland. 793 


disenthralling a world. Howard, alone, undertook the work of showing mercy to the 
prisoner, and his example is now enlisting the choicest minds in Christendom in this 
labor of benevolence. Clarkson, unaided, a young man, and without influence, conse- 
crated himself to the work of abolishing the slave trade; and, before he rested from his 
labors, his country had repented of and forsaken this atrocious sin. Raikes saw the 
children of Gloucester profaning the Sabbath day; he set on foot a Sabbath school on 
his own account, and now millions of children are reaping the benefit of his labors, 
and his example has turned the attention of the whole world to the religious instruction 
~ of the young. With such facts before us, we surely should be encouraged to attempt 
individually the accomplishment of some good design, relying in humility and faith 
upon Him who is able to grant prosperity to the feeblest effort put forth in earnest 
reliance on His almightiness, 

Such were the occupations that filled up a day in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. 
There was not an act done for Himself: all was done for others. Every hour was’ 
employed in the labor which that hour set before Him. Private kindness, the relief 
of distress, public teaching, and ministration to the wants of the famishing, filled up 
the entire day. Let His disciples learn to’follow His example. Let us, like Him, 
forget ourselves, our own wants, and our own weariness, that we may, as He did, 
scatter blessings on every side, as we move onward in the pathway of our daily life. 
If such were the occupations of the Son of God, can we do more wisely than to imitate 
His example? Every disciple would then be as a city set upon a hill, and men, seeing 
our good works, would glorify our Father who is in heaven. “Then would our right- 
eousness go forth as brightness, and our salvation as a lamp that burneth.”’ 


[Francis Wayland, D.D., LL.D., as eminent a philosopher as divine, was born in 
New York, March 11, 1796. He studied at Union College and Andover Theological 
Seminary. After a five years’ pastorate in the First Baptist Church, Boston, he was 
appointed president of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and retained tha; 
office twenty-eight years. From 1857-9 he was pastor of the First Baptist Church, 
Providence. He ‘died September 30, 1865. The sermon entitled “The Moral Dignity 
of Missions,” preached by him in early manhood, wonderfully strengthened the 
missionary cause at home and abroad. His “Elements of Moral Science,” and 
“Elements of Political Economy,” have wisely trained thousands of American students, 
This discourse is extracted from his “University Sermons,’’] 


aN 


794 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


A MAN UNDER AUTHORITY. 


H. W. WEBB-PEPLOE. 


“The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest 
come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For 
Iam a man under authority, having soldiers under me . . . When Jesus heard it, 
He marveled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found 
so great faith, no, not in Israel.”—Matthew 8: 8-10. 

Great truths have often been expressed in very simple language, and have pro- 
ceeded from most untutored minds when instructed by God. Very probably the 
speakers have had at the time but little consciousness of the marvelous truths to which 
they were giving expression; but this demonstrates the more clearly that God can 
take the weak things of this world to confound the mighty, the things that are not to 
bring to naught the things that are. So the Lord is pleased at times to speak by the 
Holy Ghost through men who themselves have no conception of the depth of their 
utterances, which are afterward elucidated by the Holy Ghost for the benefit of God’s 
people. 

When the centurion spoke these words to the Lord Jesus it would seem that there 
was nothing more present to his mind than the thought that as a Roman soldier he 
_ had learned the great law of obedience—to obey and to be obeyed—and that in his — 
sphere the power to command was absolute just so far as it could be enforced by man. 
He recognized in Christ the presence of One infinitely superior to any one with whom 
he had ever dealt, One who apparently had command in the sphere of the unseen and 
the spiritual. He thought that what he himself understood as the great law of his life 
should be applied in the case of Jesus. He argues from the less to the greater, from 
the seen to the unseen, from the temporal to the spiritual, and says to himself, “As I 
have been accustomed to obey and to be obeyed in the army to which I belong, so this 
great Commander, whoever He is, certainly has power to enforce His commands in 
the spheres of sickness, sorrow, and suffering, over which He holds sway.”’ Conse- 
quently he says, “Speak the word only, Lord; speak the word only.” Every Christian 
must expect this same absolute obedience to the word of the Lord which that soldier 
expected when he bowed as a poor humble suppliant at the feet of Jesus of Nazareth, 
who he knew had power to enforce His commands. He therefore believed that the 
Lord Jesus would speak that word which would set his home at rest, and would leave 
him and all his family at liberty to enjoy the blessings which the Lord provided. 

Life is not only a matter of great difficulty to many, but, owing to our peculiar 
circumstances, life is an abstruse question, a riddle of a very peculiar kind. Men see 
that if the Bible is a divine revelation it offers a standard of living which is infinitely 
above that which is ordinarily lived by men. They see, on the other hand, that, with 
the strained activity of the present generation, a man must be very earnestly devoted 
to his own business if he would keep pace with the requirements of the age. The 
consequence is that they think that there is a divergence between the spiritual and the 
temporal, between the doctrinal and the practical, and that it is impossible to reconcile 
the two. Thus we hear it said that a man or a woman engaged in the struggles of this 
life cannot be expected to have perfect and uninterrupted rest and joy and communion 
with God in the midst of the turmoil and distress of business life. 


bre 


A Man Under Authority—W ebb-Peploe. 795 


Such a statement, my brethren, distinctly contradicts all the purposes of God; for 
while life is a riddle to the creature, it is a riddle only because men have either never 
been taught, or fail to recognize and acknowledge, the wonderful unity which per- 
vades the true life. There may be manifold manifestations of life, but throughout all 
these manifestations there should run one great unifying principle, one purpose; 
and unless that unifying principle pervades our every act, it is no wonder that 
we lack communion and fellowship with God, no wonder that religion is 
divorced from business; no wonder that what men call the privileges of 
the gospel are in their minds disassociated from the duties and the demands 
of a daily existence. We affrm—and I trust that God may confirm it by 
the power of the Holy Ghost—that the divine unity which pervades the Godhead, 
coupled with the trinity of manifestation, is intended to be a pattern to us of 
what should pervade the life of every human being on earth. As life is one, and yet 
may have manifold representations, so there should be in each of us a oneness of life 
and of thought, a oneness of purpose and of power, if the original revelation of God 
in man is to be carried out. Adam had this unity of life, for he was one with God; 
but Adam lost it because he turned from God. Adam's representative, Jesus Christ, 
came to bring to us that which Adam the first had lost; the second Adam regains for 
man exactly what was lost through sin. Before discord was introduced into their life 
by sin, Adam and Eve lived for God; they ate for God, they drank for God, they 
walked for God, they worked for God, they were gardeners for God; their life was 
one in which God was the all-pervading principle, the all-pervading power; there was * 
for them no severance between the secular and the religious, no difference between the 
temporal and the spiritual, between the earthly and the heavenly; all was of God, all 
was for God. But the moment that sin entered into man’s being it corrupted and 
terribly transformed and severed one part of man from his God so completely that all 
his other faculties became tainted and marred by the disunion. Henceforth man lived 
a divided life, so utterly divided that it seemed impossible that there could be such 
perfect reconciliation as ever again to induce absolute unity of power in the sons 
of men. As long as men and women think that secular life must be a separate exist- 
ence from the spiritual, that earthly engagements cannot be reconciled with uninter- 
tupted communion with God, just so long are they living outside the purposes of God, 
contradicting the majesty of their true human nature, and denying the efficacy of the 
gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. 


The Son of God has been revealed to the sons of men not only to exhibit a perfect 
pattern of One who lived in perfect communion with God the Father, so that He 
could say that His words, His thoughts, and His works were not His own, but the 
Father's which sent Him; but Christ also came to produce in the sons of men who 
accept Him as their Savior the very same existence in connection with the divine, only 
modified by our human capacity and by the root of sin, which never existed in our 
Lord, but will hinder and hamper us to the last moment of our mortal existence. 


We may find one solution of the riddle of life which puzzles men strikingly brought 
out in the centurion’s words, even though he may not have understood their full 
import at the time when he gave expression to them, and though from the natural 
he argued as to the spiritual sphere. 


In Christ things which to the unenlightened eye seem to be severed are united. 
All the perplexity and painful distress, the dark difficulties that may dominate one’s 
whole existence, would disappear if we would only learn that in Christ Jesus our 
eating and drinking, our sleeping and clothing of the body, are as much spiritual 
matters as falling upon our knees in prayer, or reading God’s holy Word, or partaking 
of the holy communion at the table of the Lord. In Christ Jesus life is one, and there 


= , oe 


796 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


ought to be no division between things secular and things spiritual, things bodily and 
things heavenly; they must be one, absolutely one. 

This truth is illustrated in the twofold life of this centurion. Not until we have — 
carefully studied the military history of Rome shall we fully understand thé mighty 
force of the words to which this man gives utterance: “I am a man under authority.” 
This one idea pervaded his entire existence; this one law—the law of obedience—gov- 
erned his whole life; for the instant a man was called to join the Roman army he gave 
himself over to one law of life; henceforth he must not know the possession of property 
or the possession of relatives, he must not know the possession of a will, or even the 
possession of hope, in one sense; he was simply a vessel, an instrument, taken posses- 
sion of by the state, to be absolutely, ceaselessly, under the control of that great power 
which had called him into its service. The Roman imperium overshadowed the man 
and absorbed him and all that he had into itself. But while the imperium took him 
into its power, at the same time it transmitted its power to him; he, therefore, became 
possessed of the whole power of that state to carry out its will, so far as that will 
could be carried out in one individual. The’ Roman soldier was the representative of 
a domination that overruled him, and that overruled the world, and that through him 
carried out its purpose and pleasure. It was possible for that soldier to embody the 
whole Roman authority, the whole Roman force, in his person; he might say, “In all 
these things I am more than conqueror through the power that has taken possession 
of me and deigns to make me its medium of revelation.” Therefore in the centurion, 
as in every other Roman soldier, there was a double life. There was, first, a life in 
which the principle of the domination of the state took possession of him, so as to 
make him feel that he had not an instinct, not a plan or a purpose, that was not the 
property of the state. But, second, he could also feel that, as he was taken possession 
of by the state for its use, so the state, with all its imperium behind him, enabled him 
to step out with the assurance that it would deliver him from evil, that it would 
avenge his cause at every point and take his part in the presence of his foes, and that it 
would empower him for whatsoever it desired. Therefore, so far as Rome was omni- 
potent, and so far as one man could carry out Rome’s purposes, just so far each indi- 
vidual soldier became omnipotent, and could say, “I can do all things through Rome 
which strengthens me.’ In those days the Romans deified power, and actually wor- 
shiped their own emperors while living, and glorified them as gods when dead, 
looking upon them as the earthly representatives of power. 


When this soldier stood before Christ he said, “My experience has been that as 
I obey Iam also obeyed. I can see that thou hast authority in the unknown spiritual - 
domain; therefore the unseen powers will obey thee exactly as I have learned to obey 
Rome and to be obeyed by those under me. I appeal to thee, therefore, O Master, 
to speak the word only, and all will be well.” Because of these words our blessed 
Lord was pleased to say that He had never seen such faith in man. In return for this 
evidence of faith Jesus gave him all that he desired; “Go thy way; thy servant is 
healed;” and our Lord actually deigned to marvel. 

Now this incident brings out a very magnificent truth. It teaches us first of all 
that here is true faith. Faith is not the glib utterance of any form of words or any 
principle of doctrine, but faith is the submission of the whole being to the will of the 
Holy One, who stands before us as the true representative of authority and govern- 
ment. When our souls, our bodies, and our whole being and property are brought 
into absolute submission to His will, then, and then only, are we men of faith. Here, 
of course, we have to do with a different sphere. There the man was only a slave; 
he was bodily a representative of obedience: in our case it comes to the inner life first. 
As Christians our spirits must first be submitted. then the will, and the body will 
follow as an instrument subject to the will and ready to carry out its behests. For 


A Man Under Authority—W ebb-Peploc. 797 


this faith Christ praised the centurion, and this alone Christ accepts of us, this only 
will be the means of introducing us into that blessed life of liberty, peace, rest, and 
power which we so strongly desire. You will never enter into the life of rest and 
victory, you will never know what it is to be one with the Father in Christ Jesus 
through the Spirit, until you have learned the divine law that life is one, that you 
cannot sever the secular from the spiritual. The one great means by which this unity 
of life is to be manifested in your business and in your pleasures is by your taking 
this position and saying, “I am a man under authority.” 


The unifying principle of life has been exhibited in the temporal sphere in the 
case of the centurion, but it is also permissible to apply this to the spiritual sphere. 
Our Lord commends the centurion’s faith, but no man has true faith who does not 
act on the great principle of submission to the Lord Jesus as the supreme representa- 
tive of authority. From the moment that a man is born into the world he is inclined to 
evil; the very instincts of his nature lead him astray; and yet we can see that no human’ 
being is altogether and hopelessly evil unless he wilfully allies himself to the devil and 
his ways. That is why Christ, when He condemns the lost to everlasting fire, says, 
“Go into the fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ No man goes to hell, thank 
God, except the man who sets his face to be like the devil, and therefore becomes a 
demon and loses every instinct of good. But in human beings, as long as they remain 
in this world, there is always the possibility of salvation, for there is still in man, no 
matter how depraved, the possible instinct of turning to God; there is still a desire 
toward good in what we call his better moments. All who are not converted to God, 
however, go down, down, down, and are finally completely overcome by Satan; if they 
are not servants of God, they end by being slaves of the devil. What is their condi- 
tion” Is it restful, is it a life that flows on in endless song even if worldly blessing 
fail? No; there is always unrest. ‘The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it 
cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, 
to the wicked” (Isa. 57: 20, 21). A wicked man may call himself happy, but he always 
seeks to avoid God, and is ever restless and wretched. But bring that man under the 
power of the gospel and what happens? He is convicted of sin and realizes imme- 
diately that he ought to live a better life, that God requires a holy life. He usually 
sets about to try to please God by his own efforts. He begins to turn over a new leaf 
and struggles hard to obey God’s law, but the consequence is that there is ten times 
as much unrest as before his conviction. He becomes so agonized that his soul can- 
not be still for a moment; he has no pleasure either in heavenly or in earthly things; 
he is living in bitter distress. But now let that man learn that Christ has made peace 
with God through His precious blood, and that the cross brings perfect acceptance 
to any man who believes in Jesus. What happiness follows! He accepts the truth that 
he is pardoned for Christ’s sake. But is he simply pardoned because he believes that 
Christ died for him? Nay, God forbid; you know the power, I hope, of 2 Cor. 5: 17: 
“If any man be in Christ, there is a new creation: old things have passed away; 
behold, all things have become new.” Why is that not true experimentally? 
Because we do not recognize the force of the truth which I wish to impress. 
When a man truly believes, there has come into that mian’s very being a new life from 
God, which is the God-life. This is not given him simply that he may say, “I am 
saved and am going to heaven;” but Christ has come in to dominate his whole being, 
to take possession of him forever. How we have slandered our Lord when we have 
dared to stand before the world and to say, “I am Christ's, because I believe that 
Christ died for me!” That does not satisfy God. He wants man to be living the 
divine life in all the power and blessedness of that unity which pervades the divine life 
in all with manifold representations. Each of us has but one life; whose is it to be? 
The moment I am regenerated Christ has entered my heart, and henceforth I am His. 


798 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


Now I stand before the world a saved soul, to say but one thing: “I am a man under 
authority.” If I am Christ’s, then His divine life must be poured into my heart, into 
my soul, into my life, into my body, into my property, into my home, into my business, 
and into my pleasures. In baptism I became a servant, a soldier of Christ, like the 
soldier under the Roman imperium, dominated absolutely by His will and His power, 
so that not a moment or a faculty or a possession is my own. ; 

Brethren, you may hurl my words from you, but you cannot hurl God from you. 
If you have heard God’s Word you must one day answer for it. Do you desire to 
learn the secret of a restful life, to learn how you can be a man or woman of Christly 
power? You can only become such in so far as Christ has power over you and takes 
possession of you, as Rome took possession of her soldiers to make use of them for the 
glory and the honor of the state. Rome rewarded her soldiers, and do you suppose 
the Lord will not reward you? He will reward you abundantly when the time comes, 
but do not think of that at the outset. Think first, “For what am I enrolled; who has 
taken me into His service, and what life am I now to live?” You are to live a life of 
obedience to authority: a life in which there is but one dominating power—the omni- 
potent imperium of the Godhead. To think that He is willing to take us, and to 
permit us to represent Him before men! We feel that we are unworthy of it, as a 
man might think, ‘Am I worthy to be a general, to represent Rome and the grand 
embodiment of authority that is found in the emperor? Can I stand before the world 
as the representative of the great Cesar?” He can do it only as Cesar gives him 
power, but Cesar may do as he will. “We have no king but Cesar,” says the recreant 
Jew. ‘We have one king,” says the Christian who is living a half-and-half life, “and 
it is the world’s opinion.” The Lord Jesus Christ says, “My kingdom is not of this 


world; it is of heaven.” Christian brethren, we have no other king than the Lord’s . 


Anointed. “The government shall be upon His shoulders, and of the advance of His 
authority there shall be no end.” Each of us must show that to be true in our own 
life. \ 

What a lie it is to say that Christ is put in possession of authority by His Father, 
being seated at God’s right hand; that we give Him the kingdom, while we are yet 
bowing before Czsar—the Cesar that reigns in the daily life of fashion for the women, 
the Cesar that reigns in daily business life for the men, and in the daily life of authority 
for the clergymen! A man said to me not long ago, “How can the clergy live above 
their daily bread? You cannot expect it from them. They hang upon the wills of 
their congregations.” Brethren, we have no right before God or man to care what 
men may say. We are under the authority of Christ, and we must speak His truth. 
To mince words because men’s money is at stake is to deny the authority of the true 
Emperor; it is to be cowards to our Lord. You would never again be influenced by: 
such sordid motives if you conceived of the Christ-power you ought. It must pain 
any Christian to think that any child of God could say, “I cannot live above my daily 
bread; if I offend my people they will turn to Rev. Mr. So-and-So.” Will they? 
What matters that? You are a man under authority. And, you, my business brother, 
take up your banker’s book and balance-sheets, take up your great accounts of all your 
home and foreign trade; look over them, item by item, and say, “Will they stand the 
scrutiny of the great Auditor of heaven?” The Auditor of heaven does more than 
the auditor of earth. The heavenly Auditor looks into the motive back of every 
transaction and memorandum. We all need to be commercial Christians, but we are 
only at liberty to act according to the law of God; to refuse to do so is to deny the 
power of Jesus. 


If we could only get this principle before us it would set at rest all our present | 


troubled condition of soul. You who are exercised about your duties to society, have 
you ever thought that if Christ were really in authority, and there were no divided life 


A Man Under Authority—W ebb-Peploe. 799 


due to the setting up of two principles, all this quibbling about social duties and 
pleasures would disappear? You must not depend on man’s advice or limitations. 
God is your judge. ‘Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which 
he alloweth.” (Rom. 14:22.) Apply that to your daily life and you will soon settle 
the questions about this or that partnership or pleasure or business transaction. Can 
a Christian go into partnership with one who serves man and the devil and never 
submits his affairs to Christ? How can Christ have fellowship with Belial? Settle 
it with God, and do not deceive yourself with the idea that you will do good. If you 
make yourself one with the world on the plea of raising the world to God you will have 
to pay for it in the day of the Lord’s settlement. In these days there is much talk 
about a longing for power. Christians exclaim, “I want the baptism for power; would 
to God I had power!” See how Christ has solved the whole thing for us through this 
centurion. This Roman soldier said, “I am a man under authority, and have soldiers 
under me.’”’ He had learned the art of obeying, and therefore the state could trust 
him to command and to be obeyed. Learn to obey and you will soon be in command. 
. Christ “learned obedience by the things which He suffered:” therefore “hath God 
’ highly exalted Him.” Beloved, why play the fool about this matter? You would like 
to feel, as one said to me. He wanted a physical manifestation of the Holy Ghost, 
and so he would go through a night of prayer like a Roman Catholic, or perform some 
great ascetic act in hope of getting power for self. A man will go to an all-night 
prayer-meeting to get the power of the Holy Ghost. Prayers will do much, but they 
will do nothing while there is contrariety to God. When you put yourself under 
authority let the representative of authority say of you, “That man is to be trusted.” 
Why is one man more used than another today? Because he obeys; he is not to be 
flattered, he is not anxious for the opinion of man. Let a man overcome self in the 
law of obedience, and the Holy Ghost will take him and use him as a vessel fit for the 
Master’s use. All this talk about yearning for power is so much empty breath, so 
much vanity and conceit, until men have learned this lesson. Put this law into prac- 
tice. Brethren, I know but one life of joy—I wish I knew it better—it is a life of 
obedience to Christ’s authority, 


350 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


PAUL AS A PASTOR. 
ALEXANDER WHYTE. 


“From house to house for the space of three years, I ceased not to warn every one 
night and day with tears.”—Acts 20: 31. 

In his painstaking industry for Theophilus and for us, Luke has here provided us 
with an extract-minute, so to call it, copied out of the session-books of Ephesus. Paul 
had been the minister and the moderator of the kirk-session of Ephesus for three 
never-to-be-forgotten years. But he has now for some time past been away preaching 
the Gospel and planting churches elsewhere, and another elder of experience and of 
authority has all that time sat in the Ephesian chair that the Apostle used to occupy 
with such authority and acceptance. But Paul is now coming near the end of his 
life. He knows that, and he has a great longing, and a most natural longing it is, to 
see his old colleagues in Ephesus once more before he goes to be with Christ. And 
thus it is that at his special request an “in hunc effectum” meeting of kirk-session has 
been called, an extract-minute of which is to be read by the curious to this day in the 
twentieth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Now from this priceless little paper of 
Luke’s we learn that, the session being constituted, Paul immediately took occasion 
to review those long past three years that he had spent in their city, and had sat at the 
head of their court. Paul had given three of the best years of his life to Ephesus, and 
it was only natural that he should take occasion to go over those three years and look 
at some of the lessons that those three years had left behind them, both for himself 
and for his successors in the eldership of Ephesus. And it is just those fine lessons 
that this first of Church-historians, with such an admirable literary instinct, and with 
such sanctified industry, has here supplied us with. Paul never spoke better. Paul 
simply excels himself. There is all that stateliness that never forsakes Paul. There 
is all that majesty that Paul bears about with him at all times and into all places. All 
united to a humility, and an intimacy, and a confidingness, that always carry captive to 
Paul all men’s hearts who have hearts. Paul is simply unapproachable in a scene like 
this. Paul has no equal and no second in the matters and the manners of the heart. 
Paul is almost his Master over again in these matters and manners of the heart, so 
much so, that when it was all over, we do not wonder that they all wept sore, and fell 
on Paul’s neck and kissed him, sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, 
that they should see his face no more. In no other single passage in all Paut’s life by 
Luke, or in all his own Epistles even, do we see the finished friend and the perfect 
pastor as in this sederunt, so to call it, of the kirk-session of Ephesus. This sederunt, 
and this extract-minute of it, is a very glass in which every minister and every elder 
may to this day see themselves, and what manner of minister and what manner of elder 
they are, and are not. 


1. “Serving the Lord,” says Paul te begin with, about those three years. And 
Paul always begins with that same thing. He begins every sermon of his, and every 
Epistle of his with serving the Lord. I, Paul, the servant of the Lord, is his salutation 
and seal in every Epistle of his. And hence his stateliness, and hence his high serious- 
ness, and hence his unparalleled humility, and hence his overpowering authority, and 
hence his whole, otherwise unaccountable, life pastoral and all. No: the elders of 
Ephesus did not need to be reminded that Paul had not spent those three years serving 


Paul as Pastor—Whyte. — 801 


and satisfying them. They got splendid service out of Paul, both for themselves and 
for their families, but all that was because Paul did not think of them at all, but only 
of his Master. There was a colossal pride in Paul, and at the same time a prostrate 
humility, such that they had never seen anything like it in any other man; a sub- 
missiveness and a self-surrender to all men, such that, as those three years went on, 
taught to all the teachable men among them far more for their own character and 
conduct than all his inspired preaching. If Paul had both forgiven and forgotten 
those unfortunate misunderstandings and self-assertions that will come up among the 
very best ministers and elders, they had not forgiven or forgotten themselves for those 
days, and for their part in them. And thus it was that when Paul said these words: 
“Serving the Lord,” those who had known Paul best were the first to say that it was 
true. Now that it was all long past, they all saw and admitted to themselves, and to 
one another, how in this disputed matter, and in that, Paul had neither served himself, 
nor them, but the Lord only. 


2. We do not at first sight exactly see why Paul should be so sore, and so sensi- 
tive, and so full of all scrupulosity about money matters. But he had only too good 
cause to say all he said and do all he did, in that root-of-all-evil matter. It was one 
of the many most abominable slanders that his sordid-hearted enemies circulated 
against Paul, that all the time he was feathering his own nest. He is collecting money, 
they said, from all his so-called churches, and is stealthily laying up a fortune for 
himself and for his family in Tarsus and Jerusalem. You all know how certain 
scandals follow eminent and successful men as its shadow follows a solid substance. 
We are ashamed, down to this day, to see Paul compelled to defend his apostleship 
and himself from such tongues and such pens; from such whisperers and such back- 
biters. And, yet, no. We would not have lost such outbursts as this for anything. 
We would never have known Paul, or have loved him, or have believed in him and in 
his gospel as we do, had we not been present at that table beside those men who had 
seen Paul with all their eyes, day and night for three years. I defy you! he exclaimed, 
as he stood up in indignation, and held out his callous hands—I defy you to deny it. 
I have coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know that 
these hands—and as he held them up, the assembled elders saw a tongue of truth in 
every seam and scar that covered them—these hands have ministered to all my own 
necessities, and to them that were with me! Noble hands of a noble heart! 


preaching, and to put some other things forward. At the same time, though consid- 
erations of money had nothing at all to do with it, some other matters undoubtedly 
had to do with it. To me it is as clear as anything can be, that the apostle was 
tempted and was even commanded, by those very men sitting there, to keep back some 
things out of his preaching that he was wont to bring forward into it. Paul would 
never have said what he did say at that heart-melting moment, and he would never 


. a 
a 
; 

- 


802 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


tions in which to see and to examine both themselves, and all their past and fast- 
passing relations to one another, both in the pulpit and in the pew. 


4. “And, with all humility of mind.” Evangelical humility, as Jonathan Edwards 
so splendidly treats it, lay deep down like a foundation-stone under all Paul’s attain- 
ments as a saint of God and as an apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul’s Master had taken the 
proper precautions at the beginning of Paul’s apostleship that he should be all through 
it, and down to the end of it, the humblest man in all the world. By that terrible 
thorn in his flesh; by a conscience of the most remorseful memories; as well as by 
incessant trials and persecutions and sufferings of all conceivable kinds, Paul was made 
and was kept the humblest of all humble men. As all our preachers and pastors still - 
are, or ought.to be. For they, too, have each their own thorn in their own flesh; their 
own crook in their own lot; their own sword of God in their own heart and conscience. 
If it were nothing else, their daily work is the most humiliating and heart-breaking 
work in all the world. All other callings may be accomplished and laid down; may 
reward and may bring pride to those who follow them with all their might; but never 
in this world the Christian ministry. And, not his defeats and disappointments among 
his people only; but, still more, the things in a minister himself that account for and 
justify all those defeats and disappointments—all that makes his whole ministry to 
collapse, and to fall in on his heart continually, like the house that he has built on the 
sand. Till, whatever other gifts and graces a minister may be lacking in, it is impos- 
sible for him to lack humility. With all humility of mind, says Paul, to the assembled 
elders of Ephesus. Humility of all kinds, he means; and drawn out of all experiences; 
and shown to all sorts of people. Till, both for a garment of office, and for a grace of 
character, a minister is. clothed from head to foot with spiritual and evangelical 
humility. 

5. “And from house to house” warning every one night and day with tears. The 
whole of Ephesus was Paul’s parish. And, not once in a whole year, like the most 
diligent of us, but every day, and back again every night, Paul was in every house. 
Paul was never in his bed. He did not take time so much as to eat. As his people in 
Anworth said about Samuel Rutherford, Paul was always working with his hands, 
always working with his mind, always preaching, always visiting. “At all seasons” 
are Paul’s own enviable words. At marriages, at baptisms, at feasts, at funerals, at the 
baths and in the market places. NNow down in an old woman’s cellar, and now up in 
a poor student’s garret. Some men find time for everything. They seem to be able to 
manufacture time just as they need it. The sun and the moon and the stars all stand 
still in order that some men may get sufficient time to finish their work. It is for such. 
men that sun and stars are created, and are kept in their places; they take their 
ordinances from such men, and from the Taskmaster of such men. Paul, I suppose, 
is the only minister that ever lived who could have read Richard Baxter’s “Reformed 
Pastor” without going mad with remorse, and with a fearful looking for of judgment. 
“Another part is to have a special care of each member of our flock. We must labor 
to be acquainted with all our people. To know all their inclinations and conversation: 
for if we know not the temperament or the disease, we are likely to prove but unsuc- 
cessful physicians. A minister is not only for public preaching. .One word of season- 
able and prudent advice will do that good that many sermons -will not do. See that 
they have some profitable moving book besides the Bible in each family; and if they 
have not, persuade them to buy some small piece of great use. If they be not able to 
buy them, give them some. If you cannot, get some gentleman, or other rich man 
that are willing to do good, to do it. Another part lieth in visiting the sick, and in 
helping them to prepare either for a more fruitful life, or for a happy death.” There 
are few things in ministerial history that makes my heart bleed like the tragedy of 
Jonathan Edwards’ breach with his congregation, and then his banishment from his 


Paul as Pastor—Whyte. 803 


congregation. And I never can get over it that, in spite of all else, had Edwards been 
a pastor like Paul that terrible shipwreck could never have taken place. And, yet, I 
must frankly confess, that explanation does not satisfy every case, even in my own 
experience. For some of the best pastors I have ever known, have been the victims 
of the cruellest and most heartless treachery and ingratitude, and that from some of 
their most pampered people. 

6. Even the Apostle Peter makes the confession that he had found some things 
in Paul’s Epistles hard to be understood. And so have I. And not in the Romans 
and the Colossians only, but almost more in this kirk-session speech of his. I can 
understand him, even if I cannot compete with him, in his incomparable pulpit and 
pastoral work. I myself go about, in a way, preaching repentance toward God, and 
faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. But after I am like to drop with my work; and 
most of all with the arrears of it; Paul absolutely prostrates me and tramples me to 
death when he stands up among his elders and deacons and says: “I take you to 
record this day that I am pure from the blood of all men!” I do not find his rapture 
into the third heavens hard to be understood, nor his revelations and inspirations, nor 
his thorn in the flesh, nor any of his doctrines of Adam, or of Christ, or of election, 
or of justification, or of sanctification, or of the final perseverance of the saints. It 
is none of all these things that I am tempted to wrest. But it absolutely passes my 
imagination how a horny-handed tent-maker, with twelve hours in his day, or make it 
eighteen, and with seven days in his week; a mortal man, and, as yet an unglorified, 
and indeed, far from sanctified man, could look all his elders, and all their Wives, and 
all their sons and daughters in the face, and could say those terrible words about their 
blood. Jesus Christ, who finished the work given Him to do, never said more than 
that. The only thing that ever I heard to come near that, was when a Highland 
minister was leaving his parish, and said from the pulpit in his farewell sermon, that 
he took «all his people to witness that he had spoken, not only from the pulpit, but 
personally, and in private, to every single one of his people about the state of their 
souls. Altogether, Paul was such a preacher, and such a pastor, and such a saint, that 
I cannot blame them for thinking in those days that he must be nothing less than the 
Holy Ghost Himself, who had been promised by Christ for to come. Such was Paul’s 
character, and such was his work, and such was his success both as a preacher and as 
a pastor. 

With all that, and after all that is said, I am still dazzled and absolutely fascinated 
with Paul’s pastoral work. I cannot get Paul’s pastoral work out of my mind. 
I cannot get it out of my imagination. I cannot get it out of my conscience. I can- 
not get it out of my heart. Above all his discoveries, when Professor Ramsay goes 
cast to dig for Paul in Ephesus, I would like him to be able to disinter Paul’s 
pastoral-visitation book. And with it the key to those cipher and shorthand entries 
about what he said and what he did in this house and in that, and day and night 
with tears. The hours he gave to it, his division of the day and of the night, 
the Psalms he read and opened up from house to house, the houses that made him 
weep, and the houses that sent him back to his tent-making singing. Did 
Paul make it a rule to read, and expound, each visit? Did he send word by 
the deacon of the district that he was coming? Or did he just, in our disorderly way, 
Start off and drop in here and there as this case and that came up into his over-crowded 
mind? Till the learned professor comes upon Paul’s private note-book, for myself I 
will continue to interpret Paul’s farewell address to the kirk-session of Ephesus with 
some liberality. Paul does not really mean me to understand that he was always 
weeping, and always catechising, and always expounding, and always on his knees in 
the houses of Ephesus. No: Paul was Paul in all parts of his pastoral work, as well 
as in everything else. Paul is the last speaker to interpret in a wooden way, far less 


804 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


in a cast-iron way. Paul, you may depend upon it, was quite content some days just 
to have waved his hand in at that window, and to have saluted this and that man in 
the street, and to have been saluted in return by this and that gentlemanly little school- 
boy with his satchel on his back. Paul would often drop in, as we say, not indeed to 
curse the weather, and to canvass the approaching marriages, like William Law’s 
minister, but all the same to rejoice with the bridegroom and the bride, and to set 
down their exact date in his diary, so as to be sure to be on the spot in good time, and 
in his best attire. If you are a pastor, and if your visits up and down among your 
people help to keep your and their friendships in repair; to rekindle and to fan the 
smoking flax of brotherly love; if your visits operate to the cementing and the stability 
of the congregation; then, that is already more than one-half of the whole end of your 
ministry, both pulpit and pastoral, accomplished. And, with all your preaching, and 
with all your pastoral work performed like Paul’s, in intention and in industry at least, 
you also will surely be able, with great humility and with great assurance of faith, to 
bid your people good-bye, and your kirk-session, saying—And now, brethren, I 
commend you to God, and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up, 
and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified. 


[Alexander Whyte, D. D., was born at Kirriemuir (Thrums), January 13, 1837, 
receiving his education at Aberdeen University and New College, Edinburgh; served 
as colleague at St. John’s Church, Glasgow, 1866, then as colleague and successor to 
Dr. Candlish, Edinburgh, in 1870, where he remains the senior minister. He has 
written a number of biographical works, his Bible Characters being published in 1897. 

This sermon is from notes on a continuation of his Bible character series of 
sermons, this one being delivered Saturday evening at Free St. George’s, Edinburgh. ] 


BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 


LYMAN ABBOTT. 


“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall 
be.”—1 John 3: 2. 

The world is God’s workshop, and men and women are the products of His 
industry. The chips are all about us, and the products are far from finished—some 
perhaps never will be; we cannot tell. But we are in the world to be made: this is 
the end of life—the development of true men and true women, worthy to be called 
children of God. The process begins at the cradle; so far as this life is concerned, it 
ends when we drop the body into the grave, at what we call our day of death, but 
should call our day of resurrection, and rise up and go out from the school of earthly 
life to some other life, for some other preparation or for some possible achievements, 
we cannot tell what. 

In this process we have to develop what we call our intellectual powers. We 
must understand something of this outer world in which we live. We must know how 
to interrogate our own consciousness and understand something of the inward world, 
the world of thought and feeling. And we must learn how, by our reason, to draw 
conclusions from the things which we have learned from observation and from self- 
consciousness. This triple process, studying the outer world, studying the inner 
world, and deducing conclusions from what we have observed in both worlds, gives us 
what we call knowledge. And this which we call knowledge is acquaintance with God. 
It is acquaintance with the works which he has made and with the life which he has 
inspired. Our creeds are not too long; they are too short. They do not contain too 
much; they contain too little. They are not too complicated; they are too simple. 
We cannot depend on the theologian alone to tell us about God. We must go to the 
artist to tell us what is beauty, and to the musician to tell us what is harmony, and to 
the poet to tell us what is imagination, and to the father and the mother and the friend 
to’ tell us what is love; and all these are revelations of God. The difficulty with the 
creed is that it contains too little. Too few men have been working at it. It is made 
up of crystals; but all our beliefs should be seeds that are ever growing larger and 
bursting the shell within which they are placed. For we shall not begin to understand 
what knowledge is until we understand something of what God is, and we shall not 
begin to understand what God is so long as we confine our notions of divinity to those 
which are given to us by philosophers, 


But we are not only thinking creatures; we are emotive. We have appetites and 
passions, desires and aspirations. Appetite, passion, acquisitiveness, approbativeness, 
self-esteem, ambition, as well as faith and hope and love—these are all impelling us in 
one direction or another. To be educated is not merely to know how to see the outer 
world, is not merely to deduce right conclusions from what we have observed: it is to 
know how to regulate this ill-regulated, passionate life within us; it is to understand 
how to be full of passion and yet keep it controlled, as the engineer keeps the fire 
controlled that makes the steam. A passionless creature is a poor, useless, ineffective 
creature. It is to know how to have the self-esteem that shall protect us, and yet that 
shall not make us hard and careless of others; how to have the love of approbation 
that shall make us care for the opinions of others and yet not make us a reed that is 


806 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


shaken with the wind; it is to know how to have the faith that shall see the invisible, 
and yet not to look so absorbedly at it as to overlook the world in which we live, a 
faith that shall never degenerate into fanaticism or superstition; it is to know how to 
have the hope that shall not so look into the life beyond as to allow us to scorn the 
life that is; and to have a love that shall never be mere sentimentalism. 

And this education which gives us knowledge and which trains our moral powers 
gives us, if it be a true education, strong, resolute will. I have heard sometimes of 
fathers resolved to break the Hill of their children—they might better break their 
backs. The will is the very citadel of life. I have heard of men who think that strong 
wills are needed for men, but weak and pliable ones for women. No! The strong will 
is the essence of a strong character. This will is often compared to the helm of a 
ship. If one could only set the helm when he starts out from New York, and steer a 
straight course to Liverpool, navigation would be an easy matter. But that we cannot 
do. The helmsman must stand with his hand on the helm and must turn it to meet 
the deviation of the compass, the shifting currents, and baffling winds. It is not 
possible to steer an undeviating course, but only a steady one, and one must be always 
shifting his helm in order to keep a steady course. An obstinate man is one who ties 
the helm and goes to sleep. The strong-willed man is he who holds the helm and 
knows when to change it, in order to meet the changing currents of life. 


This is education; to get knowledge, to get regulated passions and appetites and 
desires, and to get the strong will that gives us power over ourselves and masterful 
control in life. And all life is educative, for every stage in life is only preparation for 
another stage, and every problem in life is achieved only to have a more difficult prob- 
lem given to us. The question came to the American colonies, Will you be free? 
Then you must fight for freedom. For seven years we fight and win our freedom, and 
then we say, Now we shall have peace. Again the question comes, Do you love 
freedom for yourselves only and not for others? For a score of years the question is 
presented; finally comes the Civil War; slavery is abolished, and again we say, Now 
we shall have peace. Then God straightway opens other territories, and says, You 
have won freedom for yourselves, now make other peoples free. The boy brings the 
solution of his problem on the slate to his teacher, and asks, is the answer right? The 
teacher says yes, rubs the figures off, hands the slate back, and says, Now you can take 
a harder problem. So in life; every task is the preparation for a harder task, évery 
achievement opens the way for greater achievement, every epoch is but the beginning 
of a new epoch. - 

The whole history of life shows that education is itself the end of life. The little 
child lies in the cradle; the mother cares for it, the father provides for it, they try to 
educate it, they send it to school and to college, and then their child goes out into the 
world ready to take up life himself, and presently he is married, and a second home 
begins, and little children are given to him, and he trains them in turn, and the parents 
wait a little while to have as grandparents the joy of children without the care of 
children, and then their work is done, and they depart to enter upon some other work, 
in some other sphere, we know not where. 

We are not in life for purposes of probation; we are not here to be tried to see 
whether we are fit for heaven. There is probation, but probation is not the end of life. 
As in college there are examinations, not.to show how much we know, but to ascertain 
whether we know enough to enter the next class, so in life our trials are to ascertain 
whether today we are ready for a new lesson tomorrow. We are not here for achieve- 
ment. We are not here to do things, we are here to grow by the doing of things. 
We are in the workshop to learn industry. For life is an industrial school, and the 
purpose of its industry is to make us men and women. The end of life is not achieve- 
ment, but life itself. 


Baccalaureate Sermon—Abbott. 807 


Now let me tell you why I have said this. A friend not long since read to me a 
very pathetic letter which he had received from a Christian woman, which ran some- 
thing like this: ‘My husband has but a narrow income. We are not able to keep a 
servant unless we spend all his income, and I think now is the time to lay by a little 
for our old age. My boys are at school, and I want to spend a little time with them, 
entering into their duties, giving them what little help I can, assuring them at least of 
my sympathy. When my husband comes home at night, he is tired out, and I really 
do not see what better thing I can do then than to read to him, for his eyes are rather 
weak. And so with the housekeeping and the children and the husband, I have no 
time left to serve the Lord.” 

I think there are many such women and a few such men—more women than men, 
for the simple reason that women are more conscientious. You have gone through 
your college course. You are going out into life, and the temptation is to say to your- 
self, Now I must do something to justify the expenditure which has been put upon my 
education; I must find some mission to accomplish, some place to fill, some deed to 
do, else the time and money spent in school and college will have been spent in vain. 
This is an honorable feeling, but it is a mistaken one. We are not put into life for a 
mission; we are not put into life to do great things. We are put into life to be made 
men and women, and to do the things which God has put into our hands to do, be they 
great or be they little. 


No person can do a great work who says to herself, Go to, I will do a great work. 
Great work is not done in that way. All great work is spontaneous. I was standing 
before a picture last week with an art critic, who said, She paints better than she used 
to; she has gotten through worrying about details. She had lost self-consciousness, 
and the loss improved her as an artist. The other day a literary critic said to me, No 
man can write a moral novel purposely; if he is a moral man, his novel will be moral; 


_ if he is an immoral man, his novel will be immoral, and that is the end of it. Out of 


our character grows our life; we do as we are. This is the reason of the popular 
feeling against the professional reformer. The man who says, I will be a reformer, 
generally lacks common sense; the man who says, I will be a prophet, is apt to lack 
common morality. Columbus starts to sail across the ocean that he may find a 
passage to the East Indies, and he stumbles on America. Luther is a monk, never 
purposing to revolutionize Europe, only determined that he will follow his conscience 
wherever it may lead him. Morse is an artist, and while on shipboard the idea of the 
telegraph comes to him, and he works it out. Lincoln is a politician in Illinois, with 
no thought of emancipating the slave, but he resolves that he will be true to himself, 
whether he wins or loses a Senatorial contest. All truly great men are spontaneously 
great. More than that, great men are not great merely because they succeed. A great 
man may fail. We revere the man who endeavors to do a mistaken thing, if he carries 
into his endeavors a noble character. We honor Robert E. Lee, though had he 
succeeded in what he wished to do, he would have inflicted incalculable injury on the 
human race. We honor him for what he was, not for what he did or tried to do. 


But did not Jesus Christ have a great mission? And did not Jesus Christ tell us 
to follow Him in this great mission? Can we be following Him if we do not ourselves 
take up some great mission of our own? Look and see. In His first sermon He says 
practically this: I have come to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech 
to the dumb, solace to the suffering, emancipation to the slave. I have come to make 
the world a purer world and a better world. And then all His biography is written in 
the one sentence, “He went about doing good.” Did he do great things? Forget 
your preconceived ideas and read the story of His life, and answer what one great thing 
this man did, as men count greatness. He wrote no great book, led no great army, 
founded no great State, organized no great Church, made no great oration. He 


808 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


talked to the Twelve about Him at the supper with quite as much eloquence as He 
talked to the thousands in the Sermon on the Mount. He healed, but not so many as 
in one single year are healed in the Massachusetts General Hospital. He preached to 
a few hundreds, but not to as many as Whitefield or Wesley or Beecher or Phillips 
Brooks preached to in their lifetime. We love Him, we revere Him, we follow Him, 
not for the great things He did, but for what He was. 

And after His death He gave His disciples their mission, and He gives it to you; 
let me read it to you: “Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my 
Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when He had said this He breathed 
on them and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit.” What does that mean? 
What is the Holy Spirit? “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, 
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” What Christ tells us is this: 
This spirit was in me. I give it to you. Do you want it? Now go, and so 
live as to manifest it. The fruit of the spirit is love; what kind of love? 
every kind of love; be truer to your friends, love with a wider and a more 
catholic sympathy, be merciful and helpful to all who are in need. Joy! What 
kind of joy? Every kind of joy. The merriment that maketh glad like a medicine; 
the soberer joy of maturer life in actice living; and, most sacred of all, the joy that 
illuminates sorrow and gives us a song in our night. Peace! Not merely the delib- 
erate effort of a self-conscious peacemaker, who sees people quarreling and says, I 
must set these people right, and generally succeeds in setting them more at variance 
than before; but the spirit of peace which carries benediction in the presence of its 
possessor, the peaceful spirit of a loving heart. Meekness; the spirit that does not 
grasp; gentleness; the spirit that we call tact; goodness, that is serviceableness, the 
impulse to help wherever opportunity to help is given; temperance, or the power of 
self-control, the hand on the helm. Christ says, Take this spirit of life and then live 
your life naturally, spontaneously, unconsciously. Be, and the doing will come. 


As Christ did His work, so God does His. We may learn something even from 
the agnostic, though I am no agnostic. God works—if I may so express myself— 
anonymously. He hides Himself. He is not in the tempest, He is not in the earth- 
quake, He is not in the fire, He is in the still, small voice. Ten thousand times ten 
thousand are those that feel some impulse to higher life, some aspiration to something 
better, some impulse to love, gentleness, mercy, some spiritual perception which comes 
they know not how, and which they think is from their own spontaneous life, but 
which comes from Him; they are led and lighted by Him and know it not. To go 
through life incognito as Christ went, unknown as God goes, and yet everywhere to 
carry this high, inspiring, quickening presence, this is supreme; this is best of all. 

You are going out into the world, some of you into law, some into medicine, more 
into teaching, many of you back to your homes, to father and mother and your village. 
And perhaps sometimes you will say, Was it really worth while? I am not winning a 
great name, nor accomplishing a great mission, nor achieving any great result. Yes; 
it is most of all worth while to live in a home, the home that is made for you by 
another, or the home that you make for yourself, and on every branch of the home 
tree to hang the fruits of the indwelling spirit, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, meek- 
ness, gentleness, goodness, temperance. 

When the orchestra is getting ready, and every artist is tuning his instrument by 
letting it down or bringing it up to the right key, and they aré all consciously trying! 
to get their instruments into tune, it is not an enjoyable sound which they make in the 
process. By and by the tuning is over and the conductor stands before them, and 
raises the baton and gives his signal, and they begin their work, and each one plays the 
score that is set before him, and out of all these several scores arises a harmony that 
entrances us. Go out into life and play the score that is set before you. If God gives 


Baccalaureate Sermon—Abbott. 809 


you a kettledrum and bids you beat it, beat it and make a noise, and endure what 
people call fame. If God gives you the first violin and makes you a leader, do not 
fear, but lead as well as you can. But if He sets you at the harp and says, Play one 
score of chords and that is all, play your score of chords and do it well, and be satisfied. 
For to be is more than to do. She is greatest who is most full of the Spirit of God, 
who “lets” the mind be in her which was in Christ Jesus, and then goes her way, and 
does her work, and lives her life in sweet unconsciousness. 


[Lyman Abbott, successor to Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth Church, Brook- 
lyn, and editor The Outlook, was born at Roxbury, Mass., December 18, 1835; 
graduated College City of New York, and has degree of D. D. from Harvard. Prac- 
ticed law and ordained Congregational minister in 1860, filling pastorates at Terre 
Haute, Ind., and New York City, becoming secretary American Freedman’s Union 
Commission, resigning in 1869 to devote himself to literature. After serving 
Plymouth Church ten years he again resigned to give his whole attention to The 
Outlook, where the sermon used appeared, and from which it is reproduced by Dr. 
Abbott’s permission, It was preached at Wellesley College, Sunday, June 23, 1901.] 


810 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


CHRIST, THE CENTER OF CHRISTIANITY. 


AMORY H. BRADFORD, D. D. 


“And ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake.’”—II Cor. 4:5. 


The Apostles were possessed by enthusiasm for Christ. While they were with 
Him they were so attracted by Him that they left all to follow Him. When their eyes 
were opened to His spiritual ministry and mission, they were bound to Him still more 
closely. Peter, who had denied’ Him, was proud to die for Him; John, who had not 
understood Him when He was in the flesh, wrote of Him as “One who was in the 
beginning with God;’’ while Paul, who was as one born out of due time, with passion- 
ate earnestness, cried, “What shall-separate us from the love of Christ?” appealing to 
all the powers of earth, heaven and hell as inadequate for a task so stupendous. In 
the early days of its history, Christianity might have been described as devotion to 
Jesus Christ. And now, after 1900 years, and more, it may be defined in the same 
terms; for when any preacher or teacher escapes from traditional doctrine, and speaks 
the simple teachings of Jesus with something of His humanity and simplicity, he 
wakens such enthusiasm as can be aroused by no other subject. The most popular 
fiction has to do with the life and times of Jesus; the books with the largest circulation 
are variations on His teachings. Even the theater has turned to early Christian history 
for subjects, and no dramas are received with more applause than those which deal 
with loyalty to Christ, or which attempt to interpret His words. What does it all 
mean? I may speak about deep themes of philosophy and all but the few whb are ever 
seeking something new will go to sleep; but when I speak of Jesus moving men, a 
brother and a friend, making brighter and better this weary world of ours, when I 
point men to His cross as the fullest revelation of love human and divine, their ears 
become attentive, and their eyes show sympathy. This is true not only in the 
churches, but in all sorts of assemblies. Speak to a crowd of striking laborers about 
political economy and they will hoot you; threaten them and they will defy you; but 
show those rough men how “the man of Calvary” would deal with current social 
problems and they will break into cheers. Christianity is still enthusiasm for Jesus 
Christ—not because He was a unique man who lived in Judea 1900 years ago, but 
because He presents in human form principles which are universal and deathless. 

The identification of Christianity with Christ is nothing new in principle. The 
tendency to identify a faith with its Master is found in nearly all religions. Have you 


observed how the various religions are related to their founders? Hindooism is — 


vague, impalpable, impersonal, a system of thought in the sky, much like the piles of 


clouds which on a summer day lie near the sunset, touched with splendor, but soon 


to dissolve into darkness. Hindooism is about the only religion which has not 
improved the condition of those who hold its doctrines, and it is the only one which 
has no great teacher. But the moment we get beyond Hindooism, all is changed. 
Shall we go to Persia, the home of the Fire Worshippers? They are sometimes called 
by that name, and sometimes Parsees, but more frequently Zoroastrians, which means 
that they are the followers of Zoroaster, the pre-eminent prophet of those who worship 
the hosts of the heavens. 

When some centuries before Christ, there was a wide-spread religious reformation 
in India, what was the new faith called? By the name of its doctrines? No! by the 


Christ, the Center of Christianity—Bradford. Sir 


name of the man who was its teacher; out of whose patient meditation it sprang into 
being. Buddhism which is next to Christianity in its good works is almost as closely 
related to Buddha as Christianity is to Jesus. 

In China the same fact is observed. The system of ancestral worship which turns 
the eyes of hundreds of millions in China towards the past is called Confucianism, 
from the man who was, I believe, providentially used to teach the world that, however 
much men may look toward the future for the golden age, they must never forget that 
they should honor the land of their birth, and their parents. In a later time we find in 
the East, another teacher who was to preach sublime truths about the unity and 
spirituality of God, and his followers also were not to be known by the names of their 
doctrines, but by the names of their master, Mohamed. There seems to be something 
in the religious instinct which seeks a person for its manifestation and illustration. 
There are said to be three living and growing types of religion in the world— 
Buddhism, Mohamedanism, and Christianity, and all are identified with the names of 
the men who gave them power in the world. A Hindoo teacher once said to me in 
effect—Christians speak of a man, but we speak of truth, therefore we are nearer to 
universal religion. He overlooked the immense fact that all truth which possesses 
vitality and endurance may be embodied; that the world may misunderstand that which 
is interpreted by speculation, but that it will never long misunderstand that which is 
lived. One of the fundamental truths of the New Testament is in the text—‘The life 
was the light of men”—and we may add: The life always has been and always must 
be the light of men. The world has never been lifted one step upward by speculation; 
but it has followed truth incarnate in its great teachers with leaps and bounds. 

The same tendency has been illustrated in a lesser degree both in Romanism and 
Protestantism. What may be called the chief sects in the Roman Catholic Church are 
known by the men who first opened the new paths. Who are the Francescans? 
followers of St. Francis. Who are the Benedictines? followers of St. Benedict. Who 
are the Jesuits? Those who have tried to identify themselves with Jesus, but whose 
patron saint will always be Ignatius Loyola. 

Among Protestants—who are the Lutherans? Who are the Calvinists? Who are 
the Wesleyans? The names of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, tell the story. 

Religion which is embodied has vitality. A faith which is in the air has little 
attraction for men who are struggling against hunger, cold, sickness, sin, death. They 


. want to know what can reach to their conditions, and lift them out of their depths. 


Let us never be surprised at the identification of Christianity with Jesus Christ. 
It was the condition of its growth and it is necessary to the continuance of its influence. 
If the teachings were separated from the man, the moment of separation would be 
the beginning of decadence. We are not peculiar in this respect. We differ from 
others only in the One whose name we bear. 


Observe now how closely, yet how unassumingly, how positively, yet how mod- 
estly, our Lord kept Himself at the front. This is the marvel of His teaching. 
Without egotism that great “I” was ever conspicuous. Words sound appropriate 
when spoken by Him which would hardly have been tolerated if they had been uttered 
by another. “I am come that ye might have life.” “I am the way, the truth, and the 
life.” “I am the light of the world.” “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy 
ladened and I will give you rest.” “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” 
“This do in remembrance of me.” Thus the first personal pronoun appears again 
and again in the pages of the Gospels. Yet when Peter called Him “good Master,” 
He refused the implied compliment, and said, “there is none good but God:” and when 
men would worship Him, He declined to allow it, and said, “Worship God.” At last 
when those about Him were giving Him so much attention that they were overlooking 
the spirituality of His mission, He said, “It is expedient for you that I go away.” In 


812 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


, 


other words, you are thinking so much of me personally that I must get out of sight 
in order that you may discern the truth for which I stand. 

You read the life of Napoleon and feel that you are dealing with an enormous 
egotist; when Jesus speaks of Himself He seems like the humblest of men. What 
made the difference? In the case of Napoleon, self was the end of endeavor, but with 
Jesus, attention was attracted to Himself only that men might the better understand 
God. Jesus never allowed others to think of Him as an end—He was only the means 
to the end. It was as if He had said, “I ama mirror, but the light reflected is God.” 
“T am a telescope; you must use me, but only that you may look into the deeps of the 
glory of God.” He drew the attention of men to Himself just long enough to get. 
their eyes in the right direction and then stepped aside, that they might see God and 
their relation to Him. 

He who lifts himself into prominence and stays there is an egoist. He who 
makes himself conspicuous for a moment and then gets out of the way and leaves men 
looking upon truth and love is great enough to be the world’s Savior. It has been 
said, ‘Nothing is easier than to create a religion; one needs only confidence and fools- 
cap paper.” But what kind of a religion would that be? It might satisfy the curiosity 
of a few manish women and womanish men, but it would inspire no enthusiasm, work 
no miracles, transform no characters, lift no burdens of sin and sorrow. What is 
needed is not only something to stimulate, but something great enough to take hold 
of a sinner, lift him out of himself, fire him with a passion for something sublime and 
deathless, something which will make him glad to spend his money and willing even 
to die that the welfare of his fellow-men may be advanced. Such enthusiasm requires 
a person. Never once in history, that I know, have men been thus inspired by an 
abstract truth; but when the truth which before had been powerless has been incarnate 
it has swept all before it like a mighty wind. There is a fine illustration of this fact 
in India. The old Hindoo religion was decadent and dying. It was a philosophy, 
and philosophy never gives life. But Buddhism, which was born in India, is one of 
the mightiest religious forces on the earth. Both forms of faith have substantially the 
same speculative doctrines; both teach transmigration, both hold to Karma, both look 
toward Nirvana as the final goal: but Hindooism has little influence on the people 
and has never done much for them; it is a splendid corpse, while Buddhism, with a 
man to illustrate and impersonate its teaching, is one of the three missionary religions 
of the world. 

Those have read history to little purpose who sneeringly describe Christianity as 
the religion of one man. They are right, but they fail to see that any truth must be 
incarnate in at least one before it can be the creed of all. Jesus gathers up the 
enthusiasm of humanity into Himself—and then disappears, and we wonderingly begin 
to realize that while we have been following a man, we have also been led into the 
presence of God. 

This is what gives Jesus His power. While He was the most human of men; 
while He makes us feel that He is with us in all that we do and think, in all our labors 
and our sufferings; that we walk no path that is not familiar to Him; while our hearts 
burn within us as we converse with Him; yet no one can follow Him without quickly 
finding that He has been brought by the shortest and most direct path to know himself 
as related to God, to think of duty as the will of God, to live in the strength of God. 


It has often seemed to me that the most wonderful thing about Jesus Christ is the 
fact that to every one He seems to be living today. Other men aroused enthusiasm, 
Jesus still fires thousands with a willingness to die for Him. Other men live in 
history; Jesus lives in the hearts of consecrated followers. The story of Christianity 
is the story of enthusiasm for Christ. Paul represented himself as taken hold of by 
the love of Christ. The early martyrs competed for the honor of being burned to 


Christ, the Center of Christianity—Bradford. 813 


death in His name. The motto of the beautiful St. Francis, who was the friend of 
both man and beast, was “the love of Christ.” The art of the world for centuries has 
found its sublimest subjects in the Gospel story. It is a revelation to go through the 
world’s great galleries of art. Listen! the most beautiful picture in the National 
Gallery in London is Murillo’s Holy Family; in Paris, Murillo’s Assumption of the 
Virgin; in Antwerp, Rubens’ Descent from the Cross; in Florence, The Madonna de 
la Sedia; in Venice, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin; in Milan, Leonardo’s Last 
Supper; in Berlin, Guido’s Ecce Homo; in Rome, the Crucifixion; and in Madrid, 
The Ascension of Raphael; in Dresden, the crown of all the world’s art, The Sistine 
Madonna. 

The place of Jesus in poetry is not less significant. It is illustrated in Dante’s 
Vision, Tennyson’s Holy Grail, Browning’s Christmas Eve, Easter Day, and Death 
in the Desert, Whittier’s Our Master, Lanier’s Christ. These are only two or three 
flowers hurriedly picked in the world’s great garden of song. The motto of Harvard 
University has always been “Christo et Ecclesie”—“Christ and the Church.” 

I have not referred to these facts to eulogize Jesus. That seems to me to be the 
cheapest kind of preaching—like the tinsel hung on the crucifix in old world churches. 
Let us have done with compliments for Jesus. You might as well eulogize the sun 
and the stars. He has His place of power because “all men have desired a human 
God;” because, as has been well said, “Humanity does not need morals, it needs 
motives; it is sick of speculation; it longs for action.” Those who want action require 
a worthy leader; that leader must be a man. 


The Puritan Revolution was an abortion until Cromwell rose, condensed its prin- 
ciples into life and fused them in the fire of an imperial personality. Principles never 
have power until they are incarnate. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” did not lead the 
French Revolution, but Danton, Marat, Robespiere did. 

It is sometimes said that cities are states, that London is England, Berlin Ger- 
many, Rome Italy, and Paris France. That is doubtful; but who can doubt that 
principles become powers where they are incarnate in persons? Is brotherhood a 
dream? The magic name of Joseph Mazzini breaks the dream. Is sacrificial service 
only an ideal? The mention of Florence Nightingale shows that it has reality. Is the 
missionary enterprise folly? Listen! I speak two words—David Livingstone. The 
insinuation is repelled. Is love for God and man impossible except in thought? Jesus 
Christ lived—we have our example. 

Three points now remain to be emphasized. 

Christians are disciples of the living Christ. I have already remarked that in a 
unique way He seems to all who think of Him to be living, and as vital today as when 
He walked the earth. The common feeling is not mistaken. Jesus said that when 
He went away He would come again; and He has come, in the spirit. Spirit is like 
wind, it can be felt, but it cannot be seen. The world is conscious of His spiritual 
presence, but it sees neither His face nor His form. We are sure of the west wind 
when it blows over a field of wheat. We feel its pressure; we see the golden heads 
go down before it. In like manner we feel spiritual inspirations, impulses toward love 
and service; and we see men transformed when they are in touch with Christ. Our 
Master is not simply one who lived nineteen hundred years ago in a corner of the 
world, but one who is abreast of the centuries in all the lands. Remember this: we 
are disciples of Him who said to John, “I was dead, but am alive forevermore.” No 
dead hand rules our thinking; but a living spirit is the inspiration of our thought, 
endeavor, and love. 

The second point is equally important. We believe that God and man, time and 
eternity, the universe seen and unseen, can be interpreted only by some one who, 
belonging to all spheres, is yet, in the truest sense, a human being. Some religions are 


814 Pylpit Power and Eloquence. 


only philosophies. Jesus shows that the ideal human life is the life of God. If we 
ever know anything about God it must be through some one who brings Him so near, 
and makes Him so real, that we shall feel toward Him the same kind of enthusiasm 
that we feel toward the noblest and most inspiring men. No one would sacrifice for a 
Proposition, but many a mother would die for her child; many a patriot will give his 
life for his country; and thousands who have seen God in the face of Jesus Christ have 
followed Him to His cross. Jesus is God revealing Himself in terms in which He can 
be loved—that is in the terms of humanity. Renan was right; millions would die for 
Jesus; but it is not because it is Jesus, but because He shows in the every day life of 
humanity the glory of God and of the unseen universe. : 

Instead of making less of Christ, the world will make more of Him as it better 
understand that all knowledge of the divine, before it can have any influence on man, 
must be conveyed in forms that men can understand. 

Christianity is not a philosophy of religion; it is not a theory of God, or the way 
in which man is to be saved; it is not a set of propositions about the Old, or the New 
Testaments, or even uniformity of opinion concerning their contents; it is not any 
doctrine of the church, or the sacraments. Christianity is in all churches and outside 
of all. It is everywhere that men loyally accept the fact that God and duty, time and 
eternity, are sufficiently revealed in terms of humanity, and that the man in whom that 
revelation is complete is Jesus Christ. ; 

Finally: One of the most encouraging signs of the times is what is called “the 
return to Christ.” That does not mean that all knowledge comes through Him, but 
it does mean that men are getting back to the grand simple fundamentals which He 
taught, viz: That the sum of duty is right relations to God and man; that He made 
known in life the way to realize those relations; that to trust as He trusted is to be 
tight with God; that to love with His love is to be right with man; that His Father is 
our Father, and that from Him nothing but blessing can come, in time or eternity. 
Explain it as you may, those who are fullest of the spirits of Christ, who are most like 
Him in all His simplicity, fidelity, and brotherliness are the ones whom this world 
most desires and most honors today. In spite of armies, parliaments, obstructive 
selfishness, political corruption, and violations of moral law, Jesus holds the future, and 
no question of politics, or individual conduct, or of the relation of man to man will be 
settled aright until it is settled in His way. 

Let us read again and again the story of His life, let us be willing to follow Him 
as He moves along His pathway in the midst of suffering and sorrow, sin and death, 
saving men today; let us get all the knowledge we can, but let us never forget that the 
highest knowledge, that which alone makes existence endurable, is that which will tell 
us of Him in whose hands we are held, and to what we are tending. He who can best 
help the race to that knowledge will be the Master of the future as He should be our 
Master. Does any one really doubt that His name is Jesus Christ? If you and I do 
not, then let us give to His cause the influence of our faith, our intelligence, our 
allegiance, our example, our enthusiasm, and our undying devotion. Do not try to 
define Him, but follow Him. Like men let us stand under His banner; and under 
His leadership go wherever duty calls, to relieve suffering, inspire hope, and to save 
from sin, thus helping to fill this world of ours with the sway of love, which is the 
Kingdom of God. 


[Amory Howe Bradford was born at Granby, Oswego County, New York, April 
14, 1846, graduating from Hamilton College in 1867, Andover Theological Seminary 
1870, taking post-graduate course at Oxford University, England. For years pastor 
First Congregational Church, Montclair, N. J., and associate editor of The Outlook. 
Sent by American Board of Foreign Missions in 1895 to inspect missions in Japan. 
He is author of a number of well-known books, Thought for Today, etc.] 


(815) 


CHRIST, THE RESTORER. 
' THEODORE L. CUYLER, D. D. 


“He restoreth my soul.’-—Psalms 23: 3. 


The twenty-third is everybody's favorite among the Psalms. There are certain 
chapters in God’s Word that seem to link themselves to almost every human heart, 
having an adaptation to every line of life and every description of circumstances. So 
it is that from childhood, on even to gray hairs, there is no one Psalm so often read, 
so often prayed, so often sung, as this shepherd’s Psalm of David. Nay, it is a sort 
of nightingale among the minstrels of the Psalter; for, as it is the habit of that bird to 
sing amidst the silence and darkness of the night, so it seems as if this exquisite little 
psalm makes itself heard in the gloom of the Valley of Death, and makes its nest, 
as it were, in these deep gorges of life, so that those called to walk there not only have 
the rod and the staff, but the sweet note of heaven’s love sounding in their ears. One 
of the sweetest, one of the richest, of these God-given songs in the night is the twenty- 
third Psalm, the pastoral chant of the shepherd David. And have you not observed 
that it comes right after the twenty-second, which I am inclined to think is something 
more than a mere coincidence? The twenty-second is the Psalm of the Cross and of 
Redemption. In the twenty-second we have Christ crucified; then, when the way is 
prepared by this Messianic revelation, then it is that we are brought into this beautiful 
study and enjoyment of Him as the Shepherd and the Restorer of the soul. For I 
shall speak this morning of Jesus as the Restorer; not vaguely of the restoring love 
of God, but specifically of Jesus Christ as a Restorer, bearing in mind all the while 
that Jesus appears to us as the Shepherd, for that was His own description of Himself. 
“T am the Good Shepherd; I lay down my life for the sheep.” All that chapter in the 
book of John, in which Jesus Christ describes Himself as the Good Shepherd, flows 
tight out of this twenty-third Psalm as the natural New Testament sequel; so that 
today let us think of Jesus as the Shepherd who restores the wanderer, as the Shep- 
herd who puts back in the fold what has gone astray, as the Shepherd who guards 
and feeds, as the Shepherd who will finally bring home His own flock into glory. 

Then, in the first place, let us talk and think of Jesus as the home-bringer of the 
wandering sheep—for the original meaning of the Hebrew word is to bring back. 
“He is bringing back my soul” is the Saxon translation, and the closest, probably, 
to the original. Bringing back implies wandering, a far astray condition of the heart, 
a dwelling in the “far country” of sin, so that Christ goes out to seek and to save the 
wandering soul. Oh! how beautifully comes in here that passage, “All we like sheep 
have gone astray; every one of us had turned to his own or her own ways,” and then 
God laid on the Shepherd, the Restorer, “the iniquities of us all.” 

Three features appear conspicuous here under this head. The alliteration will 
help you remember them. These are, Ruin, Redemption, Restoration. Every one of 
us was ruined through wandering; every one of us was in a state of guilt hereditarily 
and afterwards by actual transgression. That state of guilt in which you and I were 
by nature was a state of alienation from God—a state in which there is an entire loss 
of original righteousness—a state in which the whole head is sick and the whole 
heart faint by corruption—a state of exposure to the justice and wrath of God here, 
and to the pains of perdition hereafter and forever. That is the state of ruin—just such 


«oy ee 
i 


816 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 

ruin as a voluntary transgression brings. It is a ruin from which no one ever yet 
recovered himself any more than the fallen pillars of Balbec could by their own power 
put themselves on their vacant pedestals tomorrow morning—nay, any more than you 
would expect a resurrection in Greenwood Cemetery this hour. Bear in mind, in the 
first place, that the ruin by sin is complete. 

The next point is redemption through Christ. It is purchasing by Calvary’s 
blood salvation for the wandering sheep—making it not only possible that the wander- 
ing soul may be saved, but certain that the wandering soul will be saved when it is 
once in the hands of Christ. Oh, I have no patience in preaching an atonement which 
barely makes salvation possible! If redemption by the blood of Calvary means any- 
thing, it means the positive and everlasting recovery and security of all those for 
whom Jesus shed His blood; and all those that accept that blood and put themselves 
in the Shepherd’s hands for restoration are forever safe. And now this doctrine gushes 
out with tenderness! Full of sweetness is it, like a honey-comb; how it drips with 
love! It is redemption, not for angels, seraphim and cherubim, but for beggars, 
outlaws, and wilful, disobedient, ungrateful rebels. That is what redemption means. 
It means that the worse a man is, the more God pities him. The very murderers that 
put Jesus to death had the very first offer of His love; as if Christ had said to them: 
“Go to Jerusalem and tell them they can get at my heart in a better way than with 
a spear. They need but to come with the prayer of faith and they shall be saved.” 
This love is lavished even upon the wanderer. I have heard the story of a father whose 
son, having had too much to spend at home for his own good, ran away, after the 
fashion of the Prodigal Son, and led a wild, reckless career in California. Report 
came to his father from time to time of bad things, of worse things, and of still worse; 
letters were sent to the erring boy, which remained unanswered, until, finally, the 
father, meeting a man who was going to San Francisco, gave him his son’s address, 
and said: “Look him up and just tell him that his father has never ceased to love him 
as much as ever, in spite of his sinful course.” The man hunted San Francisco: 
through, until he found the young man one evening in a gambling-house. He beck- 
oned him out, and in the street he told him his name, when he had left his. father, 
and why he had sought him, “Your father,” said the gentleman, “said I should look 
you up here, and should tell you from him that he loves you yet!” The young man 
dropped his head and the tears started. “Oh, my God!” said he, “did my father say 
he loved me yet?’ How many an one has laid his broken heart upon the mercy-seat 
and cried, “Oh God! canst Thou love me again?—me, the sinner—me, the rejecter of 
Thy grace—me, the trampler on the blood of Thy Son—me, who have done despite 
to Thy Holy Spirit—canst Thou love me yet?” Yes, Christ, the Restorer, does love 
and redeems by love, and recovers such by the power of His love. 

That is the third “R’—Ruin first; Redemption, by the blood of Christ, second; 
and, third, Recovery. Restoration is the word more in line of our text; and this 
restoration, by Jesus Christ; restores to God’s favor one who has wandered from Him, 
It restores what was lost in Adam’s fall—righteousness; it restores what we never 
could regain but through Christ. It restores hope, spiritual life, the heirship of heaven, 

Now, then, if such be Christ’s work as a Restorer, who are these that He restores? 
“He restoreth my soul.” Oh, how much turns on the word “my” in this passage! 
How different this would read “He restoreth souls,’ or “everybody’s soul”! He 
restoreth my soul. When Spurgeon went down one day into his Orphan House, where 
he found from day to day the friends of the orphan children sending them money 
and giving them cake and contributing to their pleasure, one little fellow came up to 
him and said: “Mr. Spurgeon, suppose you were a poor boy here, and hadn’t any 
uncles, nor aunties, nor sisters, nor friends ever to send you any spending money or 
candy, or even to remember you through the year? Because that’s me!” Spurgeon 


Christ the Restorer—Cuyler. 817 


says, “I handed out the silver in my pocket very soon to that lad.” “That's me!” If 
you cannot read of redemption and say, “‘That’s me! I am the needy one; I am the 
guilty one; the blessing is offered to me,” this gospel is practically to you a mere 
abstraction. It is when you caneput the personal pronoun into your religion and into 
God’s promises and into redeeming love that it becomes to you a power and a joy. 

The next point I would present is, that Christ is a Restorer to health. That 
touches all the diseases of Christians in this congregation. Let me feel your pulse 
this morning, brother! I am afraid it beats low. There are too many whose pulses 


beat low. The first inquiry of the physician when he comes in the sick-room is made 


at the wrist. He always explores the wrist for the pulse. He wants to know how the 
“regulator” beats. Christ is putting His hand often at thy wrist, brother, to see how 
the pulse moves—how many strokes to the minute there are. Is it so slow that He 
shakes His head sadly? How is thy appetite for the Bible? What was thy appetite for 
prayer last week? What is thy hunger for spiritual blessings? The pulse is one indi- 
cator; the appetite is another; the strength of the limbs is another. How nimble art 
thou, brother, in the path of obedience? How large is thy activity for the Master? 
All spiritual diseases come from the heart’s wandering from God; for the source of 
the back-slider’s disease is from the heart. Christ can heal that, but He never will until 
you come to Him and ask Him. Haven’t you observed how Christ, when He was upon 


earth, went hither and thither, according as He was invited or beckoned? Christ 


goes when He is sent for. If thou longest for the Master’s coming to thee to restore 
thee He will do so, but there must be a prayer on thy part and a deep desire. You 
have got to desire this, and to lament your backsliding, or you will never be delivered 
from it. But as soon as you ask Christ's love to come in, and Christ’s power to be 
extended, then you will feel the quickening at once. For another meaning of the 
text—(and it is the meaning that Albert Barnes gave to it)—is that Christ re-invig- 
Orates the life. He restores tone and vitality to the blood, imparts strength to the 
muscles and vigor to the footsteps—a re-invigorating process. That is a very legiti- 
mate meaning of the text spiritually—whatever may be the original meaning of it in 
Hebrew. But you must come back to Christ as the first thing. You must return to 
Him to be restored to your former condition as a Christian. Do not stop with only 
the restoration to a former condition. Try after something better than that. This is 
the mistake with many a backslider. He says, “Oh, if I could only go back where I 
was! If I could only put myself in the condition I was in ten years ago—or even last 
year!” That is not the point. It is to get closer to Christ, with a new experience of 
that love and a new abhorrence of sin and a new diligence in duty; not comparing 
yourself with a former self, but praying to be better than you ever were before, even 
in your best days. That prodigal son could not be restored to his father’s love and 
the vacant seat until he set his footsteps towards home. There was no blessing for 
him in the “far country.” Nothing could possibly be done for him while he was in 
the swine-yards, or holding in his filthy hands the wretched husks. He was a swinish 
creature while he was there. First it is, “I will arise; I will go;” then restoring love 
meets him outside the gate and brings him in to the fatted calf, the ring and the table. 
That parable of the Prodigal Son has a world of sound theology in it. No restoration 
to the prodigal until he himself comes back, and no recovery to the backslider until 
he comes to pray for mercy and sets his face towards Christ, and with tears begs to 
be restored again to the love of Him whom he has betrayed! . 

I might dwell for a moment (as a third illustration) upon the office of a picture- 
restorer. He takes an old painting, which might have been quite a masterly pro- 
duction, which may have been a masterpiece of Guido or Correggio or Raphael, and 
which has been cast aside. The colors had lost their brightness and had grown dim, 
and the painting seemed to have lost all its comeliness. The restorer sets to work 


$18 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


and removes the over-laying dust and accumulation of dirt, and he brings out the 
colors vividly again—a delicate process, and one by which sometimes a valuable 
picture starts into new life and beauty. Oh, brother! does not the canvas of thy heart 
and daily conduct need that kind of restoration? Are not the hues getting dim, the 
colors losing their brightness? Is not the resemblance to Christ overlaid, and to a 
great degree hidden out of view so that it is not distinguishable? Oh, if Jésus Christ 
would come in as a restorer, bringing out again the lineaments of holiness, there would 
be a great many of you that would need to “sit to Him!” 

The sin of backsliding is an awful sin. It figures so prominently in the Word, 
that, turning to a Bible text-book recently, I was startled almost to see the large 
number of cases recited, and the maledictions pronounced upon it. Then, too, in 
studying the narratives of backsliding in the Bible, I discover this, that men often 
break just where they seemed strongest. For instance, Noah was a Puritan; yet 
Noah lies on his back drunk. Moses is the synonym of meekness and patience; 
Moses grows enraged, and smites the rock too often. Solomon is the synonym of 
wisdom; yet he plays the fool with women and the wine-cup! John is the representa- 
tive of love; and John it was that asked Christ to bring down a shower of fire on the 
little Samaritan village! Peter is the brave, heroic disciple; but Peter turns coward 
at the sneer of a servant-girl. All these men broke right where they thought them- 
selves strong. Christians sometimes do the same thing. Where they think themselves 
strong the enemy breaks through. All those men I have spoken of were restored. 
I hope poor old Solomon was. I think he must have written the book of Ecclesiastes 
after he was restored. But for this restoration the Master goes out on errands of 
kindness, as the father sent the man to California to seek his son, almost as one would 
go to a morgue to see if a certain one was alive or dead! It must have been hard for 
Christ to go out after such lost, sinning children as He did—but He still does it! He 
goes straight after them and restores them; and if backsliding is a terrible thing, it is 
a glorious thing that there is a backsliders’ Restorer in Christ Jesus. 

Well, to what does Christ restore the backslider when he is penitent and seeks 
recovery? He restores him to his true place, which was vacant. ‘He restores him to 
usefulness. The man is ready again for duty, and feels like living a life of some value 
to himself and to others. He restores to him peace of conscience. No inconsistent 
church member ever had any peace of conscience. I tell you, young people, you may 
run away from a prayer meeting to a ball if you choose; there will be a sting and a 
prick the next morning when you wake up and think, “Last night I deliberately 
denied my Lord and Master, and did what He disapproved.” When the sound of the 
revel has died out, another sound—that of conscience—will come in and say, “You 
know you did wrong, and Christ knows it.” Peace of conscience never comes to a 
man out of the path of duty. Those fallen men that have been lately brought to the 
tribunal of civil justice had been tried and punished fifty times before in the court of 
conscience. That was the only external pronunciamento from the tribunal which 
conscience had already brought in a hundred times. There is no peace in wickedness 
to the wicked-doer, whether he be a church member or not; but peace of conscience 
‘comes through pardon and a voluntary return to the place once forsaken. Oh, what 
joy there is in coming back to health when we have lain a‘long time on the sick bed, 
until we pitied our own poor thin fingers and pale lips! The street was strange to us, 
and our deserted place in the counting-room or at the fireside was like a foreign 
country. The first time we come out in the air what a tingle it has! and when we 
meet our friends again for the first time we feel as if just introduced to them. We are 
restored. Would that every backslider that has come to this church this morning 
sick, sick, sick, would feel so sick of himself that he would put out his hand to Christ 
and go home again in the first stages of restoration! “Restore unto me the joys of 


a 


Christ the Restorer—Cuyler. 819 


Thy salvation.” That is the fourth point I speak of. The restored backslider goes 
back to his peace of conscience and to his old place of duty, and once more has the 
joys of salvation. And he has no power for good while in a state of backsliding. He 
is of no use while in that state. He not only has no inward peace, but no external 
influence. The result is that a church full of backsliders is just as inefficient as ten 
thousand invalids in a campaign. The general may call the muster-roll; he may send 
orders to “advance”; but if half his men have deserted and the other half are in the 
hospital, what chance has he in the field? Just so the Master may be calling His 
people to a life of activity, but if a part have deserted and a part are on their backs 
in a spiritual decline, there is no response and no outcoming. First of all, there must 
be restoration. The deserter must come back to his post, and the invalid must stalk 
out of the hospital; then the army is fit for service. How many deserters are there 
here this morning? How many that feel the whole head and the whole heart sick with 
sin? Jesus alone can restore you. 

Now, then, I would address a word to those yet unconverted. I have said so much 
in reference to backsliding members of Christ’s Church, because I feel how vital it is 
that they should realize their need of restoration, and how important that they should 
be directed to Christ as a Restorer. They should feel also a longing to be restored, 
which must be bred from deep disgust and dissatisfaction with themselves. If we 
would direct half the censure which we pass upon the frailty of others toward our own 
weaknesses and besetting sins, and our own cowardice and neglect of duty, you may 
depend upon it we should be the healthier and the happier. I want to turn you in 
upon yourselves this morning in the attitude of self-condemnation, that you may be 
ready to say, ‘Oh, blessed Jesus, come today and recover my soul.” The only hope 
for every unconverted person here for restoration from the ruin of sin and for recovery 
from the guilt of sin is in Christ. Again and again I proclaim this, If you want to 
try another method, you will try it to your sorrow. You will come back to it finally; 
and you may as well start with this idea, that Christ only can forgive your sins; that 
Christ only can give you power to resist sin; that Christ only can save you. And if 
you are ever restored, it must be in this world. The very word may suggest this idea 
to you, “May not Christ restore all or any in eternity to heaven? Does not that word 
have a squinting towards a restoration in eternity?” No! I do not see the faintest 
grounds for it. A perversion of this text. in the direction of that error has, rather 
more than usual, thrust itself towards the front lately. I know nothing about eternity, 
and you can know nothing about eternity, but what is revealed in this divine Book. 
I find the Lord Jesus Christ presented from beginning to end as a Restorer of human 
souls in this world on the two occasions of repentance and faith. I find not a hint of 
any restoration from the realm of darkness to the realm of everlasting glory. Probation 
is in the fore-front of God’s Word for this world. I find no hint of a probationary 
State in the world to come. If I do not find the doctrines of future probation here, 
it is of no account to me, that any speculative theologian may evolve it out of his 
own brain. ‘If it is not in God’s Word, that is enough. Now, on the other hand, I 
open this Book and find some very sharply distinct assertions that when death leaves 
us judgment finds us, and probation is ended. I discover when I look at these pages— 
(and I think we ought to read them tremblingly as God’s loving utterances of warn- 
ing)—I discover that future punishment is spoken of invariably as without end. I am 
not going to speculate this morning on what it is or what its character is, but it -is 
spoken of in the Word as a penalty laid down upon the transgressor as a banishment 
from God,, as the suffering due to the sinner. It is declared that “the wicked shall 
go away into everlasting punishment”: and there are several other passages of the 
same solemn purport. Not one of them gives any hint that after the banishment 
cometh a restoration to final blessedness. Nay, more, I find a direct condémnation 


820 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


of that modern theory in God’s Word, where our Savior drew that most pathetic and 
powerful picture of the wrath of the world to come, and described Lazarus uplifted 
into the bosom of the Patriarch Abraham, and the man that had the good things of 
this world (and grew worse by means of them) crying out in torment. The poor rich 
man is asking that he may be restored to some small comfort. He puts the doctrine 
of “restoration” there to practical test; but the answer is, “‘A great gulf is fixed, so 
that they who would go from you to us cannot cross.” If Jesus Christ knew every- 
thing (as He did) He must certainly have known such a tremendous truth as that that 
“‘oulf” would yet be bridged, and that He was to bridge it! If this Book is so full of 
salvation for this world, why is there not one line revealing salvation from hell in the 
world to come? Can it be possible that a doctrine on which thousands hang their 
hopes of eternity has not a single line here hinting it, when the Bible is so full of 
rich offers of restoration and salvation in this life? 

But imagine a man restored’ from hell after he had been punished for centuries 
according to this theory. He is ushered into heaven. They are chanting the song of 
redemption. He hears them sing, “Worthy of the Lamb that is slain.” He has no 
word of praise for Christ. Jesus has done nothing for him. He has “served out his 
time” down there, and Satan has been purifying him for hundreds of years, until he 
has got him in a fit state for heaven. What does that soul owe to Christ? He owes 
all rather to him who has been putting him through this purifying process in hell, and 
making him fit for the “better country, even the heavenly.” 

Charles G. Finney, in one of those tremendous philippics of his against error, 
used sometimes to describe a “jail delivery” from the world of woe, when a multitude 
of spirits blasted and blackened came up to the gate of heaven and clamored for 
admission! The archangel, looking over the gate, inquires, ““Who is there? Why is 
this uproar?’ And they reply, ““We are from hell! We have served out our time! 
Let us in!” That is the doctrine of restoration! Who here expects to hang his hopes 
of eternity on that? Who will take the cross of Christ that is put right before him, 
trample on it in his folly and his madness, and then risk salvation in eternity? Oh, 
brethren, there is a Restorer here! There is a Restorer here! But I know of no 
restorer beyond the grave. 


I sometimes take up and read in that beautiful book of my friend Kennan that 
description of a scene away off in Kamschatka, where a portion of their company had 
been lost in the snow for weeks. He and a few others set out on a journey of two 
hundred miles to find them. Mr. Kennan tells us that the very feet of the dogs left 
blood prints on the snow. They pushed on two hundred miles toward the Anadyr 
River, by the light only of the aurora borealis, hoping to find them. He was seeking 
to save the lost. He tells us, in an Arctic midnight, when the thermometer was 40 
degrees below zero, when they had endeavored to get a little warmth around the fire 
of a few roots gathered by the way, he heard a sharp halloo across the waste of snow. 
“We quitted the little fire and hastened in the direction of the sound, and we found 
one of our guides standing by a little iron pipe thrust out of a snow-bank. I hurried 
up to it, leaned over it and shouted down that pipe. Listen! Up from beneath the 
snow I heard, in my familiar native tongue, the words, ‘Who's there!’ Then,” adds 
Kennan, “when he told us how to find our way into that temporary place in which they 
were hidden under the snow, and we entered the cavern and saw my companions gath- 
ered around the fire in that spot, so near to perishing (where they would have perished 
if I had not reached them), my nerves had got strung up to such a state of tension 
during the long journey that in fifteen minutes I was as powerless as a child, and sank 
back unable to speak or move.” The tide of joy broke him down. There is many a 
soul whom Jesus has rescued from death, and in his first glimpse of glory he has 
broken down like my friend Kennan. Why, if you would not think me irreverent, I 


Christ the Restorer—Cuyler. 821 


would say there must be a time when the Lord Jesus Himself would be ready to 
“break down with joy!” May there be such a breaking in our hearts this morning 
when we beckon for our loving Lord, until we can exclaim, “Oh, the Restorer is 
come!” Then each one of us can say, “He restoreth my soul! He leadeth me in 
paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” To Him, and to Him alone, be all 
the glory! 


[Theodore Ledyard Cuyler was born at Aurora, N. Y., Jan. 10, 1822. He grad- 
uated from Princeton college 1841 and from Princeton Theological Seminary 1846, 
being ordained to the Presbyterian ministry two years later. After three pastorates 
became pastor of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, where he remained 
from 1860 to 1890, when he resigned to give his attention to temperance, philanthropic 
and literary work. He is the author of numerous books, and his influence upon the 
reading public may be imagined, when it is known that he has published over 4,000 
religious articles in periodicals.] 


822 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


THE MASTICATED WORD. 


ROBERT STUART MAC ARTHUR. 


Text:—“Thy words were found, and I did eat them, and thy word was unto me 
the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O Lord God of 
hosts.” —Jer. 15: 16. 

Jeremiah was called when young to be a prophet; at Anathoth, the place of his 
birth, he first exercised his prophetic office. He soon became the subject of persecu- 
tion, both from his townsmen and kinsmen. Later, in Jerusalem, he experienced 
similar trials. While the pious king Josiah ruled, Jeremiah received constant aid in 
his efforts to abolish idolatry and to establish true religion. But under Jehoahaz a 
great change was experienced by Jeremiah, and an entirely different spirit pervaded the 
city and country. Idolatry was revived, and Jeremiah’s warning prophecies were disre- 
garded, and he himself was bitterly persecuted. He foretold the captivity in Babylon 
and the fall of Babylon itself. But all his warnings were unheeded, and his fidelity 
even endangered his life. When Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah was a 
prisoner because of his loyalty to the truth. Finally he was carried to Egypt with the 
remnant of the Jews, B. C., 586. 

His mildness, sensitiveness, and modesty made his trying duties the more severe, 
but he feared no danger and braved every form of opposition when duty called him 
into rough paths. His bitter warnings were often more painful to himself than to the 
people whom he addressed. Nothing could stay the downward tendency of his 
infatuated countrymen. In a spirit of loyalty to God and of patriotism to his country 
and people he himself shared in the sorrows which his earnest appeals and solemn 
warnings could not avert. One element of his strength in the performance of his 
trying duties was his personal experience of the preciousness of the Word of God. 
He could not but declare to others the truth which had been so blessed to his own 
soul. No man can really preach above his own experience. No man can powerfully 
move others by the Word of God who has not been himself powerfully moved by that 
same Word. The minister who ® cold and official can never subdue and constrain 
the hearts of the hearers. Only he who has known God as a personal friend and 
Savior can recommend Him as such to others. Jeremiah received the Word into his 
own heart, and out of the fullness of his own heart his lips spoke. The heart must 
unite with the head if the pulpit is to be a throne of power. Heartless preaching of 
the Word of God can quickly be discovered even by those who are themselves heartless 
in the service of God. The mastication of the Word is the very heart of the text; 
but it gives other helpful truths and suggestive hints in our relation to the discovery 
and declaration of the word of God. 

I. We have, in the first place, in the study of this text, the Word Discovered— 
“Thy word was found.” In Jeremiah’s case, the finding of the Word was his con- 
viction that the message which he received was truly from God. It was of the utmost 
value to him to know that the voice which he heard was the voice of God. He had 
to try the voices, as we are instructed to try the spirits. He seemed to have had 
divine discrimination enabling him to distinguish between the voice of his own heart, 
the voice of false prophets, and the voice of God. The man who lives near to God 
will be likely to know his Father’s voice. The heart that is responsive to the call of 
God will quickly distinguish between the call of man and the call of God. Only he 


The Masticated Word—MacArthur. 823 


who has mountains in his brain can rightly appreciate the everlasting hills, only he 
who has oceans in his soul can fully enjoy the waves and music of the shoreless sea. 
So, rightly to see and to hear God, we must have the appropriate faculty. The pure 
in heart see God here and now, the obedient in soul hear God’s voice, and immediately 
recognize it as the voice of God and not of man. Jeremiah lived in an atmosphere 
charged with the presence of God; he therefore readily, spontaneously, and joyously, 
“found” the Word of God. 

In the sense in which he found God’s Word we are not to make that discovery. 
He had to distinguish between the voice of man and the voice ef God. We have the 
inspired volume in our hands, but there is still a real sense in which we also are to 
discover God's Word. The Bible is never truly God’s message to us until it comes 
to us as if addressed to us alone. God’s book of revelation, like His book of creation, 
is spread out before us, but both books must be studied before they will give up their 
deep secrets. God's thoughts are written on rocks and trees, in rivers and flowers, 
but only the attentive student interprets the divine thought in these manifold revela- 
tions. Not otherwise is it in the higher, fuller, and diviner revelation which we call 
the Bible. There is no contradiction between God’s thoughts in the volume of nature, 
and in the books of inspiration; both are from His mighty hand and His loving heart. 
Nowhere does the Bible oppose or even depreciate the teaching of God in creation. 
Science and revelation cannot be opposed to each other; all true science is revelation 
within its own realm of thought. The Word of God gives its deepest meaning only 
to careful and prayerful students. We must be in sympathy with its thought in order 
to master its thought. The student of music must be musical in taste and studious 
of purpose. We ask no more of the student of the Bible in this respect than we do of 
all students of any science or art. The Bible is God’s fullest revelation to the children 
of men. We too often read it in a fragmentary manner; detached texts often lose the 
meaning which they possess in their original position. Our study of the Bible has 
too often violated all laws of careful interpretation. No man could understand a play 
of Shakespeare simply by studying a few lines out of their connection. In this way 
texts of any author could be made to mean almost anything except what the author 
intended them to mean. No man can understand Milton’s “Paradise Lost” except 
he read the magnificent epic from beginning to end. No man can understand one of 
Daniel Webster's orations except he be familiar with its beginning, middle, and end, 
except he know its purpose. Tennyson’s poems could not stand the test of the frag- 
mentary and torturing manner in which the poems of the Bible are often treated. 
Macaulay’s histories would be meaningless oftentimes if subjected to the processes 
of study and interpretation too often applied to the historical portions of the Bible. 
If any Bible student will read the book of Job through at a single sitting he will get 
such a conception of that book in its dramatic, its poetic and its didactic elements as 
he never before experienced. But recently I made a test of the method I am now 
commending, by reading this book from beginning to end at a sitting. As a result 
of that personal experience, I am ready to apply to the book of Job the strong and 
eloquent words of Carlyle, when, apart from all theories about it, he calls it one of» 
the grandest things ever written with pen, and then adds: “Sublime sorrow, sublime. 
reconciliation, oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind; so soft and great as| 
the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars! There is nothing written, | 
I think, in the Bible, or out of it, of equal literary merit.” 

Let the same method be applied to an Epistle, as for example, the Epistle to the 
Philippians, and I venture to say that it will be a new chapter in this matchless volume, 
ever after it has been so studied. Mr. Moody recommended the topical study of the 
Bible; he would have had us take such a topic as faith, hope, joy, peace, light, love, 
and study it in different books, carefully discovering its meaning in its varied relations. 


824 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


This method has its advantages, but it is not without its disadvantages as well. The 
constant effort should be to get the writer’s thought as it is revealed in any portion of 
the inspired volume. 

The Bible is not one volume, but it is a whole library; in it are contained all the 
treasures of wisdom and learning, as they were not found in the library of Alexandria 
in the olden time, nor are found in the libraries of Germany, France, England, and: 
America, in our time. The Word of Gad is a torch in our dark night and a lamp in 
our life journey. It is the book of books; it has survived the literature of many cen- 
turies and climes, in harmony with the law of the survival of the fittest. It is a book 
of greater antiquity than any other. It is the oldest history of the oldest events; it 
comes to us with the loftiest pretentions and demands for its message an absolute 
acceptance. 

There is no kind of history so difficult to write as biography. Had the Bible been 
written by uninspired men it would have denied, or at least minimized, the vices of its 
heroes; it would have magnified, or created, their virtues. But it dares to tell the 
truth. In this respect it differs from all other books; it nothing conceals, it nothing 
exaggerates, it sets down naught in malice. There is then a true sense in which we, 
as well as Jeremiah, may discover the Word of God. I urge you to study most 
diligently its inspired pages; read the seraphic prophecies of Isaiah until your own 
soul shall glow with their heavenly ardor, the glowing lyrics of David until heavenly 
poetry shall sing itself in your own hearts, and the tugged histories of the olden time 
until the events narrated shall live again in your own experience; and thus shall you 
discover God’s Word, and know that you have truly found God’s Word because God’s 
Word has found you in the deepest experiences of your own souls. 

II. We have, in the second place, the Word Appropriated—“I did eat them.” 
The Word of God will do us but little good except it become a part of our own souls; 
a hungry man may make a chemical analysis of bread and Starve carrying on this 
chemical process. Bread cannot impart nutrition, except it be eaten and thus become 
a part of bone, sinew, and blood. Jeremiah might have rejected the Word of God; 
many reject it this day. Many wish to obey it only so far as its truths harmonize with 
their own desires. They practically make themselves superior to the fullest revelation 
of God. 

The Bible asks no favors from the critics; it simply demands fair treatment at 
_ their hands. It is willing to be subjected to every form of just criticism. It has 
passed through the fires of criticism when they were heated seven times hotter than 
they have ever been heated for testing any other book, and it has come out of the trial 
without the smell of fire upon its pages. Moses will live when all his critics are utterly 
forgotten, and the same is true likewise of others among the writers of the sacred 
Book whose works have been discredited. Man may tilt against the stars, but they 
shine on undisturbed in their inaccessible heights and in their unapproachable beauty. 


But even the literary endorsement of the Bible will not give us the best results 
which it is intended to impart. The assimilative process suggested by the text must 
take place, else the heavenly manna will not fully cheer our fainting spirits. The 
divine Word is to be eaten, its spirit is to be taken into our inner life; we must masti- 
cate, digest, and incorporate the heavenly truth before it will bring forth its appropriate 
fruits in our daily life. This is a remarkable expression here employed to set forth 
the completeness of its assimilative process. We must actually, spiritually, experi- 
mentally, chew, masticate, and digest the living bread, that it may truly nourish our 
living souls. In the large and divine sense, Jesus Christ is the true Word of God and 
the true Bread of Heaven. He Himself taught us that in this figurative and spiritual 
sense He was to be eaten by us, that He might impart to us true spiritual life. In 
our hurried lives we do not meditate sufficiently upon the Word of God. If it would 


The Masticated Word—MacArthur. 825 


become dear to us as it was to the psalmist, as he has detailed his experience in the 
one hundred and nineteenth Psalm, if it would become our meat and our drink, as 
it was to many of our fathers when other books were not so numerous, then we might 
expect to see the stalwart believers and heroic soldiers in the service of God whose 
noble services made the Church illustrious in the past. Then would the Church be 
“clear as the sun, fair as the moon, and terrible as an army with banners.” 

III. We notice, in the third place, God’s Word Enjoyed—‘And Thy Word was 
unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.” When so appropriated the Word of 
God never fails to give joy; it illumines the mind, it purifies the heart, it ennobles the 
life, and ita that.is grandest in human experience. The Bible has given 
us all that is most enduring in painting, in sculpture, in music, and in poetry. It has 
developed the highest genius in every department of human endeavor. Take out of 
the great galleries of painting, the halls of sculpture, and the libraries of the world, the 
paintings, sculptures, and books, whose existence depended upon the intellectual 
inspiration and esthetic culture of the Bible, and you make these galleries and halls 
and libraries poor indeed. The Bible has inspired the noblest music as well as the 
loftiest poetry; it has filled the world with the finest productions of human genius; it 
meets the deepest wants of the soul; it stimulates intellect, imagination, reason, and 
inspiration. The Psalms mirror the moods of the soul, as a placid lake mirrors the 
rocks and the trees on its banks. Never did any merely human harp give forth such 
lyric sweetness as came from the harp of David and filled the glens of Judah with their 
undying echoes. Nowhere else can nobler specimens of history, biography, poetry, 
and logic be found than are within the lids of the Bible. Some of the chapters of the 
Apostle Paul in his Epistles to the Romans have been studied by students of law as 
models of syllogistic reasoning. 

The day will come, and that before long, when the Bible will be a text-book in 
all the colleges of America. Its literary merits alone entitle it to this recognition. 
Why should we study Herodotus and not Moses, who is the true father of history? 
Why should we study Homer and not Isaiah, who surpasses the epic poets of Greece? 
Why should we study Aristotle and neglect the noble Paul? 

God’s Word brings God and the soul into a wonderful nearness; coming from 
God, the Bible leads to God its divine Author. It is the ripe product of ripe minds 
under divine inspiration. Its bards stood with uncovered head in the presence of 
God and sang to the world the songs taught them by heaven. They were conscious 
of the immediate presence of God, giving inspiration to their thoughts and eloquence 
to their words. They lived over again the thoughts of the eternal. As we appro- 
priate God’s word, we also may cherish these thoughts until they become a part of our 
mental and moral nature. We may hold large portions of the Word of God in 
solution in our minds. No one could hear the prayers of the late Mr. Spurgeon 
without appreciating the fact that the thoughts of God colored all his own thoughts 
as he drew near to God in prayer. The atmosphere of God was diffused from his 
pulpit, especially as he approached the throne of the heavenly grace. The same 
remark will apply to the sermons and prayers of both his sons. We may so live with 
certain writers as to catch their spirit and largely re-live their lives, 

Alexander the Great made the Homeric heroes his ideals; he carried a copy of 
the “Iliad” with him on his marches and into his battles, and incarnated the poet's 
heroic conceptions in his own daring life. It is possible for a man to sit in his library 
and hold communion with the mighty dead whose thoughts still breathe and burn in 
the volumes on his shelves. It is marvelous that a man can thus live with the spirits 
of the immortals who have long passed from time to eternity. He can master their 
thoughts, breathe in their atmosphere, and in a measure reproduce their lives. He 
may thus enjoy their fellowship as if he lived in their time and walked in their com- 


826 Pulpit Power and Eloquence. 


pany. You can sometimes discover by the man himself what books he reads, what 
ideals he imitates, and whose inspirations are his aspirations. A man’s life is the 
reproduction and interblending of the many lives whose streams flow into his own 
soul. How much more of God as He is revealed in His Word we might enjoy! One 
scarcely dares say how much of God it is possible for a human life to possess. If we 
are born of God, we are, as the Apostle Paul affirms, “‘partakers of the divine nature.” 
We are to be filled with God; we are to share in His divine fullness of life and love. 
This is the beatification of human experience; it is a foretaste of our divine glorifica- 
tion, when we shall see Jesus as He is and be satisfied when we awake in His likeness. 

IV. We notice, in the last place, God’s Word Acknowledge—“For I am called 
by Thy name, O Lord God of hosts.” Jeremiah came, in some measure, to possess 
and to manifest the character of God. We are told that Scipio Africanus was hardly 
ever without a copy of Xenophon’s wiitings. He came to possess and to manifest 
much of the character of the author so studied and lived. It is said that Bishop Jewell 
could recite all of the poems of Horace, and that those poems greatly shaped his 
thought and speech. It is also affirmed that Beza, when over eighty, could repeat all 
of the Epistles of Paul in the original Greek, and all of the Psalms in the original 
Hebrew. That fact alone would explain much in his own life as to his clearness of 
thinking and correctness of writing. On coming into this close relation with the 
revealed, and especially with the incarnate Word of God, we shall so partake of the 
character of God, that we may be known by the world as men of God. In this way 
it came to pass that those who knew Jeremiah recognized the godly character which 
he possessed, and they gave him God’s name. 

The beloved missionary, Judson, was known as “Jesus Christ’s man.” Every 
Christian is a “Christ man.” There ought to be as little difference between a Christian 
and a Christ-man as there is between spelling of the two words. If we live with 
Christ we shall gain His image; if we live with Him, men will surely take knowledge 
of us, that we so live, and that we possess and manifest His character. Men who thus 
feed upon God and His Word, come to possess the characteristics of both, so that the 
world must recognize the divine lineaments even in their faces. Homely men, when 
ungodly, become divinely beautiful when they have long lived godly lives. Pure 
thoughts reveal themselves in pure faces; the grasp of the hand, the tone of the voice, 
and the glance of the eye, will often manifest the indwelling of Jesus Christ in a man’s 
soul. Today some men hesitate to acknowledge God and His Word; but the day is 
coming when such an acknowledgment will be the highest honor that men can desire 
or possess. Today I offer you Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God. Have you 
found Him? Do you know Him? Do you live with Him? Do you know Him as 
the Bread of Heaven? Have you appropriated, masticated, incorporated that heavenly 
food? If so, you can live the heavenly life; if so, you have meat to eat of which the 
world knows nothing. Have you enjoyed this heavenly Word? If not, your highest 
enjoyment thus far has been but a child’s experience compared with the fuller enjoy- 
ment which awaits you. Have you acknowledged this heavenly Word by the public 
profession of your faith in Jesus Christ? With the heart we are to believe unto 
tighteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. 

Blessed are they who have tasted that the Lord is gracious, who are even now 
living the heavenly life while they are upon the earth! They at last shall see Jesus face 
to face, and shall be satisfied by awaking in His glorious character, His heavenly 
beauty, and His perfect likeness. 

[Robert Stuart MacArthur was born at Dalesville, Quebec, July 31, 1841; graduate 
of Rochester Theological. Seminary; LL. D., Columbian University, Washington. 
Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, New York, since 1870; connected with Christian 


Inquirer for a number of years, and well-known lecturer. "He is author of a number 
of books, Quick Truths and "PAG ies The Attractive Christ, etc.] 


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